Academics, like many other professionals, such as accountants, lawyers, and medical doctors, are primarily responsible for their own ongoing professional development. One of the ways academics are expected to pursue their professional development is by attending conferences structured around their professional associations. However, professional development is a broad construct and we lack a framework for understanding the numerous, specific motivations and goals related to why professionals choose to attend these conferences. To address this issue, we extend King's (2004) career self-management framework in three ways: a) we apply and extend the positioning behaviors of King's model for the situation of academics, b) extend the antecedents of these positioning behaviors from a single to a multi-level framework (including individual, university, and national level antecedents), and c) discuss cross-level effects of these antecedents. Implications and guidance for HR practitioners and future research are also discussed.

与许多其他专业人士（例如会计师、律师和医生）一样，学术界人士主要负责自己的持续专业发展。学者们追求专业发展的方式之一是参加围绕他们的专业协会组织的会议。然而，专业发展是一个广泛的结构，我们缺乏一个框架来理解与专业人士选择参加这些会议的原因相关的众多具体动机和目标。为了解决这个问题，我们以三种方式扩展了 King (2004) 的职业自我管理框架：a) 我们将 King 模型的定位行为应用于学术情况，b) 从单一的位置扩展这些定位行为的前因。到一个多层次的框架（包括个人、大学和国家层面的前因），以及 c) 讨论这些前因的跨层次影响。还讨论了对人力资源从业者和未来研究的影响和指导。