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!

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!

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.

In this blog and in many others, academics often comment on the problems associated with the increase in temporary and part time working (adjuncts in the US). While this way of working suits some people, many members of academic staff undertake these jobs because they are trying to find a permanent position and such jobs are seen as a step on the ladder.

Scholars will be stuck in these jobs for years not months as the level of hiring is increasingly uncertain because of the changing economic fortunes of universities. So, by doing jobs such as A level or Baccalaureate exam marking it is possible to earn some much needed cash and to enhance your CV.

Exam marking is intense and an acquired skill, so it will require a real commitment on your part. However, it is fairly lucrative but also gives you a real insight into the education system outside the university sector. It shows you the stage of learning your students go through before they reach you. It can help you to see the common pitfalls students fall into, and the skills that they have and that they need when they get to university. So pedagogically, making school exams can have a real benefit and enhance your own performance as a university teacher. Not bad for a job taken to make a bit of spare cash!

Thomas Benton argues that lecturers have little ability to improve the performance of their students, because of structural factors, not because they are poor teachers. Benton says that the students themselves have become unwilling to put the required work in and almost demand a good grade. But the system itself also encourages grade inflation and there is a university-wide reluctance to kick out poor students because of worries over student retention rates.

A teacher’s popularity is important in the US because students’ feedback is used to judge teaching performance as is class sizes. If you struggle to recruit students because you are perceived as a harsh marker, your course and therefore your job could be under threat. This is especially true if you are a vulnerable temporary or part time lecturer.

Incredibly high teaching loads for these lecturers (who even sometimes have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet) mean that they do not have time to dedicate to helping students on an individual level. It’s not that they’re poor teachers, they’re just being asked to do the impossible.

All these factors have contributed to significant decline in morale in the last few decades. Of course Benton is painting a picture of American academia and his story might not be true in the UK, but I bet some of it sounds familiar. I don’t believe that these problems are impossible to overcome and if you have a real calling to be a lecturer then you should pursue it. But it’s important to be realistic about the nature of the job and some of the challenges you will face.

I have blogged about the difficulties in mixing teaching with research before, but even during my fourth year in my post I am still having trouble getting this right! Partly this is because I have been writing and delivering a new 10 week MA unit this term. Even though this is on a topic I am very familiar with, I obviously have to be very well prepared each week and this has been taking a considerable amount of time. Add to that dissertation supervisions and lecture and seminar preparation for undergraduate courses and marking on top of that, and there’s plenty to be getting on with each week!

Many colleagues say that it is over-ambitious to attempt any writing or research during term time and that they struggle to make any progress in these areas outside holiday time. I am certainly finding that this term. It is a good lesson for me in having flexible deadlines though. There’s no point in beating myself up because I have fallen behind my strict writing schedule. I am simply going to have to adjust my targets.

Having said that, this week with no teaching commitments I should be able to push forward and get most of one chapter of my book written and then the next one might be on hold until the Easter holidays! Although it’s a matter of pride with me not to miss deadlines and to deliver when I say that I will, quality is more important than  promptness. So, give yourself a break this week… and set yourself realistic work deadlines!

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.

Teaching postgraduates is often seen as the holy grail of academic life.  It’s ideal because teaching is done in small groups so you can give personal attention to each student; they are the brightest and most dedicated of the undergraduates and this makes the experience more fulfilling as a teacher. In fact the relationship is often not one of students and teacher, but a group of scholars exploring the subject together.

This of course is the dream, sometimes masters teaching is not like that! It provides its own particular challenges. Students can struggle to meet their commitments because a masters course is so intense (only one year full time). Others have challenging work-life balances to maintain and sometimes finance can be difficult for them. This all affects the level of commitment students have to your course.

It is also important to remember that masters students, as well as undergraduates, are concerned about transferable skills and employability . Learning for its own sake is only part of the story, even at postgraduate level.

And for your own career development masters students can represent an opportunity, good for CV development, but they are also a potential pool of PhD students. So for all sorts of reasons, postgraduate teaching is an exciting aspect of the job and I encourage you to get involved as soon as possible in your career.

I am very lucky because, at my university, there isn’t a culture of having to be present in the office for the sake of it. Of course we have to be there to do our teaching, to attend meetings, to offer one to one guidance to students but, other than that, we are ‘allowed’ to do our research, lesson planning, marking etc. at home if we want to.

But could we do even more from home? What about having meetings via conference calls and webcams? And, more controversially, should we cancel office hours and just converse via email? Do we even need to be present to teach? We could run wholly online modules, with lectures delivered as podcasts and seminars run as discussion forums online!

Most people think this is going too far. Although working from home (and indeed any sort of flexible working arrangement) is beneficial to a point, it is also important to have face to face contact with colleagues and managers, nevermind actually being present for students.

However, while not becoming the rule, it is useful to have these sorts of arrangements in place in case of a weather-related emergency such as the snow fall we have had recently that has prevented us from getting to work. Instead of the work place grinding to a halt, these alternatives can be put in place ensuring that students and colleagues are not left with no contact at all.

Hopefully in the New Year we’ll have some milder weather and travel to work will not be a problem! In the meantime, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers. I’ll be back in 2011!