Making sense of a teaching programme for university academics: Exploring the longer-term effects

•Long-term impact of a teaching course for universities is under-researched.•Sense-making becomes triggered by career responsibilities.•Emerging outcomes filtered by individual interpretive frames.•Findings related to research into profession growth of school teachers.

To professionalise teaching in universities, certificated teaching programmes for academics are increasingly widespread and often mandatory for new lecturers. Evaluations of impact have escalated in the past decade. Existing studies show mixed results but few consider the differential effects on individuals over the longer term. This study examines narratives of course participants a number of years following completion to understand how lecturers made sense of formal teaching development. Powerful outcomes materialise for some individuals, highly focused by personal reference frames and career experiences. Findings are related to wider studies of teacher growth and individual orientations to teaching professional development.