Applying for Teaching Jobs

I spent 2023-24 applying for jobs as my contract seemed unlikely to be renewed. This was a distinctive experience, and I think there is value in sharing it: the fixed-term teaching academic is an increasingly-central feature of modern Universities.

Searching

I started searching in the summer of 2023. Jobs are mostly advertised in the winter if a University is thinking strategically and the summer (/autumn) if they are thinking reactively. There were lots of one-year posts advertised after clearing, for example, but these weren’t worth looking at from the perspective of someone with a year to go in their current job. I note in passing that these were mostly in research-intensive Universities.

I relied heavily on the jobs.ac.uk automated search tool, which emailed me a digest of adverts every week. The academic listings there are pretty good (better than indeed.com, in my experience), and setting up four or five searches meant I could cast my net fairly wide.

Specifying search terms forces you to articulate what you’re looking for, and I had everything from narrow searches for Inorganic jobs to wide searches for nonacademic high salaries in cities where my friends live. I looked in the UK and Europe; I couldn’t face the thought of flying to North America or Australia. It was striking how difficult it was to search for teaching lectureships using the search tools, and somewhat shocking to see how much rarer teaching/T&S adverts were than PDRA/T&R adverts; there were only 2 UK adverts for lecturer-level teaching positions lasting more than 1 year in 23-24. I judge that this is because the squeeze in University finances has hit certain career paths more heavily than others, but it is possible that local (unadvertised) appointments are part of the picture as well.

I had the most success from searches for broad terms like “inorganic”. Scanning a weekly digest took a little while, but it felt reassuring to catch irrelevant things because a wider net was more likely to catch relevant ones as well. That said, there were no specifically-inorganic teaching positions advertised that year; “inorganic” caught most general searches because the word “inorganic” was mentioned in most descriptions of Departments. Coupled with other searches (e.g. all Chemistry University jobs above a certain salary threshold), I’m confident I discovered every relevant ad.

Thinking about the adverts was the first part of the really draining work: the imaginative labour required to think of yourself in new ways. PhysChem? Sure I could polish up my maths and make that work. Biochemistry? I didn’t feel drawn to it over a non-academic job, personally. 

Emotionally, it means something when you set up the job alert which will take you out of academia. When you get an email every Saturday morning telling you about jobs which would wholly remove you from teaching students, you spend time thinking of yourself differently. It changes you when you take those futures seriously. I had read Caterine’s Leaving Academia and found that it helped me navigate some of the sadness of this situation. If you are in a similar position, I really recommend it.

Deciding whether to apply

I decided early on to apply to University adverts very selectively. I would only go for a post if I would seriously consider an offer, judging that competition would be too fierce to compete using scattergun applications at high volume. I went for a teaching role in PhysChem, but not for one in Biochemistry. I applied for a teaching administration role in Business, but not any (of the many) research administration roles in STEM. For what it’s worth, I made 6 applications and was invited to 5 interviews. I think this may mean I didn’t apply enough - I’d guess a higher fail rate is probably more productive.

The hardest thing to articulate about this whole experience was wrapped up in the decision about whether to apply. The burden of imagining yourself differently is quite large, but you are forced to imagine specifics when you write a cover letter. You have to imagine a different future for yourself; a future with new bus timetables and new colleagues and new lecture courses. It is surprisingly hard to carry around the potential of being someone else, to hold this in your head while you do your current job. It also feels strange to discard future after future as the rejections come in. Like dreams, they sometimes fade and sometimes don’t - the process has left me with useful new ideas, but also a bit unmoored. You need to let go of something when you reach for a different future. It’s humbling.

Applications and Extra Tasks

I regretted only starting to look in my last year of employment, because applying is a skill which rewards practice.

The level of preparation required for academic applications was very high. The CV/Covering Letter/Interview format was always supplemented by additional tasks. Microteaching, a recorded presentation, a solution for a recent Departmental problem: there was always more. I saw how some of the tasks were reasonable (you want to make sure a lecturer can lecture, fine), but others were very hard to gauge. What am I being asked to do when I record a video of my teaching philosophy? How many applicants will be shaved away from consideration because they had a different understanding of what was being requested, rather than a different ability to perform what was required? Some places asked for things at the point of application, and others at the point of invitation to interview (which seemed more reasonable to me, if enough time was given to prepare).

I’m not sure it was the correct move, but I deliberately responded very conservatively to these kinds of tasks. You want a 10min lecture? I am going to give you the most traditional lecture you have seen since 1990. You want a workshop? We are doing problems from Atkins. You want a teaching philosophy video? Get ready to hear about the values at the front of your University’s strategic plan booklet. My goal was always to avoid being selected out, rather than to dazzle. I thought these would be moments where applicants were removed from contention rather than entered onto a shortlist. I don’t know if that was correct! I didn’t get offers from most of the places where I got this far, so perhaps I am wrong about this.

Visits

When visiting a city, I always took a taxi from the train station and asked about the University during the ride; I normally learned more about the University’s profile from the driver than the website. I was struck by how positively international students were seen by taxi drivers (polite and reliable fares), and how closely the minute detail of student numbers was understood. I have met a lot of admissions tutors with a shallower understanding of institutional recruitment strategies than any of the taxi drivers I had. I got some 10/10 material for the “do you have any questions for us?” end-of-interview dance from these rides.

In the University, it was striking how clear it was when applicants were treated respectfully and how common it was to be treated with something approaching disdain. I reached interview for five University jobs. Two of these (including Liverpool!) treated me very well as an applicant. One treated me neutrally. Two of them treated me so badly I would have seriously considered declining an offer, though in fairness perhaps this is easier to claim when they didn’t make one! That ratio is absolutely wild, though, and it’s extremely difficult to process anything when your entire career trajectory rests on moments where you are being treated abominably.

Good visits were scheduled in plenty of time (>2 weeks, longer if tasks were demanding), had clear timings for the key moments (e.g. the interview will be at 10:30), gave chances to talk with students (sometimes PGR students, given the timings of terms), and had breaks built in with some kind of quiet space allocated. Clear, identified contacts who responded to communications were also important. Bad visits were typically poor in ways which related to technical competence or thoughtlessness rather than any kind of obvious malice. I find it difficult to understand what an interviewer would learn from an unscheduled and unstructured interview, for example. On what basis would a decision deriving from this interaction discriminate between candidates? How should I interpret being rejected from this process?

Moving onto the next application was easy after a fair rejection, but oddly difficult after an unfair one. It was disappointing to be rejected by somewhere which was thoughtful about my experience as an applicant, but I felt I had been given a chance to present myself fairly. I left with a positive view of these Departments, and a much simpler set of feelings. It meant a lot to have been treated like a person when being rejected.

Other Applicants

It’s an odd experience meeting other applicants on the day. By and large I liked everyone I met, and I felt flattered to be considered alongside them. Though the shadow of competition is always in the background when you chat over coffee, I feel sincerely pleased for the people who got the positions. It was nice to feel such uncomplicated positive emotions about that, actually. I’ve kept in touch with a few people I met as applicants, and enjoy bumping into them at conferences. At the same time, interview days are always a bit of a blur; I worry that I have forgotten a lot of people I met, too.

Summary

Long-term teaching contracts were very rare when I looked in 2023-24, and the high volume of preparation didn’t always have a well-defined purpose from the perspective of an applicant; it is possible that some processes are not measuring what they think they’re measuring.

Trying to find an academic teaching job is extremely draining to do, and it means a lot to applicants when they are treated with some minimum level of dignity. Staring at the prospect of leaving academia is probably something which lots of Chemists are going to be doing in the next few years, and Caterine’s book was a great comfort to me in this context.