Landing an Academic Job: Step 1 Identify Your Preferred Work

This post is the first in the Landing an Academic Job Series I’m running here on the blog. In this post I’ll help you understand why you should identify your preferred work as the first step.

You can see Step 2 in the series here and Step 3 over here. As a bonus to this series, I explained how I navigated faculty interviews with an infant here. If you’re ready to jump to an insider’s perspective on the faculty interview process, check out my resource designed to give you the support you need to ace the interview. Or if you’re not ready to focus on the interview yet – grab my free Faculty Job Search Tracker.

If you’re reading this series you’re likely interested in working for a college or university. What you’ll have to determine before you begin looking for a job is what type of work you hope to spend your days doing. 

What do you want to do as an a faculty member?

To get us started, grab a piece of paper, digital tool, or other resources that will let you capture ideas, explore connections, and piece things together. 

Really, go grab something now….I’ll wait.

Ready? Great! Let’s get started. 

Many people tell me that they want to get into university work because they want to teach. You may have different reasons.  

When you envision yourself in your ideal academic position, what are you doing?

Jot down what comes to mind for you. 

Now, let’s add some additional detail. 

Reflective Questions to Consider your Preferred Work

Do you picture yourself in front of a group of students who are working in groups?  Do you picture yourself designing research studies about questions that interest you?  Are you working with groups of colleagues to create a better university experience for students? Are you working with community partners to solve a community problem?

Do you see yourself doing a combination of these things or in different ways.  Instead of being in front of the group teaching, you may be seated in circle with a group of students engaged in a conversation with them. 

Maybe your preferred work includes reading and writing about what you’re reading. 

Capturing your thoughts about these questions will help you narrow down your job search to positions that are centered on the types of work you want to do in your career. 

What it comes down to is this: Why do you want an academic job? What work do you want to be doing while working?

Now that you have a pretty good idea of what you want your work day to look like, I’m going to explain a bit more about a typical work that faculty members do.  As I go through that, you should note things that you would enjoy doing and maybe even create a list of the things you wouldn’t enjoy. 

What Faculty Members Do

Most faculty work can be broadly grouped into three main areas: Teaching, Research (also called Scholarship), and Service. Of course under each area there are multiple duties that faculty members complete. Some duties are daily, regularly recurrences, others are completed rarely – maybe once per year or semester. Still others, may not be applicable to specific faculty members at all. We’ll talk more about that last point in a later post. 

For now, take a look at this image created by Dr. Susan Wardell (June 22, 2021) on Twitter.  In it she breaks down some of the common duties that faculty members perform. I’ll give a few more details about each of the main areas below. If nothing in this graphic looks like your preferred work, you may need to reconsider the faculty life.

Teaching & Related Duties

As you can see in her diagram, teaching includes many activities beyond engaging with students in the classroom. Some activities are fairly obvious: planning for lectures and classroom activities, designing activities and assignments, and grading those assignments. 

Likely when you were considering how you’d like to spend your workday, you did not including managing electronic materials for courses (i.e., zoom links, learning management system settings, course recordings, and course reserves).  As noted in her diagram, faculty may also be involved with peer observations (as the observer or the one who is observed), course evaluations, course revisions, and the paperwork that accompanies all of those processes. 

And of course, faculty members are expected to communicate regularly with students – during office hours, via the learning management system, via email and hallway conversations. 

From the items you see on her diagram related to teaching, capture the parts that you would really enjoy doing on the list you started earlier. For many faculty members in my field, the direct instruction and interaction with students is their preferred work. This is all they think they’re signing up to do.

Research & Related Duties

Maybe you realize that many academic jobs require teaching, but you’re looking for a way to focus on research agenda. Or maybe you didn’t realize that many faculty members have to complete research projects to keep their jobs.

If you’ve already completed a research project or been part of a research team, you likely know many steps and duties that are part of the process. Of course there is project planning, data collection and analysis, and writing articles (or chapters, books, or a range of other types of publications). 

Project Management

In my experience, and as the diagram shows, research also includes project management – often of multiple large projects at various stages of development at one time, attending & presenting at professional conferences, and sharing your work with the public. 

 Of course, some faculty members’ time is also taken by duties such as coordinating the travel details for conference attendance. Deaf faculty members also spend significant time coordinating access and accommodations on their campuses and for their professional presentations (O’Brien 2020; McDermid 2009; Woodcock et al 2007).

Securing Grant Funding

In many fields, significant funding is required to conduct research – if you’re in one of those fields you likely already know that – so, substantial investment of time is required to locate, apply for, and manage grant documentation and processes. I know lots of faculty members who love getting the grants. I don’t know any who have “apply for grants” on their list of preferred work activities.

All of the components of an active research program require that the faculty member also remain current in the field by reading articles and books by leading scholars to stay up to date in their field. 

What are your general thoughts about conducting research and disseminating results?  Are there some parts of the work you’d enjoy, and others you wouldn’t?  Capture those ideas with your previous notes.  In future posts we’ll come back to this work you’ve done to see how it aligns with different types of employment opportunities. 

Service & Related Duties

From my experience, most aspiring faculty members do not decide to pursue academic jobs because they want to be involved in service – or at least not service to the institution. However, service is a significant component of most faculty member’s work lives.

Typical faculty service obligations can be delegated into a few areas: the institution, the profession, and professionally related community service. Institutional service includes departmental work as well as service outside of your department. Usually institutional service includes serving on committees (e.g., general education, search, curriculum, diversity, faculty evaluation, etc.).  This type of service can also entail spearheading projects like program accreditation reporting or redesigning the lab space. 

Institutional service also includes mentoring, advising, and guiding students. Dr. Wardell calls this “Pastoral care for students.” And I think that’s an excellent phrase for it. 

Service to the profession can include peer review of scholarly articles and service on professional boards or associations. (This type fits my list of preferred work.) Whereas, professionally related community service is service you do in the community that is related to your field or discipline. For example, I am often contacted for guidance for learning ASL or hiring an interpreter. Answering these types of requests is part of professionally related service. 

The graphic includes “career development” in the service category. I guess you could classify this as service to yourself. This is where Dr. Wardell puts applying for promotion and awards as well as career development like networking.  

A Week in the Life

While the graphic looks like faculty life are equally distributed between teaching, research, and service, the fine print tells the true story.  The specific time allotment and expectations for individual faculty members vary widely.  In a future post, we’ll explore more about the types of faculty positions and their general distribution of responsibility.  For, now, I want to give you a bit of insight into my daily work schedule so you can see what this type of work looks in the day to day. 

My Ideal Week Template

I’m currently a tenured associate professor at a regional, comprehensive university (Update – I left that job and now I’m back on the tenure-track making my way toward tenure). I set up a time-blocked weekly template schedule that corresponds to my main areas of work. The Full Focus company calls this the Ideal Week; other people have different names for it.

Here’s a look at my weekly template schedule for the Spring 2022 semester. 

In my current position I usually teach 4 courses per semester. This semester, I’m also teaching part-time at another university because they were in bind.  So, there’s an extra course on this semester’s schedule. I’m in class with students about 15 hours per week. (2023 Update, this schedule looks very different because of a new position, but the points are still valid.)

I spend about 1 hour per day in focused planning and communication.  I have a 30 minute block at the beginning and an other at the end of my workday. By my time allocation you can tell this is not my preferred work.

I have a one hour lunch blocked out each day to give me time to grab a bite to eat and take a walk.  My word of the year is MOVE. I’m trying to be intentional about including movement in each day. 

Scheduling High Level Projects that don’t have Deadlines

I’m currently working on a couple of high priority research projects (a book proposal, an IRB, an article, and data analysis). To get this work that doesn’t have specific deadlines done, I give it the prime time of my day.  This places it before other activities and tasks take over the day. My goal is to work on my research activities for about 7 hours per week. 

I schedule student office hours for the afternoons. When I’m not meeting with students, I use the time to complete teaching related tasks: planning lessons, grading student work, communicating with students, among other things. 

My service load is a bit lighter this term.  The last several semesters I’ve had large blocks dedicated to service because I was the chair of the re-accreditation process for my department.  Since we were awarded re-accreditation,  I only have sporadic commitments. That’s why I don’t have service explicitly on my schedule.  I usually use the Monday and Friday afternoon office hour spots to complete that work when it comes up. 

Prioritize the Type of Work you Prefer

We’ve explored various duties that faculty members have.  What aspects of faculty work intrigue you? What do you think you’d love to be doing?  Which parts would you rather take a pass on?  Not all faculty members do all of this work in one semester or even in their career. 

If you could create a job that only required your preferred work, what would lit look like?

Tell us in the comments!  

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