The Early Career Blog

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 ...

Dr Steve Joy [Here is the original (slightly longer) version of my most recent piece for the Guardian Higher Education Network.] For many, interviews represent the stress of the job market par excellence. Yet it is a fact not often acknowledged that interviews are generally predictable, and you can prepare for them without feeling as if you are submitting to a dark ritual in the face of which passive acceptance is the only option. My aim in this piece is to point out some of the rationale behind an interview, and a few ideas for practical ways that you can prepare for one. Talk to others about their interview experiences I’m starting with this advice, because I’m frequently surprised by many people’s resistance to sharing interview experiences with their peers and colleagues – except, that is, for the odd comically embellished horror story. Gathering anecdotal evidence from others will help you to spot patterns and anticipate potentially tricky questions. So, make a point of asking...

Dr Steve Joy [This is a re-posting of my third piece for the Guardian Higher Education Network. You can access the original here .] Tradition dictates that the start of a new year is a fitting time to make plans and promises for the 12 months to come. Eat and drink less, exercise more, keep in touch with friends and family regularly – these are the stock fixtures on many a list of new year's resolutions, whether solemnly written out or only half-intended. This seasonal tendency towards a spot of healthy self-reflection could just as usefully be applied to your career and, specifically, whether your current career plan is still the right one for 2014 and beyond. Below I offer a list of 10 questions which you might find handy to prompt your reflection. The intent is not to lead you sententiously in one direction or another, nor is this one of those magazine-style quizzes where you add up your answers and find out at the end whether you and your career plan are a perfect match...

Dr Steve Joy This is a re-posting of the second piece I've written for the Guardian Higher Education Network . You can read the original piece here . The classic counterpart to a CV, cover letters are standard in almost all job applications. Academic cover letters are typically allowed to be longer than in other sectors, but this latitude comes with its own pitfalls. For one, many cover letters are written as if they were simply a retelling in full sentences of everything on the CV. But this makes no sense. Selectors will have skimmed through your CV already, and they don’t want to re-read it in prose form. Instead, approach your cover letter as a short essay. It needs to present a coherent, evidence-based response to one question above all: why would you be an excellent hire for this position? 1.        Start with a clear identity Consider this sentence: “My research interests include Thomas Mann, German Modernist literature, the body, the senses, F...

Dr Steve Joy This post is the working through of a personal bugbear - one which only riles me so much because I am fully aware that every piece of academic writing I have ever produced has fallen victim to the same syndrome. Even so. Do not as I do, but as I say. The pesky syndrome is this: woolly, imprecise phrases when describing the importance of one's research, i.e. its contribution or significance. It happens in cover letters, grant applications, articles and papers, research statements - it's reached pandemic proportions. Here's an excellent example of just such offensive wooliness: "There has not yet been any attempt to survey the senses in a more comprehensive fashion [in Thomas Mann's work]. This study aims to begin that (re)appraisal, which will hopefully give rise to a more nuanced conception of Mann’s bodies, and demonstrate that the corporeality of his fiction is at the core of the author’s aesthetic project." In the words of Mary Poppins: ...

Dr Steve Joy Many of the early career academics whom I’ve met over the years have talked, some almost wistfully, about a desire for more collaboration in their professional lives. Perhaps, in some cases, this was a strategically motivated wish – after all, there’s grant money to be won for interdisciplinary & inter-institutional projects – but I think that, for most, the desire was authentic. Yet I have frequently encountered the perception that, in the flooded academic job market, there isn’t room for too much collaboration. Amassing individual successes to go on the CV is what it’s about; selfish need must always trump collegial spirit – at least until one has snared that elusive permanent post. It’s difficult to see how to square these two sets of needs & wants – the collaborative versus the competitive impulses, or, put rather more cynically, optimism versus realism. But one thing which strikes to me is that we often struggle to be honest with ourselves about whether we ...

Dr Steve Joy This piece also appeared on the Guardian Higher Education Network . ***** Applications to academic jobs are notoriously convoluted, particularly to posts which combine teaching and research. Typically the CV will be one document among a groaning dossier that might well comprise a cover letter, a research statement, a teaching statement, sample courses or syllabi, and even (on occasion) a diversity statement. Where do you start? And with so many elements to worry about, how important is the CV? The answer is that it is very important. Many selection committee members say that the first document they look at is the CV. It shows that you're fundamentally eligible to do the advertised job, and it offers a run-down of your career to date. It's the scaffolding on to which the selectors can hang all of the other information contained elsewhere in your application. Yet, for a host of varied reasons, many people persist in writing truly awful CVs. What follows is my...