If you are trying to get a job in academia, I hope you have gainful employment (or a trust fund) to hold you during the search. Expect the search to last one to three school years. I was lucky, mine only ran eight months. I’ve heard of excellent and highly-qualified folks giving up after five to six years or more of searching.
While you search, DO NOT stop your professional development: continue to teach, publish, present, take graduate and post-graduate coursework, research, travel. Naturally, to do some of these things, you’ll need money, and that’s where working comes in. You need an actual income-earning job, so you either need to teach or tutor or you need other work related to the content area. For English, that might include communications-related work such as writing, editing, or proofreading.
Always make certain your ceevee is updated and ready to go, keep in touch with your references and make sure those letters of recommendation are current (dated within the last year). Always have a GREAT teaching demo ready to go, and practice your interviewing skills. If you do not have one, create a digital professional portfolio (your online ceevee), and it doesn’t hurt to have a business card to pass out at conferences and in interviews—network, network, network! You never know when you will need those connections!
Oh, and hang onto classroom artifacts and create a hard copy of your professional portfolio, too: copies of your teaching evaluations, student evaluations, copies of syllabi, interesting assignments you’ve given, programs from conferences at which you’ve presented, awards you’ve received, letters of thanks/commendation you’ve gotten, certifications you’ve earned. And develop that teaching philosophy. You definitely want that present in both the electronic and hard copy portfolio, along with copies of your transcripts, your ceevee, and letters of recommendation.
Go in to interviews totally and utterly prepared, looking dressed to kill and acting like you are really excited about getting the job. Make certain you have THOROUGHLY researched the institution: know who the students are, the mission statement, the strategic plan, who the administrators are, who the faculty in the department are, the course titles offered in your program, the thrust of the derees offered in your program, how your experience/research relates to what’s happening in the department. Feel secure that you have anticipated ALL of their interview questions so you won’t feel stymied by whatever it is that they ask.
If you are interviewing at a community college, know that they are MOST interested in what sort of teacher you will make and how familiar you are with their teaching philosophy and their student body. They will ask questions specifically targeted at these things. They will also want you well-versed in educational technology, working with academically-underprepared students, differently-abled students, nonnative speakers of English, and nontraditional students. You should also be prepared to teach fifteen credit hours per semester, and you should be willing to serve on campus committees. Also, you should understand that if you wish to progress through the ranks, you will still have to engage in continued education, scholarship, and research, just like your counterparts at the four-year schools. If all that sounds like too much for you, chances are you should stick to the universities, where the teaching loads are lighter, but the “publish or perish” expectations are often much more intense.
So that’s my brief primer on gaining employment in academia. I hope this is useful to you…
