Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to participate in our survey on career paths in NLP and the factors that shape career decisions.

We are interested in learning more about the professional contexts in which members of the NLP community work, as well as the factors that have influenced their career choices.

We plan to synthesize the findings and use them to facilitate a discussion at EMNLP 2026. We will also share the aggregated results with the community to provide a broader overview of career paths and working contexts in NLP.

The survey is fully anonymous and takes approximately 10–15 minutes to complete.

You can access the survey here: https://acpaths.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/

Why participate?

Make an impact: Contribute to a better understanding of the NLP career landscape and help junior researchers and practitioners navigate their career options with greater clarity.

Gain insights: Receive a report summarizing the findings and providing an overview of NLP careers and their professional contexts.

We would be very grateful for your input. Thank you for considering participating in our survey.

If you know colleagues or peers who may also be interested, we would greatly appreciate it if you shared the survey with them.

Best regards, Esra Dönmez (Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart) Marlene Lutz (University of Mannheim) Matthias Orlikowski (University of Mannheim)