It struck me the other day how much of my summer I have spent on what I would call ‘admin’ tasks as opposed to actual research or teaching preparation. Doing secretarial-type jobs is not what most lecturers joined the profession to do, but they are important. We are not in the good ol’ days now when academics had secretaries and administrators to do everything for them!
Depending on how your department or faculty is run, as a lecturer you will probably find yourself doing more and more admin tasks. This is because many universities are trying to streamline their procedures and consequently are cutting back on their admin staff. So, what sorts of things could you find yourself doing?
Maintaining student records is an important one. Each department does things differently but you may find yourself responsible for some of the following: tracking student submission of essays/projects, keeping records of extensions granted, of claims for special personal circumstances, tracking persistent student absence, keeping records of marks awarded for individual pieces of assessed work or exams, calculating overall marks for each student for your course, chasing absent or non-submitting students.
You might find that you become the first point of call for students who have questions about the course, a particular unit of their entire programme of study. You can be bombarded with emails, phone calls or face-to-face queries. This can be especially onerous if you are a leader of a particular programme or degree, although this sort of responsibility won’t be given to you at the start of your first academic post.
Another sort of admin that your university will require you to do is the official form filling required by them for bureaucratic reasons. So, whenever you want to amend your unit and teach it slightly differently a whole load of paperwork will be filled in, even more so if you want to offer a new course. And it’s likely that your department will review its entire teaching provision fairly regularly (once every 5 years or so) and if you get caught up in that process there will be a lot more form-filling and hoop-jumping to complete.
So, don’t be under any illusions; you can’t hold a permanent academic post without having to deal with these sorts of tasks. It’s better to get your head down and get on with them, and try to be as organised as possible. Otherwise you might get lost under a sea of paper!
