Living Outside the Org Chart

For professionals navigating this “third space,” work has quietly stopped fitting the tidy categories institutions use to describe staff. While some stay close to a single function with a clear reporting line, others do something more radical: they stop treating boundaries as the organising fact of their work altogether. Instead, they focus on broad, institution-wide projects—student transitions, community partnerships, professional development—that refuse to belong to a single department (Whitchurch, 2008).

For these unbounded professionals, identity functions less like an essence—a fixed thing you either have or don’t—and more like a project. It is something built and rebuilt over time. You don’t discover this kind of professional identity. You construct it, continuously, and the construction never really finishes.

The Tax on the Blank Space

There is, however, a discomfort sitting inside that freedom. This identity must be actively defended in a system built to not notice it.

Ambiguity can be incredibly fruitful for institutions, driving creative, cross-boundary solutions. Yet, the people carrying that ambiguity often remain structurally marginalised, navigating limited access to rewards, recognition, and career progression (Irwin, 2025). The everyday version of this looks like an educational developer publishing rigorous pedagogical research, only to be told it “doesn’t count” because it falls outside the faculty’s specific discipline area. The work is real; the category simply wasn’t built with them in mind. Even worse is when these professionals are overlooked altogether, not invited in conversations where their added value is most clear.

Exactly what that missing category looks like varies. Some systems enforce a sharp professional-versus-academic divide. Others rely on rigid job gradings, pay scales, and task descriptions that were never written to accommodate hybrid roles. The specifics differ, but the underlying pattern holds: the entire weight of navigating an undefined role falls on the person occupying it. Institutions keep their structures built for people who fit inside a single box, while relying heavily on the generative ambiguity of the people who don’t.

Native Guides to the Grey Area

There is a quiet advantage hidden inside this marginalization. As university work becomes increasingly complex, traditional, “bounded” roles are frequently forced out of their comfortable silos.

When a pure IT department is tasked with implementing a campus-wide AI strategy, or when HR attempts to overhaul academic career tracks, they are suddenly wading into messy, cross-boundary waters. They are stepping into a territory that third-space professionals have navigated for years.

In these moments, the dynamic flips. The third-space practitioner goes from being an institutional anomaly to a native guide. They already possess the fluency in translation, the tolerance for friction, and the cross-departmental trust that traditional staff suddenly find themselves desperately needing. What the org chart sees as an undefined role turns out to be a massive, strategic head start.

The Expanding Horizon

If this is the structural reality—a system built for boxes, increasingly relying on people who know how to work outside them—what does that growth actually look like from the inside?

Research into how academic developers mature reveals a fascinating pattern (Mårtensson & Roxå, 2021). New practitioners tend to start narrow: one function, one type of intervention, a handful of reliable tools. But within the first few years, something shifts. Three distinct markers of growth begin to emerge:

  • Expanding horizons: Practitioners start noticing more pathways, more aspects of the system, and a wider repertoire of solutions than they started with.
  • Widening orientations: Instead of settling into a single approach—like solely liberating a teacher’s thinking, or solely aligning them with institutional goals—developers learn to hold several orientations at once. They begin to navigate the friction between competing purposes, realizing that growth means holding that tension rather than smoothing it away.
  • Focusing on ‘the others’: Attention shifts outward. A mature developer cares less about their own performance and more about what is happening in the practices of the people they support.

This outward shift is a sign of profound professional health. Paradoxically, it also makes the developer less visible to the organisation, making their deeply impactful work even harder to get credit for.

The Same Motion, Twice

Look closely, and you will see that these two perspectives describe the exact same phenomenon. The continuous, never-quite-finished construction of a third-space identity is the same motion as a developer’s expanding horizon.

This means the discomfort of not fitting a box—the same discomfort that left her blank on the org chart—is exactly what professional growth looks like in this kind of role. Every marker of maturity pulls a practitioner further from the tidy, bounded categories that institutions know how to file, promote, and reward.

In this line of work, growing sideways and growing at all are the exact same motion.

Reading Your Own Drift

None of this is an excuse for institutions to remain as they are. Recognition structures and staff classifications desperately need to catch up with how modern university work is actually done, and that is a structural failure, not a motivational one.

But practitioners don’t have to wait on policy to reframe their reality. If not fitting the mould is what growth looks like, the most useful question to ask yourself isn’t how to make your role legible to an org chart. The question is: where has your horizon moved this year?

Which orientations have you picked up that you didn’t hold three years ago? Whose work has moved into the foreground of your attention, and whose has moved out?

These questions produce a different kind of career record than a job title ever could. Keep that record for yourself while the institution works out how to catch up. It is the truer map of the work, and it matters far more than whether or not HR has built a box for it yet.

Resources and further reading

  • Irwin, E. (2025). Institutional responsibility and third space professionals: a call for structural change to embrace ambiguity. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (33). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi33.1209
  • Mårtensson, K., & Roxå, T. (2021). Academic developers developing: aspects of an expanding lifeworld. International Journal for Academic Development, 26(4), 405–417. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2021.1950725
  • Whitchurch, C. (2008). Shifting identities and blurring boundaries: the emergence of third space professionals in UK higher education. Higher Education Quarterly, 62(4), 377–396. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x