Approaching the Academic Job Market
So, you’ve made it to the point where you are considering the next stage of your career. First and foremost, you are here, so take some time to reflect on your journey and how hard you must have worked to get here. You have made it through what may be most of your formal training and schooling, which might mean that change is now upon you. As you consider what lies ahead in approaching the job market, try to take a deep breath. It is uncertain, unclear, and may come with more questions than answers. But, drawing from multiple experiences in approaching what to do next, here are a few things to consider.
I should also state upfront that one size absolutely does not fit all when it comes to approaching the job market, so please take anything below as one perspective and be sure to meet with others who recently went through this process to garner multiple viewpoints to inform your process. Additionally, I should state that though I have some (secondhand) awareness of what clinical graduate students go through after their graduate training (e.g., APPIC internship, mandatory postdocs for licensure, EPPP testing, etc.), this blog post may not be as applicable for these considerations. Lastly, this blog post may be slightly more tailored to those who are aiming for a tenure-track position at an R1 institution, with some mention of how to approach other positions.
What Job Market Will You Be Approaching?
As you approach years 3+ in your (PhD) training, it may be time to start considering where you want to apply your efforts as you progress toward the end of your program. If you are considering research, teaching, or a hybrid of these might be in your plans, then you should consider tailoring how you approach the rest of your program to fit with these needs. If you are looking for a career that prioritizes research over teaching, then you should try to learn as much as you can to make yourself a stronger researcher and try to complete important projects (emphasis on quality over quantity).
If you are looking for a career that prioritizes teaching over research, then you should try to guest lecture classes and ask the assigned professor for feedback, see if you can teach your own class (pay attention to your constructive student rating of teaching effectiveness; SRTEs), and work on your mentoring as you train undergraduate and/or other junior graduate students in the program. A hybrid approach may also be prudent, given many predominantly teaching faculty positions can desire a good researcher to mentor students in conducting good research projects at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). If you are considering a non-academia job, be sure to attend any information sessions within your community, reach out to people who have made this transition to see how they made it work for them (e.g., what skills and experiences translate), and think carefully about what opportunities you may need to aim for early to make this a possibility (e.g., internships, informal interviews, networking, programming and/or other statistical techniques that may be useful). A note for international students: it is very difficult to complete internships and/or consult depending on your visa status, so be careful about pursuing these without getting accurate information on what you can and cannot do (e.g., immigration lawyers will know more than your home institution’s international department, but may be costly to consult).
What Will You Need for the Academic Job Market?
In readying for the academic job market, you will want to consider preparing a few documents and gathering items that will represent you on the job market. In the current time (2024), three standard statements are required to apply to most positions which may be prioritized differently depending on the type of position you apply to: 1) Research Statement; 2) Teaching Statement; 3) Diversity Statement. Other important documents that you will want to prepare or gather are: 4) Curriculum Vitae; 5) Resume; 6) any available Student Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness (SRTEs); 7) Sample Papers from your research; 8) Cover Letter.
Research Statement
This document is generally 2-5 pages and outlines the overall impact of your research in broad terms, then going narrower in focus to outline some of your most impactful findings, and then ending broadly with what you will be working on in the future at the institutions which you hope to work. It is important to carefully connect various research projects which you contributed to in a way that develops a narrative of your research that another person would be able to follow along (and this takes time and revising). Though your projects may not seem linear to you as you work on them throughout your training, you need to take a step back and try to see the connected elements of what you do as a researcher. If you have a wealth of published papers, consider mentioning fewer high-quality projects that you worked on and/or published. Additionally, try to pay special attention to whether you will be successful in securing (grant) funding to be able to conduct your research in the future and be able to train the next generation of scholars to address real-world problems.
Teaching Statement
This document is also 2-5 pages (depending on your target destination) and should outline how you approach teaching, your accomplishments in teaching, and any other pertinent information regarding your ability to teach at the institution to which you are applying (e.g., potential courses you might want to teach at the end; check their course catalogs). Try to bring up concrete examples that cover your teaching approach (e.g., de-identified examples of how you engaged in the practices which you outline). Additionally, include any honors and awards which you have received in here as well. Even if your teaching experience is lesser than most, try to outline a philosophy of how you want to be as a teacher, try to attend trainings in your institutions that will give you guidance on how to be an effective teacher and mentor, and try to consider how your mentoring experience informs your teaching statement as well.
Diversity Statement
This document is generally 1-3 pages (some institutions de-prioritize this by making them very short, so decide if that is a place you really want to work). This should encompass how you approach making your research and teaching environments more inclusive, how you have tried to better your understanding of other people’s identities within the academic environment, and how you hope to champion diversity-related efforts into the future.
Point of Contention: There is a lot of debate about diversity statements, so try to steer clear of them given some of it is not in good faith. Try to look out for available rubrics for what goes into their evaluation online. One’s identity does not necessarily make or break this statement. It has more to do with how you are conscious of diversity, seek trainings, and handle progressing diversity in your institution and community while improving its climate.
Sample Papers
Gather at least 3 empirical (and/or other article types) which you have worked on over the course of your PhD training that you feel best represents your skills and ability while representing what you want to work on in the future. This should also reflect the content you wish to include in your job talk and be the most impactful research you have conducted. You would want to prioritize: 1) first author manuscripts that are published, in press, or accepted; 2) first author manuscripts that are written up and pending final revisions which may or may not be on an open science archive; 3) published, in press, or accepted manuscripts in which you played an important role in but may not be the first author (e.g., second or third).
Point of Contention. Norms vary as to whether you should (or could) upload your written research papers that have not been submitted (or went through a peer-review process already) to an open science archive website (e.g., PsyArXiv). If you have mentors or co-authors who endorse this practice, then power to you, and you may want to upload papers that show you are actively conducting quality research onto these types of websites. However, if your mentors do not endorse this practice, that is ok, given papers do tend to need peer-review to uncover whether something may be missing, wrong, or need further research to improve a project. If that is the case, but you still have an empirical paper which you may want to include in your research talk, consider saving a PDF copy of it, with a “Note” on the first page indicating something to the effect of: “This paper is still undergoing revisions by the authorship team and is not in final form. The current version is being shared to private parties for evaluation but should not be distributed, broadcast, or cited without the written consent of the corresponding author”.
Cover Letter
This document has a lot of variation in how it may be written, but there may be a few things to emphasize. First, you should emphasize your research lines, approach to teaching, and how you approach diversity in the first couple of paragraphs. Consider this a brief introduction to the larger documents which the hiring committee will review. Next, try to reiterate elements of their posting verbatim, and indicate why you believe you are the right candidate to fulfill elements of their posting through some of your experiences and skills (i.e., be specific about yourself). Try to emphasize why your research lines are also fundable, and what funding sources you might pursue (e.g., National Science Foundation, National Institute on Aging, etc.). Once you cover these elements, the institution will want to know that you did some homework into how you would fit into their institution. This is where you can look up already established institutions or centers, other departments, or internal funding opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations and/or intra-university collaborations which you fit well into. Try to keep the cover letter brief (e.g., 1-2 pages at most), sign at the bottom, and see if you can use a professional letterhead of your current institution.
Other Important Documents
Keep your CV up-to-date and carefully separate research, teaching, and service with the appropriate subheadings which you think will represent you well. Ensure that the CV may read well for other people and try to keep “papers in preparation” to ones that are further along (e.g., draft ready) as opposed to everything which you started but have not really moved in a few years. For a resume, keep this drafted as well just in case a given institution or position which you may apply for may request it. For SRTEs, if you have these, try to gather them together, positive and/or negative, as they may be requested by a given institution.
Will You Consider a Postdoc, Visiting Assistant Professor (VAP), Adjuncting (or other positions)?
More and more talented graduate students enter the faculty job market but find that luck is unfortunately not in their favor. As the academic job market approaches, and if academia is your goal, you may want to consider positioning yourself to also be viable for postdoc positions. Postdocs are typically matched in the following manner: 1) applying to a Principle Investigator’s (PI) grant line for a postdoc to progress that grant’s research aims; 2) applying to a department-specific call for postdocs (which may be more common in business schools); 3) applying for a postdoc fellowship to offset the costs of you entering a lab as a postdoc (which may also provide some research autonomy compared to being funded on a specific grant); and 4) aiming for fellowships that increase diversity across a university or university system (which may transition to faculty positions). Options 3 and 4 may at times be ultra-competitive and fewer in number, but it never hurts to put your best forward and apply to them. However, Option 1 may be more available depending on your research fit and skillset to contribute to the PI’s grant aims (e.g., methods, statistical analyses, relevant research approaches).
As you continue through your graduate training, you should start to consider potential PIs who you might want to work with who may have a natural fit with your research and to which you would be able to contribute effectively to their environment. As you enter Year 4 or 5, it can be useful to see if a meeting at a research conference is possible or lay out your desire to consider a postdoc with their research lab and see whether there is an opportunity to explore it further. At the best case, they indicate interest, you may meet with their lab, and you may have a natural fit with their group so a plan can be in place. In the worst case, they do not have room for you to join their lab (e.g., they have another candidate they are trying to hire), the fit is not quite right, or you are unsuccessful in fulfilling what they need (emphasis on) “right now”. Do not take this personally but keep trying to see where a postdoc may land and keep the conversations going to see what might provide an offer letter at the end. Other positions to consider are visiting assistant professor positions which can increase opportunities to gain more experience with teaching, and additionally adjunct professor positions. If considering these options, try to speak with individuals who took on these types of positions more recently to get their perspective on them.
Other Considerations
Feedback
As you go along in this search, take a lot of care in evaluating your materials, surrounding yourself with supportive people, and ask for advice along the way. Multiple people reading your materials, even more than once (if they have the availability to do so) will help a lot. And in preparing for any stage of interviews whether that be a virtual, in-person flyout, or other mode of interview, it is really important to run through how you want to present yourself to others to see if anything is coming across in a way that does not feel genuine (e.g., are you scripted in how you respond to typical job questions?).
Competition
Try to be very careful about comparing yourself to any colleagues at your level, or those who are training and just behind you (e.g., in the case of being a postdoc and seeing senior graduate students who are immediately successful on the faculty market). You never know how hard people are working and how much they also desire positions that you hope for, so it is best to not treat the job market as zero-sum even when it seems to be. If you can maintain persistence and your level head with some flexibility in your options, eventually things may work out. But everyone has limited amounts of time to consider going after a given job market repeatedly, so be honest with yourself about your timeline and try not to sacrifice anything that might be detrimental to your longevity after you complete such a long period of schooling and training. Transitioning out of grad school can be jarring, so knowing what will keep you dialed in and able to keep working in a new capacity will be key to keeping this going.
Be Careful About Advice
I will end by saying to be careful about whose advice you ultimately follow. Your best approach may be gathering numerous perspectives for making decisions along the way with your approach to the job market. Further, you may need to invest a lot of time into thinking about where you want to be located, what type of culture you want in your future workplace, what opportunities for growth are available in your hopeful institution, and whether you can have a happy life in the new location. If you find yourself not being clear about some of these aspects, try to step outside of your current “training” mindset, think about who you want to be in the future, and what you need to get yourself there.
Good luck!
About the Author
Julian Scheffer, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UC Berkeley and is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario (Fall, 2024). He currently conducts research examining the utility of interpersonal emotional processes like empathy and compassion in challenging interpersonal and intergroup contexts (e.g., informal caregiving for people with neurodegenerative disease, political opponents, and allyship in addressing social injustice). He's an early morning gym rat who enjoys exploring breweries with his wife when not relaxing with their two cats.
