But it is almost two months now since I became properly free of it, and as the excuses to remain unemployed diminish, so too does my bank balance. In inverse proportion, a horrible suspicion is beginning to arise in my mind: what if I don’t WANT to get a part time or temporary job whilst I look for something ‘proper’?* What if I actually believe that working somewhere which doesn’t require or make use of my PhD is somehow below me?

In other words, what if I am a terrible, terrible, job snob?

Compared to many other women of my age, I have a very good chance of acquiring a well paid and rewarding position: I hoped and still hope it will be in the academy. In a sense, it is perhaps this knowledge that underlies my reticence about finding ‘other’ work – no matter how much I need it. Perhaps the problem is that I so firmly believed, or just took it for granted, that finding such a position would happen almost immediately. The fact that it hasn’t has come as something of a shock. And thought I don’t like to think it of myself, perhaps I have come to imagine that my perfect academic job, my security and self-sufficiency and my intellectual pleasure are rights, rather than the privileges they actually are.

I think that there is also an element of fear in this. I’m 28 years old, and I haven’t really been outside education since the first time I stepped through the school gates in September 1989. That’s almost 24 years. Honestly, I don’t think I know any other way or place of being, and I’m wary and frightened at the prospect that I might have to get work outside of the Ivory Tower, no matter how temporary that may be. The fears are those of a cosseted schoolchild: what if they don’t like me? What if they think I’m weird? What if they think I’m a snob? What if I don’t like them? What if they know things I don’t know, and talk about things I don’t understand? What if they make me feel small and unworldly? All these questions are laden with prejudice, and are perhaps silly if not downright pejorative. I’m aware of this, and it is a painful thing to realise about yourself.

Worse, however, is this question – what if that temporary job becomes permanent? What if, for whatever reason, I stay in a job that (apparently at least) wastes the effort that others have put into getting me the title of Dr.?

There are a number of ways of approaching this issue. One is to suggest that, in fact, that supposed temporary, non-academic job might become the best thing that ever happened to you – or, at least, not a bad thing and that you will be happy, able to support yourself and any family you have, able to do the things that you want to, because you have a job that doesn’t eat all your time and brain power and create such high levels of stress.** If that becomes the case, there will be no need to feel unhappy – or even ashamed, particularly because there is nothing to be ashamed of. Another tactic is to be quite explicit from the start that this is going to be a temporary position and that, unless something changes drastically, you will continue to look for other work and not allow yourself to fall into the safe complacency which having a job can provide. One friend of mine has held almost every job under the sun –  but she doesn’t let her jobs, past or present, define or limit her. They’re not who she is – and I need to learn this too.

If I know all this, then what, aside from fear, is keeping me from taking on less academic, but steady, work, and forcing me to chase two and three week projects doing note taking, administration and proof-reading? Perhaps it is laziness – I was told to take a holiday and, truth be told, I’m rather enjoying the pottering. But I know, too, that this enjoyment won’t last – it’s probably already gone on too long – yet I fear I do not want to lose the luxury it provides. Is it snobbery: am I reluctant to take work because I do not think it is worthy of me? If this is so, I have learned nothing about being human. Is it shame: am I afraid that I will disappoint the people I love? If this is so, then I think the angst lies more within me.

It is most likely all of these things. But I have to get over them, because this is not a problem that is going to go away. I currently have a three week task to complete for the University, which I am lucky to have. But once it is over, it is over, and I will have to start looking again. And I can’t rely on Unitemps forever – once I have graduated, early in the summer, I really will be on my own.

Thinking about it, though, perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps all the protection I have had from the real world during my time in the Ivory Tower has somewhat limited my education. Perhaps I need to step outside its bounds for a while – to learn about the wonders and terrors outside, and to recognise my academic opportunities as honours, not entitlements.

*By ‘proper’, I mean academic. And permanent.

**In 2012, the Universities and Colleges Union issued a report which suggested that academics are far more stressed and overworked than average.

But here I want to talk about the canines – the teeth with deep roots, which grasp and tear, the teeth which hurt and leave marks. For me, currently, the biggest of these are feelings of rejection, and they come in many different forms from many different sources, some intentional and some not.

Perhaps the least intentional is the feeling of rejection which occurs when you leave a department and a community you have been a part of for a long time. It’s an almost inevitable part of finishing a PhD, and an important way of moving on and growing as an academic. My advisor always encouraged me to adventure elsewhere after my PhD; it would develop my personal skills and knowledge, and take my own work outside the enclosed world of my department. I’d come to terms with the idea of leaving sometime late last year, and the idea of venturing further afield was an appealing one. But now that I have begun that process, I’ve realised how much that community meant – and still means – to me. Even though it was inevitable that my PhD would end, I never quite imagined how that would feel; and actually, it’s a very specific kind of rejection and loneliness.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not lonely through want of company, having a great partner and wonderful family and friends. It isn’t as though I have been ostracised; I still see many of my friends from my old department on a social basis. But I am no longer a part of that specific community, that very particular set of people going through similar experiences and working on projects in an environment that is, it seems, quite hermetically sealed. And that separation produces its very own, quite dully painful and chronic sense of solitude.

But there’s a form of rejection which is more acute and specific – that which occurs when job applications are turned down. Since submitting in December, I have had one job interview (unsuccessful), and multiple rejections without interview. Opening every rejection email, no matter how nicely it is phrased, brings with it all the nerves, all the disappointment and then all the numbness that I remember from when, aged ten, I opened the letter that informed me that I had failed my grammar school exam. I’m not that different now from that child, and every rejection still makes a toothmark on my sense of self-esteem. I wonder if I am valuable outside my previous academic context, if I do have anything to offer to that wider world about which my supervisor used to speak, whether that wider world is at all interested in anything I have to say and how I say it.

But this is something it is necessary to get used to. With so many applicants for every academic and postdoctoral position and a worryingly low number of successful applicants gaining permanent posts in the end, it doesn’t look like life as a post PhD, pre-academic-career individual is going to get easier any time soon. But in the end, you just have to keep trying, and using your available time whilst job hunting to keep your academic hand in and make yourself as attractive as possible. It’s something I’ve yet to learn to do successfully and fully.

Rejection bites for many different reasons, not all of which the person rejected can understand or know. As someone who takes dismissal quite personally, I can’t legitimately tell you to not take it to heart. But I can tell you to constantly evaluate how much this kind of career is worth to you – and that if it is the thing you most want in the world to do, then no matter what, you simply have to persevere: and know that it can take months, even years, to get there. However, you should also know that, in the meantime, there are things that you can do.

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!