Habilitation at KIT: Your path to a teaching license
The habilitation is the highest academic degree in Germany and serves as proof of the special ability to independently represent an academic subject or subject area in research and teaching, which is an essential prerequisite for appointment to a professorship.
In Baden-Württemberg, it also gives you the authorization to teach (venia legendi) for a specific academic subject or subject area and you may use the title Privatdozentin / Privatdozent.
It is expected that the habilitation achievement demonstrates both a considerable subject depth and an appropriate breadth in the coverage of the respective subject area. In addition, the proven ability to teach excellently, especially in the context of a German computer science degree program, is a central evaluation criterion.
The habilitation regulations describe the individual procedural steps and the respective requirements to be fulfilled in detail, please read them carefully! (see downloads)
If possible, a habilitation procedure should not take longer than five years and consists of the following steps in a very abbreviated form:
| 1. | Notification - the announcement of your project to the dean's office of the KIT faculty (including a project outline and timetable) |
| 2. | Interim evaluation - approximately two years after the start of your habilitation project, you submit interim results and receive feedback from the habilitation committee on strengths and weaknesses, among other things; there is a faculty-specific procedure for the interim evaluation as a supplement to the habilitation regulations (see downloads below) |
| 3. | Application for admission - up to six months after the end of the interim evaluation, you formally apply for admission to the habilitation procedure; here, all admission requirements for the subsequent habilitation application are checked and, if necessary, conditions are imposed on you. |
| At this point in the procedure, you now know whether you are eligible for admission to the actual habilitation examination or whether you still have to fulfill any conditions. You typically have plenty of time left to work academically and gain further teaching experience. | |
| 4. | Habilitation application - you apply for the actual examination procedure and submit your habilitation thesis, among other things; this is reviewed internally and externally and a decision is made on whether to accept your written work as habilitation work. |
| 5. | Habilitation colloquium - you give a lecture (usually open to the faculty) on a topic from the subject area of the habilitation, which is communicated to you by the habilitation committee a few weeks before the date, and answer questions from the professors and habilitation candidates of the KIT faculty to prove that you have mastered the scientific basics of the subject. Immediately after the colloquium, the habilitation committee decides on the success of your habilitation project and informs you of the result. |
There are many detailed regulations in the habilitation procedure, which you must read in the habilitation regulations!
