1. Are you happy/fulfilled in your current job?

If the answer to this is no, then you it’s important to do something about it. We spend so much of our time at work that it is simply not worth ploughing on while being miserable. If you are unhappy, what makes you so. Is it the role? Your responsibilities? Your colleagues? Your boss? Is the situation so bad that you will need to leave and move to another company/institution or can it be fixed where you are?

If you are happy in your current job, that is great news but it is important not to remain static. Use 2011 to build your CV, to work towards a promotion or to develop new skills. Just because you are not actively looking for work right now does not mean that you won’t have to in the near future or that you should stop improving your career prospects.

2. Improving my profile in the job market (now or in the future)

Whether you’re on the market right now or just planning ahead, take a look at your CV and see whether you need to build on any particular area. Perhaps if you have been in the same job for a while, the first step is to actually write a new CV! You should have a ‘live’ document available at your fingertips at all times, even if you are not currently applying for new jobs.

Once this is done, take a look at the range of skills, knowledge and experience you display. Is this commensurate in all areas with someone who has held a job for the time that you have? If not, then it’s time to plan how to fill those gaps. Do you need extra training? Is there a project you could become involved in to learn ‘on the job’?

3. Use mentoring and networking

In order to help you improve your career chances, you need to use the expertise of those around you. If you are already in a job, use your mentor and internal personal development systems to find out how you can fill your CV gaps. If you are job hunting, make sure you network at every opportunity. Advice and support from others with expertise in your field could make 2011 your year!

In this week’s Chronicle, Gene Fant Jr has written a short piece on why it’s important to let others take a look at your CV. For the full article please click here.

Especially when starting out in a particular field it can be difficult to know how to ‘sell’ your knowledge, experience and skills, so talk to someone who has done your job for years or, even better, someone who has experience on hiring committees and sees hundreds of CVs, good and bad.

Obviously you have to be careful that those you consult will treat your CV confidentially, but approaching professors or senior researchers in your field should ensure this. If you are still doing your PhD, your supervisor is an obvious choice.

But once you have got your doctorate, some people can feel isolated and without a support network while jobseeking. That’s why it is important to build up your own network of contacts at every opportunity. You’ll soon find a group of academics whose opinion you can value and trust.

Jobs for September

Many universities are currently advertising the short term, temporary positions they need to fill in order to complete their teaching responsibilities for next academic year, so if you are a jobseeker who still doesn’t have anything lined up for 2009-10, don’t panic! There’s still a lot out there. Some institutions, including my own are even advertising permanent positions so be prepared to carry on slaving away at your job applications, and attending interviews, throughout the summer months.

CV Building

For those of us who are perhaps not looking for work immediately but are still interested in building a career in the long term, it’s important at the end of an academic year to think about what sots of things you have done this year to improve your CV. Don’t fall into the trap of only producing a CV when actively job hunting. Try to keep up your CV development at all times. Have you got any new teaching experience? Have you published anything this year? Developed new administrative skills? Taken on new roles within your department? All these things can be added to your CV to show that you are an active scholar and that you are doing things all the time to build your career.

But do have a rest!

Do allow yourself some time of rest over the summer too! It’s a time of consolidation and regrouping for many of us, assess what’s worked in the previous year’s teaching and research, and then learn your lessons and move on, making sure you fit in some annual leave too! September will come around all too quickly!

More and more British universities are capitalizing on summer schools as a way of making extra cash. They are taking advantage of the reputation of our education system round the world, which despite the many reservations of those of us working within it, is still one of the best in the world. The premise is that overseas students come to study at your university for short courses over the summer months. This education will improve their skills and knowledge and help them get a better degree at their own institution, and obviously looks great on the CV.

These schools are very popular especially in cities such as London, Manchester, Edinburgh and, of course, Oxford and Cambridge. So, how can they benefit the academic job seeker? Well, lecturers are needed to design, run and teach these courses. They are very intensive, involving much more contact time than normal undergraduate teaching and also often involving trips outside the classroom. But they can also be very lucrative with high wages for those willing to give up their summers to teach on these schools.

Some universities will also be looking for admin staff to help to manage the intake and keep records on the students. These sorts of jobs are also often open to academic staff who need extra cash over the summer or whose contracts terminate at the end of the traditional academic year. So, research the universities in your local area and see if they have any of these sorts of jobs going. Working on a project like this can look good on your CV too!

We had a long discussion about academic CVs and the perils of getting CV advice from generic websites targeted at those who are entering the commercial sector. Many of these advice sites say that a CV should be no more than 2 pages. Well, even for academics at the start of their careers it is impossible to fit everything in to 2 pages. We decided that a good length for an academic CV was between 4-6 pages. But the question was raised about how to make different sections of your CV stand out and be more attractive to the reader. The use of colour was proposed, which I think is a great idea. BUT what if the person printing out your CV at the other end hasn’t got a colour printer? Or if the CV is distributed for the interview panel using only a black and white photocopier? All that hard work choosing colours will have been for nothing. Messing about with italics, underlining and different fonts is also not recommended as it makes the CV harder to read. The solutions we came up with were using different point sizes and spacing the words well on the page.

Another question was about the issue of salary negotiations. Rarely, an interview panel will ask you what level of salary you would expect if you got the post. What a challenging question! You don’t want to price yourself out of the market but equally you don’t want to under-sell yourself. Obviously any answer given in an interview is not binding: if you are offered the job you will be able to negotiate formally later. But it’s still a difficult one; I’d be interested to hear anyone’s suggestions on how to handle that.

Overall I had a great time in Southampton, a lovely setting and a very friendly, enthusiastic bunch of students. I could quite get used to this roving careers adviser lark! So if you have a group you’d like me to come and talk to…please get in touch!

The event I went to was the New-ACE workshop held in Liverpool’s Engineering Department. The organisers had been awarded money by the EPSRC to set up a typical sort of academic network, where people sharing the same interests from all sorts of institutions get together periodically to discuss their research. However, this network also had a second aim of helping boost the job prospects of new academics. I think this is a great idea, not only giving a forum for people to share their experiences, but also giving a chance for an ‘expert’ like me to come in and give a basic tutorial in how to get an academic job.

I enjoyed attending the workshop very much. It felt a little like I had landed in some sort of alternate reality! The format of the day, chaired speakers followed by questions, coffee breaks, free lunches etc was exactly what I am used to in history circles, but I had landed in a parallel universe where everyone was discussing control engineering! We had a great discussion after my talk about employers looking on social networking sites for ‘dirt’ on prospective employees, about research versus teaching portfolios and the position of overseas applicants. I would heartily recommend anyone thinking of setting up this sort of network to include a career development aspect as a balance to the intellectual work you do. And if you’d like me to come and share some of my experiences, well, you only have to ask!

I may be a little too honest but it has never even crossed my mind to lie on my C.V. to get a job. And that’s not because I haven’t been desperate for a job…I have! My reasoning to justify being a ‘goody-two-shoes’ is that I wanted to be hired on my merits, that if I lied on my C.V. and got the job then perhaps I would have been expected to do things beyond my capability once hired. And of course there’s always the fear of getting caught and exposed as a fraud!

So what is it that makes so many people lie on their CV? Partly lack of confidence I suppose, if you feel that you are not qualified to do the job you are applying for, or that the field is very competitive, it is easy to want to enhance your profile a little. I think late thirty-somethings are particularly susceptible to this because they may feel they have made more career mistakes by then: perhaps they have not acquired the skills to keep up with a fast moving industry or want a complete career change but do not have the education to back it up. Maybe young Mums and Dads returning to work after caring for families feel out of the loop and unable to compete with those who have remained in the work place. Perhaps the pressure of financial commitments or people’s expectations force those in this age bracket into embellishing their CVs?

You may be surprised to hear that I am all for ‘enhancing’ your CV! ‘What?’, I hear you cry, surely you’re not recommending fraudulent behaviour? No, I am not. There are plenty of great ways to enhance your CV without resorting to lying, as you’ll see by the articles and top ten tips on this site offering CV advice. Instead of putting all your energy in creating a CV that’s a work of fiction, think about how best to sell the skills you have. Even go as far as getting out there and acquiring new skills or qualifications yourself. It is obvious if you are lying on your CV you know what’s missing, where the gaps are in your education or skills base…so do something practical (and honest!) about it. Employers will admire you all the more for that and you’ll know when you get that job, you earned it, fair and square!

Advice from colleagues: priceless!

This is the time of year when many academics turn their attention to exams. While that season is blissfully distant for unsuspecting students, we are slaving away trying to create a challenging but do-able exam paper for our young charges to face in May or September. You might think I am protesting too much, but it’s actually really difficult devising an exam paper that brings out the best in the students. You don’t want to mislead or trick them, scare or depress them, but equally you want to encourage the best students to shine by thinking ‘outside the box’.

This is a job that I never had to do as an hourly-paid or part-time lecturer, it’s only now that I have a permanent position that I have had to think about creating exam questions. No training is offered in this, it is just assumed by the powers that be that you will somehow pick up this skill by the power of osmosis: you will have seen so many exam papers by the time you get to this level that you must be able to write one of your own…well that’s not necessarily true. So how to go about it?

The answer for me was to ask for help from more experienced colleagues. Some people find this difficult because academic life can be a lonely occupation where, for the most part, you are left to get on with your own work. Other people find it difficult to admit that they need advice, not wanting to seem weak in some way, but believe me, there’s no shame in asking for help, and realising that you never stop learning is part of the wisdom you acquire as you progress through life.

I have a colleague who is currently working part time in my university, having retired from running his own department at a neighbouring institution. His experience and advice has been invaluable to me in these first few months of my job. He is not my official mentor, but he has taught me lots. I only hope that I can offer as much support to younger scholars when I am in a more senior role. So, whether you are undergraduate or postgraduate, lecturer or professor make sure you take a moment to metaphorically raise your glass to mentors, official and unofficial, everywhere: thanks, Frank!

Realistically the students that I work with on a day to day basis are not going to become historians; they will follow all sorts of career paths in a few years time. But many of them will have to write letters, reports etc as part of those jobs. They will certainly have to fill in a number of application forms during their working lives. Elsewhere on the jobs.ac.uk career development site authors have commented on the importance of presenting professional CVs, applications and covering letters. So, is it my job to teach students how to write good English and if so should I penalize them for not being able to do so? (answers on a postcard please, or rather, by commenting on this blog!)

Each case must be judged on its (!) merit of course, with students with dyslexia receiving special consideration. And I think that gentle correction and even workshops on the subject are a better way of training the next generation to write well than penalizing them. Otherwise in future years well-qualified candidates are going to have their job applications thrown in the bin because they were unable to communicate fluently in written English. And if we do move increasingly towards electronic selection software, candidates’ inability to spell might send the software haywire!

When starting a new job there’s always some chaotic and challenging times. It can be extremely hard work and sometimes self-doubt creeps in as most human beings are essentially conservative creatures and don’t like change. I am lucky in that getting this job had been my focus for so long that I haven’t doubted for a moment that I made the right move. But it’s so easy to become so absorbed in the day to day work that you forget to think about the bigger picture, about your ‘career’ as opposed to your ‘job’.

It’s important to take time out to assess where your career is going. You’re probably thinking ‘she’s just started a new job, surely she can’t be thinking about a change already’, and that’s right, I’m not. But I want to make sure that everything I do in my working life is contributing to my long-term career development. One way to conceptualize this is in terms of CV building. For example, those 3rd year dissertation students I am supervising this year represent a new skill I have acquired, as does chairing that committee or designing that exam paper.

It’s easy when actively jobseeking to keep the CV up to date, but it’s important to do this when you’re planning to stay in a job for a while too. After all, by keeping tabs on your career progress it’s be easier to perform well in appraisals, probation meetings and promotion boards. So, from now on, as well as enjoying my ‘job’ as a lecturer I’m going to be thinking about my ‘career’ as a lecturer too, and doing something every day to build up my skills portfolio.