This is the fifth of five installments of “How to Get an Academic Job,” a new guide on the tenure-track search from our Career Talk columnists. Previously the series explored “The Interview Stage.”
Congratulations! You’ve received an academic job offer. That is no easy feat. Take a moment (or a few) to celebrate. Now you have a lot of happy and complicated decisions to make.
It is common to receive a verbal offer –– over the phone or via Zoom –– before the written one. We recommend you listen attentively on that call. Take notes and ask questions about anything that seems unclear or goes unmentioned, including:
- Salary and benefits.
- Contract terms.
- Teaching load and any course-release time in the first few years.
- Tenure timeline (if applicable).
- Any additional perks, such as aid with housing or child care.
You may learn some of that information during the interview process, but it’s not unusual to get to the offer stage and still have questions. And more will no doubt come to mind after you’ve hung up the phone.
We do not recommend accepting the offer in this first phone/Zoom call. By all means, express enthusiasm. But even if you are certain that you will accept, say that you need some time to think about the offer. If you haven’t yet physically visited the campus, it is reasonable to ask if the institution will fly you (and your partner) out as you make your decision. Then talk with loved ones, and very often with your adviser, about what you might want to negotiate.
How to Get an Academic Job
So what can I negotiate? It varies from one place to another. Clearly the wealthier the institution, and the higher-ranked the department, the more likely you are to bargain successfully. Among the terms you can usually negotiate:
- Salary
- Start date
- Research and travel funds
- Housing or child-care subsidies or assistance
- Release time from teaching, or sabbaticals
- Support with housing relocation
- Office or lab space
- Equipment purchases
- Support for helping your partner find a job
You will come across rather aggressively if you try to negotiate everything. Rather, focus on the two or three things that matter to you the most. What will you need to live and work comfortably and be successful in the position? It is better to articulate those key needs at this stage, rather than be vague and hope they will meet your expectations. For example, it is less effective to ask, “Is it possible to raise the salary a bit?” than to say, “Would an $80,000 salary be feasible?”
The most important skill in negotiation is to know when to stop talking. Many people are nervous about negotiating, and their unease sometimes manifests as an impulse to justify the request in great detail. But once you have made your ask, the best thing to do is to simply be quiet and allow the other person to respond.
Of course, negotiation isn’t mandatory. If you are genuinely happy with the offer, then it is OK to accept it as is (after taking some time to think about it). But you are unlikely to ever have this kind of bargaining power with your institution again, so if there is anything you do want, this is the time to ask. Most institutions expect some negotiation. Don’t let fear of having the offer withdrawn (which is highly unlikely on the basis of reasonable requests) prevent you from requesting what you need to succeed on the job.
Finally, it is important to note that some of this changes if the position is unionized. If that’s the case, some aspects of your offer, such as salary, may be set by the collective bargaining agreement and therefore are not subject to negotiation.
You Accepted the Offer. What Happens Next?
Your first step is probably to move. If you were granted relocation assistance, don’t hesitate to take advantage of it. The institution may offer you on-campus faculty housing for the first year, which can take some of the stress out of moving to a city or state with which you are unfamiliar. Your new employer also may have a relationship with particular moving companies. Alternatively, you may simply be given a budget, in which case you are probably expected to figure it out on your own. Either way, allow yourself a decent amount of time to get oriented in your new hometown before classes begin.
If your new position is on the tenure track, it’s not too soon to start building your tenure file. In fact, we recommend you take the following steps immediately:
- Start with the date on which you hope to earn tenure, and work backward to make a plan –– including a timeline –– for how to achieve it.
- If you have questions about the tenure expectations of your department and institution, get clarity on them as soon as possible.
- If people in your department have gone through the tenure process recently, take them out for coffee in the first couple weeks of the semester and ask about their experiences.
Start building relationships early. This is vital for assistant professors who will eventually go up for tenure. But relationships may be even more important if the role you’ve accepted is not on the tenure track. If it is a temporary position, such as a visiting assistant professor role or a postdoc, then you know that you’re going to need to go back on the academic job market and/or investigate other job markets, probably within two or three years. It is totally fine to give yourself a grace period of six to twelve months (depending on the length of your position) to not think about job hunting, but even during that period, you should concentrate on meeting new people and building relationships. If you are in a nontenure-track, full-time, renewable post, then those relationships are also vital, as they may support the renewal of your contract.
Here are a few tips for building relationships on your new campus:
- Make it a priority to attend department talks and meetings in person. If your schedule permits, plan on staying a few minutes afterward to talk to your colleagues. Relationships are built during small interactions.
- Invite different colleagues to coffee every week or two for your first couple of semesters. Be curious about their work and ask questions about their experiences on the campus.
- Get to know your department’s administrators and (this should go without saying but bears repeating) treat them well. They can be invaluable fonts of knowledge. Also get to know the staff members who run the teaching and faculty-development center(s).
- Attend events in other departments that are related to your research or teaching interests –– again, in person if possible. There may be resources available in the wider campus ecosystem that you might not otherwise learn about.
Job-Search Resources
What follows is a brief list of books and online sources on the academic hiring process that we recommend for job seekers.
- The Academic Job Search Handbook. Full disclosure: One of us (Furlong) co-wrote the most recent edition of this handbook, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2016. While some things about the faculty job market have changed since then, the book remains full of evergreen advice on creating application documents, interviewing, and negotiating.
- In the past decade, universities have invested heavily in additional career support for their doctoral students. Check with your campus career center or graduate dean’s office for assistance with your faculty job search.
- Faculty members and administrators looking for best practices in helping doctoral students prepare to be faculty members might join the Graduate Career Consortium, a professional organization focused on career development for graduate students and postdocs.
- If you feel like you aren’t getting enough help on the job market from your department, or are just feeling overwhelmed by the process, you can turn for help to career sites such as The Versatile Ph.D, to which your university may have a subscription, and/or private career counselors such as The Professor Is In, Fatimah Williams, From Ph.D. to Life, and Katina Rogers.
- Academic Jobs Wiki. A crowd-sourced site, it remains the go-to place to find up-to-date information on job searches by field.
- Our articles on job hunting in The Chronicle. You can find them here or here, offering advice on cover letters, CVs, résumés, industry job searches, and more.
- And for those of you thinking about leaving academe and moving into industry: Spend some time on either ImaginePhD (humanities and social sciences) or MyIDP (STEMM) to start thinking about the kinds of nonfaculty jobs you’re interested in. If you’re a faculty member, don’t let the fact that the tools on those sites were developed for doctoral students and postdocs stop you from using them. It’s a vast world of possibility out there.
Going on the academic job market is very tough. Throughout this guide, we have advocated that you protect your mental health and exercise whatever agency you can within this hypercompetitive system. Success on the tenure-track market is not about perfection. Nor is it about being bland and inoffensive. It’s about crafting a narrative that helps you distinguish yourself for the right reasons. That takes hard work –– but luck also plays an important role. Focus on the things you can change but recognize that there are many factors you simply can’t control.
Above all, remember: Your worth as a human being is not defined by your success on the academic job market. We wish you the very best of luck.
