Next week you’ll find a new author on this blog, who is at the start of his academic career talking about the issues facing junior scholars today. I am moving on to a new blog for jobs.ac.uk on my specialist subject area of American History: if you’d like to visit my new blog, click here.

I wanted to finish my last post for Just Higher-Ed with a few thoughts on the important issues over the last four years. The vulnerable and sometimes abused position of part-time and temporary staff in the sector has been a recurring theme as was academics having to justify how hard their jobs actually are. The challenges of balancing a full teaching load with demands of research has been another often discussed issue.

The increasingly competitive nature of the job market both here and overseas has also been a source of concern but there have also been bright spots as our department has made several permanent and part time hires in the last few years, so the job market hasn’t stagnated completely.

One lesson I wanted to pass on is that if you have had to do several years of ‘adjunct’ teaching, you will probably find that moving to a permanent job is easier in some ways and more challenging in others. However, if you have friendly colleagues and teach a subject that you love without too much interference from the powers that be, within the first couple of years you’ll establish yourself, fitting your work into the yearly academic cycle with no trouble. Best of luck to all you jobseekers out there: your dream job is just around the corner!

Increasingly academics have to input their own marks into record systems and so this time of year is one of frenetic admin activity as well as actually marking exams. Many colleagues don’t find marking exams horrible, but they don’t like the fast turn-around times and the admin burdens that increase every year.

I enjoy marking: finding out how much (or how little!) of the information and skills I have taught during the year has actually been absorbed by my cohort. I don’t have a choice whether to mark exams or not, but some of you who are on temporary contracts might find you’re offered extra cash to mark exams. It might seem like a lot of work, but I’d take it: marking end of year exams brings a certain sense of closure to the year’s academic activities.

At some universities academic staff also have to take on invigilation duties. This task can veer between the highly stressful and the mind-numbingly boring! Stressful if something goes wrong: the wrong exam paper, noise from a neighbouring room, a student taken ill or caught cheating (all of which I have experienced in only four years of doing this!) Mind numbingly boring because you have to stand in a silent room with no phone or computer to play with, no book or newspaper to read for hours and hours! The advantage is that at least you get a few hours during a very busy time of the term when you can do nothing and clear your mind for a while!

James Lang argues that networking need not only be self-serving but that it is important for teachers to direct their undergraduate and postgraduate students in how to network. Almost anyone’s career chances will be boosted by having this skill.

Networking is about much more than small talk and the bravery to approach someone you don’t know and start talking about yourself. It’s about being perceptive enough to draw connections between your work and theirs, about spending the time researching the background of colleagues in order to speak intelligently with them.

These skills can also benefit the university too. Networking can be employed to help boost student numbers when staff members are asked to work at prospective student events. Long’s article makes us all stop and think: networking isn’t just a cringe-worthy self-serving tool but something that we do naturally every day. And so we need to pass the technique on to our students to ensure it becomes part of their working practice too.

We all know the problems in finding a permanent academic position at the moment mean that some academics have to work several jobs in a portfolio career. One way of making a bit of extra cash is by offering your services as a private tutor. This time of year this can be especially lucrative as children and their parents need revision sessions before the big external exams of the summer.

The sort of assistance you can offer is reinforcing the subject-based content but also coaching in revision skills and good exam practice. Most private tutors charge about £25 per hour minimum and see each tutee between 1 and 3 times per week.

As with most jobs these days, the best way to become a private tutor is to sign up online. Join one of the websites such as First Tutors for free and you will soon find you are approached by potential students.

Be warned though, one to one tuition is hard work. You have to do a lot of preparation for these sessions, learning about the curriculum your tutee is following and preparing detailed materials for your sessions. You have to be aware of expectations too. Many parents want a private tutor for their son or daughter because they want them to get the top grades so there may be quite a bit of pressure on you to deliver a significant improvement. You will also need a CRB check to show that you are eligible to work with under-18 year olds. However, this is really rewarding work and is a good way to earn a bit of extra money doing something you enjoy!

I am looking forward to the Easter break to have a rest because I won’t have to do my long commute into my university so often but I will still put in eight hour days in my office at home. Many academics struggle to convince family and friends that they will not be taking a three week holiday at this time of year!

Of course many of us have piles of marking to do, hardly a restful task for anybody! And apart from that, we’ve been looking forward to the end of teaching so that we can get on with our research or writing projects. Not only is this a very enjoyable part of the job for many, it is also essential for career development.

So where does that leave actual holiday? Time with family and friends? A breather after the long term? However career focused you are, it is important to allow yourself sometime to rest and recuperate or you will find term starting again in May and you have no energy at all. Dedicating a small number of days to spend time away from your desk is very important and will actually improve your performance overall. So however tempting it might be to throw yourself into research, give yourself a break over this Easter period. Your mental and physical health might depend on it!

Downing argues that exactly at the time when universities in the West are dramatically cutting their state funding, institutions in Asia (especially China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan)  are moving in the opposite direction. The efforts of these countries is paying off as more of their universities move into the world’s top 200 list published by Quacquerelli Symonds.

This means that Asian universities are in a better position to attract the world’ s best academics to teach and research, and the world’s best students to learn there.

Of course, the ranking system itself causes controversy, as does the internal UK ranking of universities here. But I agree with Downing when he argues that some sort of ranking system, however flawed, is necessary in order for us to judge Higher Education systems using ‘real world’ values.

And the findings of this ranking system is that the traditional universities of the West who have dominated the tables for years should be worried and look to Asia as a model of how to improve their own standing. Many academics don’t like the idea of competition on this scale, but it seems to be a fact of university life across the globe, so surely it’s better to be informed about these changes than to bury our heads in the sand?

Unfortunately the cuts to the British public sector are starting to have an impact on arts and humanities researchers and lecturers. For example, the British Academy has cut its small grants programme, as outlined in this excellent blog by Phil Ward: please click here. As Ward says, this will especially impact on early career scholars attempting to get a foot in the funding door.

While promotion and career progression are so closely tied to the acquisition of large funding awards, the removal of smaller awards such as this will have the affect of making competition for the larger awards even more fierce. So, how should we go about trying to undertake research in such challenging circumstances?

Research from home? Online resources mean that for many scholars travelling great distances to archives is not always necessary now.

Research outside term time  only? Without funding it is nearly impossible to spare the time during the teaching parts of the year to get down to some serious research or writing. So, forget the idea of an actual holiday, and make sure you dedicate your breaks to research instead.

Small grants from libraries/archives? The situation globally is not completely hopeless. There are still some institutions offering scholars money to study for short periods of time (a few weeks or a few months). Libraries, especially in the US, offer decent visiting scholarships over the summer months.

The situation is far from ideal, but if you want to continue to be a research active scholar, increasingly lateral thinking will be required.

If you are an academic jobseeker you think of your own development in terms of skills and competencies as well as the subject-based expertise that you acquire and it’s no different for the graduate jobseeker. If you are well versed in the language, theory and practice of career development then you will be in a good position to help your students as well as yourself.

It is important to help them to show that the things they have done at university have given them the skills and experience that place them ahead of the pack. An obvious example is giving an oral presentation with a class mate. Research skills, teamwork, oral communication and powerpoint skills are among the demonstrable outcomes of undertaking that assessment.

Masters or PhD students can be encouraged to think in a similar way about their university experience. Not every postgraduate will want to move on to a career in academia but this doesn’t mean that their postgrad degrees are wasted: far from it! Employers admire the strength of character that completing a postgraduate qualification requires and also the skills that it produces in a candidate.

I am not suggesting that every lecturer should have to be a careers adviser as well. Students have access to their careers services often for several years after they graduate so we should not try to duplicate the good work that they do. But we know our courses intimately and can relate them to the skills our students need in the world of work. This should be in the back of our minds when we design new courses or rejig old ones. This development doesn’t require us to do different things, but rather to think about what we already do in terms of employability and skills.

When academics are tired at the end of a long teaching term, they would probably find the idea of never retiring horrific, but I sometimes think privately that I couldn’t ever give up what I do.  This attitude does cause problems though, and one issue faced by some senior managers is how to finally ask those coming to retirement age, or who might be well past it, to lay down their chalk and retire.

There are two aspects to this. First, research. Of course noone is saying that retired academics have to give up researching. Many continue publishing and speaking at conferences well into their retirement. But the question is how much support should the institution give that person to continue their work? Library privileges help and are relatively cheap; however, providing office space for former staff members might deny current members of staff access to that space and therefore hinder the running of the department.

Second: teaching, and this is the issue that Fant focuses on. Retired academics are often hired to do sessional, contractual teaching where their continued presence is essential to the running of a particular course. There is nothing wrong with this, but as Fant says, it can be difficult to encourage them to give way gracefully if a new member of staff with similar expertise comes on board.

In my experience if these matters are handled sensitively then everyone can benefit. When I started my first permanent academic job I received a great deal of advice from a retired head of department who was doing some part time teaching and his expertise helped me become a better lecturer.

This is a complicated issue and, of course, in some institutions, staff are given no choice but to retire at a certain point. Dealing with this with flexibility and sensitivity is a real challenge for those managing a department.

Increasingly with the use of electronic and online resources plagiarism (or the deliberate copying of unattributed material) is becoming more common. It has been in the news this week as reports that a German politician and one of Gaddafi’s sons may have plagiarised their PhDs. Accusations of plagiarism are mercifully rare amongst academics although they can happen and can ruin a career. However, among undergraduate students some think this problem is rife and that teachers are not doing enough to detect or prevent it.

There are several pieces of detection software that you can try using that will do the work for you. Plagiarism can also be detected manually by you simply by entering small quotations into Google. Many students steal information from websites or Google books so a quick search will bring up the problem. How do you spot plagiarism in the first place?

- change of style. The main think to look out for is a student who writes poorly suddenly becoming very fluent! This is usually an indication that they are using someone else’s words.

- change of font. It sounds silly, but if students are cutting and pasting information from the internet, they often don’t bother to change the font to make it uniform with the one they used earlier in the essay.

- something that sounds familiar. Ideas or turns of phrase that sounds familiar to you probably are so double check the key texts in that field to see whether any theft has taken place.

- a suspicious reference. Sometimes plagiarism is accidental (i.e. unwittingly a student will write someone else’s words as their own because their note-taking has been poor). Occasionally it is deliberate and students can try to mask this using fake references. Keep an eye open for a reference detailing a non-existent book or an item that the student definitely would not have had access to.

If you can show your university that you are aware of their regulations and are alert to the possibility of plagiarism, you will be showing yourself to be an excellent teacher and interested in protecting the reputation of the institution. The other side of this is to talk to your students to make sure that they understand what plagiarism is in the first place.