Academic conferences are as much about learning a new culture as they are about presenting your research ideas and networking for prospective career openings.

As a PhD candidate going to academic conferences in the United States for the first time, I was wary of where I present my paper and the kind of people who are likely to be there. A big conference is likely to put me in a situation where I will be a small fish in a very big pond while a smaller conference, yes, you guess it, will make me a small fish in a very small pond. On the one hand, stories abound of PhD students and senior academics casting covert looks at name tags only to discover that they have been wasting their time talking to a “nobody.” And on the other hand, I’ve heard stories of ‘newbies’ getting job interviews at big conferences and I know that a lot of PhDs will be coming to these big conferences ready to ‘fight’ each other for a job. I badly need a job but I wasn’t really willing to fight a thousand PhDs for one postdoc opening, which I might not even get!

In addition, I’m not sure if I do like academic conferences, except for the ones where I’m presenting a paper. I know that these gatherings can prove invaluable to my current research but lets be honest, a lot of academic presentations are boring, very boring. And you are likely to have meaningless chats with people you may never see again or hear some ‘strange’ guy talk about his dog. Okay, the last bit only happened to me once. But lets face it; conferences can turn out to be like one of those weird house parties you used to go to as an undergraduate student and you may come back from conferences not quite sure of what (substantively) you’ve got out of them.

With this philosophy dominating my thought in early April as I board the Virgin Atlantic flight to New York, and with very little money to spend criss-crossing the massive land space that is America, I decided to forgo a conference on American Popular Culture where 3,000 academics will be congregating, for a rather cosy graduate conference at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The journey to Albuquerque from Birmingham, UK, took almost fourteen four hours with three different flights and stopovers in three cities. Will I like my hosts? Will I be spending four boring days in a city I have never been before?

Albuquerque turned out to be a great small city, ethnically diverse and with many cheap places to eat good New Mexican foods. I made use of my spare time by learning the city’s history and seeing the way the people live. The conference itself turned out to be the best conference I’ve been to yet. My hosts were great and they took time to show me the city and the university. While some European academics may think Americans are loud, self-involved folks, I found them to be respectful, funny and outgoing. Unlike some academic conferences I’ve been to in Europe, the academics I met were not pretentious.

As I left New Mexico for a holiday in Florida and New York, I felt like I made the right decision to go to a smaller conference. I didn’t leave with a job interview but I made some great friends, with whom I’m likely to be friends and colleagues for years to come.

Maybe next year I’ll go to a big conference, but for now, I’m happy being the little guy in the little league.

Shola Adenekan is a PhD candidate and a teaching-assistant at the University of Birmingham.

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!

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!

Cassuto argues that the experience of most PhD students studying at university bears little resemblance to the teaching jobs that they will end up doing (if they’re lucky!) in the first few years after finishing the doctorate. He claims that supervisors need to be realistic with their postgrad students so that their expectations match the opportunities available in the job market. Having a PhD from a research-focused university does not mean that you will get a job with a low teaching load and good research support.

Essentially Cassuto’s message to PhDs is that most academic jobs are not like the job your supervisor does. Your expectations need to change to meet the job market. Of course, this difference between hopes and reality is not the fault of the student but of the individuals, departments and institutions who are training them for an academic career.

Most universities offer PhD students very little academic career development training. It is assumed that your skills and expectations will be honed by imitating your supervisors and colleagues. What is actually required is a professional development strand to the PhD.

One commenter on Cassuto’s article suggested inviting back former postgrad students to talk to current ones about the jobs they do now, including non-academic roles, which sounds like a great idea, but could it ever happen? This would also help to solve the problem that many graduate students feel abandoned by their alma mater once they have finished their PhD by showing that their opinions and experience are valued for years afterwards.

The most important factor to take into account is that getting promoted is not about showing you have the ability to move up a grade, it’s about showing that you are ALREADY doing work of that level. You won’t get promoted on potential, but by already being there. You might think this is rather unfair because that means you have to do work of a higher grade for an initial period without getting the financial reward for it, but this seems to be the most obvious way of achieving promotion.

You also need to let everyone in your workplace know that you are seeking a promotion, specifically your mentor and your boss.  In the end you will have to find out who makes the final decision and alert them to your intentions. Initially though, speak to your mentor or line manager about this, through an official personal development channel if possible (e.g. at an appraisal meeting).

Another bit of advice is to be patient. Altogether it took 18 months for my promotion to happen, from first indicating I’d like to be considered, to working at that level, to submitting application documents, to having that application considered by a number of individuals and committees. This will not happen over night!

And don’t think of this promotion step as your ultimate goal: see it as part of a 5 or 10 year career plan in which you can reach much further. Good Luck!

I think that to deny that universities were going through very challenging times is be like burying your head in the sand. Of course financial uncertainties in both the UK and the US mean that the career prospects of all of us are also uncertain, with the arts subjects seemingly hardest hit.

The way that universities use temporary and part time teachers as opposed to replacing permanent lecturers and professors is also a key issue, meaning that the nature of the profession is changing drastically.At the same time, getting a permanent job depends on having a solid publications record, which is difficult to achieve while doing a number of part time contracts.

But does this mean that we should no longer be advising our brightest students that academia is a possible career? Some scholars think it does. I must admit that I have a more positive view of the future of the profession than some. I realise how lucky I was to secure a permanent job a few years ago, but some universities, including my own, are still creating new positions so the situation isn’t solely one of retraction.

Instead of discouraging new academics from coming through the system altogether, we should be encouraging them to be realistic and preparing them for a period of further apprenticeship where they might have to work several jobs at once to get experience, not settling in any one place, before hopefully progressing to a more permanent position.

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!

Many academics in permanent jobs will be part of a personal development review system, where they meet with their mentor and discuss career progress at least once a year. But ironically, those who arguably need this service most: the temporary staff who might be working three or four jobs to make ends meet, might not have access to a PDR system. So, take the initiative and give yourself your own career review!

Questions to think about include: have I done anything this year to improve my CV in terms of qualifications, experience or skills? Where are there still significant gaps in my profile? How can I go about trying to plug those gaps in 2011?

This is a challenging time in the world of universities, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be prepared for the possibility of that dream job coming along next year. And even if it simply isn’t possible to move jobs, by improving your career profile you’ll feel as though you’re doing something productive towards a move in the future, rather than just allowing yourself to stagnate.The same is true even if you are not actively looking to move at the moment.

As lecturers these days we spend so much time thinking about the employability of our students (and rightly so) that it is easy to forget to think about our employability! So, before you put your feet up this holiday season, spend a few moments auditing your career achievements this year: you’ll probably find that you’ve done more than you think!

In an article in this week’s University World News, Geoff Maslen explores the reasons why Australian universities are struggling to hold on to PhD candidates and encourage them to stay in academia. To read the whole article, please click here.

The trend there is similar to the US and the UK, away from permanent tenured lectureships and towards short term contracts and sessional lecturing. This has meant that universities have not put in the time and investment needed to develop the permanent staff base.

While recruiting from overseas is one option, the international job market is very competitive at the moment with jobseekers increasingly realising that they have to market their skills globally. So, perhaps now is a good time to think globally and work out whether you might want to teach abroad.

Australia, like other countries, needs to work harder to integrate its sessional workforce into the academic system instead of treating them like second-class citizens. And while this is an institutional and structural problem in many cases, it’s also the responsibility of us academics on permanent contracts to reach out to our sessional colleagues.