How to apply for a job in academia
I went to my first interviews believing that the onus lay on the university to find good candidates — not on the applicants to have to ‘sell’ ourselves
Over the past few years, I have applied for about 30 permanent academic jobs, and been shortlisted and interviewed for about 10 of them. None of them have been successful.
Although my postgraduate education was excellent, one thing we did not get advice on was how to confront the academic job market. Perhaps this was because our lecturers got their own jobs at a time when the academic job market was less gruelling.
I went to my first job interviews embarrassingly unprepared — not only for the kinds of questions that are asked by the panels, but also for dealing with the rejections.
I eventually found help in The Professor Is In, a website and blog run by Karen Kelsky, a former tenured professor of anthropology in the US. The Professor Is In is geared towards US higher education, but it gives suggestions on how to do practical things such as write a cover letter, format a CV and prepare for standard interview questions.
I have also accumulated some insights from my own experience of being interviewed for academic jobs.
There are four kinds of interview questions you should be ready to answer briefly but comprehensively, plus the questions you should prepare to ask the panel at the end.
1. The first question is along the lines of “why do you want to work at our university or department?”. If you haven’t prepared an answer to this, you will look silly— even though the reality is that most of us don’t have the luxury of choice about which university would be our ideal workplace. We just want a damn job. Scour the websites, see what courses they offer, and read at least a few of their academics’ publications to get a feel for what kinds of research their department does, what they teach and why you could make a contribution that compliments and augments what they already do there. Some variations on this question are:
Why do you want to work in our department [or university]? How do you think you would be a good fit with our work? What attracted you about the advert for this position?
2. A second type of question you’ll need to answer is “tell us about your research”. This can include your past or current research but also something about your future project and publication plans. This can be daunting for someone who is just finishing their PHD and doesn’t know if they have any future research plans. They may ask questions about sources of funding you have applied for or intend to apply for. Some panels even ask you to name journals that you will submit work to. Some variations on the question are:
Tell us about your research plans. Tell us about your five-year publication plan. How does your research fit with our areas of focus in this department? How does your work meet the criteria to score highly in the Research Excellence Framework (relevant for UK universities) — in other words, how is it world-leading in its significance, originality and rigour? )
3. A third type of question to expect is about your teaching approach and experience, including undergrad lecturing and postgrad supervision. They may want to know what courses you have taught in the past and how you have taught them (for example, what topics and readings you cover). They may ask about your approach to postgraduate supervision. They may also ask you for your “teaching philosophy”. I have never understood what this means or where one is supposed to have learnt how to articulate one (though The Professor Is In has some guidelines). In all the contract teaching work I have done, no permanent academics have ever required me to state a teaching philosophy before asking if I could help take their heavy undergrad teaching or supervision load off their shoulders. Some variations on the question are:
Tell us about what teaching you have done in the past. Tell us about your approach to supervision. When you teach this course on X, how do you normally teach it? How do you ensure excellence in teaching? How do you support diverse students? How do you encourage class participation when doing online teaching with big classes?
Now that I think about it, I haven’t been asked a question directly about decolonisation in teaching, but you should probably be prepared for this.
4. A fourth category of questions they might ask is about management and administration experience and ethics. Resist the temptation to complain about previous workplaces and colleagues. Questions along these lines I have received are:
Do you have teaching administration experience (I think they mean, have you been a course coordinator)? Do you have leadership and management experience? (Have you served as head of department or similar?) Can you demonstrate that you have undertaken professional development? (This probably means, do you have a postgraduate certificate in higher education, or have you attended workshops and courses on improving your teaching and supervision?) If you were in a difficult ethical position and how you dealt with that? How do you balance the multiple responsibilities of research, teaching and administration?
5. The last set of questions are the questions you should prepare to ask them at the end of the interview. The main rule is not to ask things that orient towards how you will benefit from the job. Definitely don’t ask anything about salary and benefits. Use this as an opportunity to show that you are interested in their department on their terms. For example, you could ask for further information about initiatives you have seen their department runs, or about the interests of their students.
Don’t ask things that you could easily have found the answer to on their website or in their publications. During Covid I have sometimes asked about how they are doing online teaching (I am not sure if this was a good question.)
So that’s basically it.
Also keep in mind one of the funniest and sobering lessons I’ve found on The Professor Is In. It’s a short video Kelsky made of herself explaining why your own needs — professional and personal — are not important when you apply for an academic job. They have a job that they need doing. You need to be able to articulate your value to them, in their terms. It is a department-centric process, not an applicant-centric one.
When I realised this (after my first interview), I was shocked. I had believed the onus lay on the department to find and appreciate good candidates — not on the applicants to “sell” ourselves. I thought that my CV and academic track record would speak for themselves, and that the department would do its homework on me. Well, LOL! (I never got offered that job.)
Later, I realised why I thought this way. This is the self-centric emphasis that is drummed into you during the PHD and when publishing your work. When you write a PHD, you are encouraged to be original, to establish a unique position for yourself in your field, to show you know what others have done and then show how you are doing something different, and to show that your insights are not derivative. In other words, even if you work collaboratively, academic work is a highly individualistic and self-centred activity.
Indeed, this is how you will need to continue to work if you want to advance in the academic profession once you have a real job.
YNot to be successful in getting a job is not an indication that you are not a competent academic
ou may feel alarmed at how much work goes into the academic job application process. But it’s not so much the amount of work involved that, to me, is the problem; it’s the way postgraduate education doesn’t prepare you for the academic job market. If you think this paints a bleak and depressing picture of the state of universities and the academic profession, I wouldn’t argue with you. I think I have a mild form of PTSD from academic job interviews.
It’s also worth noting that not to be successful in getting a permanent job is not necessarily an indication that you are not a competent academic. Universities have devised ways to get their teaching and research work done with the minimal financial outlay, which means they like to recruit people on low-paid, fixed-term contracts and “postdoctoral fellowships”. I have been in postdoctoral purgatory for four years, so I am growing an academic track record but without any professional advancement.
One of the problems with the system is the process is not transparent. You never know who the competition is, and you never get feedback on why you did or didn’t get shortlisted, or why you were or were not offered the job. By contrast, in some of the Scandinavian countries, all the applicants are named, evaluated and ranked in a document which is circulated to all candidates. This means that even if you don’t get shortlisted, you can still get a sense of what the competition looks like and how, or whether, you can realistically aim to improve your chances.
Of course, the process is not necessarily as bad as I have described. Some people get permanent job offers after fewer interviews than I’ve endured. In some disciplines, Phds are rarer and more in demand than others.
If you are reading this while preparing for your first job application, circulate this article, start a reading group with your peers, read The Professor Is In, and educate yourself. Also, don’t hang too many hopes on your first interviews. And if you are an academic who supervises postgraduates whom you know are interested in an academic career, please initiate a conversation in your department about the realities of the academic job market, lest you send your students on a long journey of disappointment.