Article to Memorize (Excerpts)

...In year one and every year thereafter, read the job ads in your field, and track the predominant and emerging emphases of the listed jobs. Ask yourself how you can incorporate those into your own project, directly or indirectly. You don't have to slavishly follow trends, but you have to be familiar with them and be prepared to relate your own work to them in some way.

Have a beautifully organized and professional CV starting in your first year and in every subsequent year. When I was a young assistant professor, a senior colleague told me that her philosophy was to add one line a month to her CV. Set that same goal for yourself. As a junior graduate student, you may or may not be able to maintain that pace, but keep it in the back of your mind, and keep your eye out for opportunities that add lines to your CV at a brisk pace.

Plan out a publishing trajectory to ensure that you have at least one sole-authored refereed journal article before you defend your dissertation.

Attend national conferences annually.

Applying for a wide range of grants is one of the best intellectual exercises in which you can engage.

Avoid like the plague offers of publication in edited collections, which is where good publications go to die. If you have a piece of work that can pass muster as a publication, make sure that it goes into a refereed journal, the best one you can reasonably manage.

Cultivate a letter writer who is not from your Ph.D.-granting institution.

Most people who prevail on the market need at least two years to do so.

Devote as much time as it takes to writing out brief—and I do mean brief—summaries of your dissertation research, teaching techniques and philosophy, and your future publication plans. Practice delivering those brief summaries until they become second nature.

Make your application materials absolutely flawless. Take your ego out of the process and ask everyone you know to ruthlessly critique your CV, letter, teaching statement, and research statement. Prioritize the advice you receive from young faculty members who have recently been on the market, and from senior professors who have recently chaired a search committee.

--Karen Kelsky, "Graduate School Is a Means to a Job" My favorite comment:

Isn't this just reinforcing the much criticized claim that "there are good jobs out there for good people"? While much of this advice is very useful, I bristle at it slightly because it seems to suggest that job seekers aren't getting jobs because they haven't figured out how to mold themselves into what the market supposedly wants--not because of major structural problems in the market itself. I have a hard time believing that there is some secret formula that ensures success in academia. I know people who got jobs after doing nearly everything this article recommends, but I also know others who did everything "right" and still came up empty handed. On the other hand, I certainly did not do everything Dr. Kelsky suggests to prepare for my own job search but was nevertheless one of the extraordinarily lucky few to get a tt job my first year on the market.