The Early Career Blog

Dr Steve Joy This autumn, the Early Career Blog is undergoing various changes, not least in the colour & choice of font. Whilst we make further changes, I am expanding & updating for 2016 some of the most popular posts – starting with this advice on structuring a cover letter for academic jobs. Below is a skeleton structure for a two-page cover letter, suitable for lectureships & similar positions in the UK as well as at research-intensive universities overseas. If you’re applying to a research-only job, then you could simply omit the two teaching paragraphs. You will notice that I suggest  not  following the standard advice that you should have one 'fit' paragraph, usually the last, in which you say something about the particular job you're applying for. Empathise with the busy academics who will be reading your letter – that is, skimming it in a brisk 30-60 seconds. Don’t make them wait all the way until the end to find out whether you have an...

Dr Steve Joy At this time of year, many early career researchers are preparing job documents for academic applications. Lots of PhD students are in the throes of finishing up & preparing to move on; the competitions for Junior Research Fellowships are just around the corner; the US job market is about to go into full swing; and looking towards the autumn, which isn’t as far off as it might seem, there will be a spate of other deadlines. For all of these applications, you will need a persuasive, tautly worded pitch to describe your research. And this is the first place where most people go wrong. In my experience, there is a stunning consistency to the way early career researchers write about their research, and in the process they mark themselves out as inexperienced and lacking confidence. Here’s an example of the type, borrowing from my own half-forgotten research but modelled almost verbatim on a handful of real job documents from the past month: My research studies moderni...

Dr Steve Joy [An edited version of this article was also posted on the Guardian Higher Education Network .] A couple of years ago, I proposed ten irritating mistakes in academic CVs and ten suggestions for writing good cover letters . I think that those tips are still relevant today, but in the intervening years, I have noticed a pattern. Applicants get so wrapped up in worrying about how to present themselves that they stop seeing the wood for trees, and they fail to see what their behaviour implicitly communicates about them to the panel. Here, then, are five examples of such behaviours and why you should guard against them. 1. Inattentive You absolutely must pay careful attention to the details of your job applications, and this includes the formatting. One bizarre manifestation of inattentiveness that I keep seeing is the use, in the same application, of different formats for different documents, e.g. pairing a cover letter in boring old Times New Roman pt 12 and a CV p...

Dr Steve Joy It’s said that, across the whole world of work, interview panels are only ever asking three questions: 1) Can you do this job? 2) Will you do this job? 3) Do you fit the culture of our organisation? There’s a lot of truth in this saying. What it means is that, in effect, the candidate’s task is to decode the phrasing of the interview questions in order to figure out what’s really being asked – whether you have the skills, the motivation, or the right cultural ‘fit’. It’s a powerful tactic. You can easily translate these principles to the specific case of academic interviews. Are you a good researcher? Are you a good teacher? Will you do your fair share of the administrative tasks required of academics? Are you au courant with what’s happening more broadly in higher education? It’s logical, and fairly straightforward. Where, then, do people go wrong? Personally, I see two main ways. First, you forget to contextualise . Look again at those questions. They aren’t askin...

Dr Steve Joy It's been a long time since I sat down to write a blog post, because I took a lengthy sabbatical & absconded to the French Alps, where I ran a small chalet - almost as far away from academia & careers advice as you can get. That's if you don't count all the people who, on finding out what I do for a living, would immediately respond, "Oh, I could really do with some careers advice!" Yet there was a striking way in which I could see a parallel between the academic job market and my chalet experiences of cooking for the guests, cleaning up after them, dealing with their questions and concerns, handling the occasional complaint, even sorting them out when they were frightfully drunk. If you liked the guests, you were happy to help them. But if you didn't like the guests, you didn't enjoy it. The same is true of the job market: be likeable & people are more likely to want to hire you . Be unlikeable at your peril. Likeable What do...

Dr Steve Joy This week, I’ve once again had the delight of participating in Cumberland Lodge’s annual Life Beyond the PhD conference, along with more than sixty research students and speakers from many subjects, universities, and corners of the UK. The venue is magical: half lost in the middle of a thousand-year-old Great Park, the Lodge is a former royal residence with its own charmingly déclassé inventory of furniture supposedly found by the Queen Mother in the cupboards of Windsor Castle. Yet what struck me most vividly about the conference was not, in fact, the sense of having wandered into a low-budget prequel to The King’s Speech . Nor was it how engaged, thoughtful, and open-minded the participants were (although this was certainly inspiring). What struck me most powerfully was the pretty rare opportunity to ask big questions about the value of a PhD, of research per se, and to juxtapose these with the sort of practical, real-world concerns that doctoral students have to conf...

Dr Steve Joy Through self-leadership, early career academics can take control of their careers, be proactive and set their own goals  Leadership is something of a buzzword these days, a concept which has seeped into academia from the corporate world and seems to come in an unending array of flavours: academic, research, thought, moral, business, strategic, and so on. It's the sort of thing people highlight in their job documents; it crops up as an interview question. But what might leadership mean to early career academics, many of whom don't lead the projects they work on, let alone teams or departments? What might it mean if, like many of the researchers we work with, you struggle with the feeling that the higher education system is a game, the rules of which are difficult to navigate and set by others? These questions come from our on-going work with researchers at the University of Cambridge, where we are using the idea of self-leadership as a means of helping them...

Dr Steve Joy At a recent talk to early career academics, I was arguing for the importance of engaging non-academic audiences in your research, when one disgruntled participant shot back that I was encouraging them to become celebrities. This wasn't what I intended, but the response isn't untypical. It reflects an unease among a lot of early career researchers: on top of everything else, do I really have to learn to become a media don or children's entertainer? Is this what I actually need to do to improve my career prospects? Advocates will counter, rightly, that this view of public engagement is unfair. They will say that the reason to do public engagement is not solely to advance one's own career, and that we have a duty to explain to the public what we do. However, motivations for engaging the public can feel more practical than ethical. We all know that it's simply what's expected by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessors, the funders, universit...

Dr Steve Joy This post is a companion to my last piece about preparing for an academic interview [and is a re-posting of my latest piece to appear on the Guardian Higher Education Network 's website]. I've trawled the archives to pick out common yet tricky questions, and I offer some ideas for how to handle them. Clearly, this is not an exhaustive list. You will always get unexpected questions. The trick is to take a deep breath and let go of the anxiety that you need to find the "right" answer. Interview questions have countless plausible and convincing answers, but what sets good candidates apart is their ability to deliver structured answers, to articulate their thinking clearly, and to speak to the concerns of their interviewers. 1) Why do you want this job? It's amazing how many people struggle to give sensible answers, which creates a dreadful impression – particularly if it's the opening question. Prepare your response, which needs to be confident...

Dr Steve Joy Recently, I’ve been playing around with a good structure for cover letters. This is because I seem to have been reading too many letters of meandering, pandering prose that lacks any sense of rigour or clarity of purpose. Yes, the job description for a lectureship contains a lot of elements, and I agree that there is a lot to say. But that’s no excuse just to drone on for page after page, retelling every single research activity to which you've ever been even remotely connected. Your hard-pressed readers will not thank you for what I have elsewhere called encyclopaedic fervour . They will appreciate brevity. So, below is a skeleton structure for a two-page cover letter, suitable for lectureships & similar positions. I don’t pretend that it’s a one-size-fits-all template, but when you adapt it, I urge you to keep in mind the relative proportions here. Note, for example, the balance between recounting past achievements & pointing forward to what you intend ...