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[ace777]

Hi,

My field is English literature and I'm considering moving to the UK, where I'd first do a post-doc.  I'm wondering what the job market is like for English PhDs there, after a post-doc.  I'm aware that it's more competitive than the US, but is there at least a decent number of lectureships that open up?  Thinking of worst case scenarios, are there full-time adjunct positions available?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[foolstop]

Hey Ace,

I cant give you any info on the availability, really; the numbers would be offset in any case given that the country is about the size of a single State.  I have been monitoring the situation in my field, and applied to several Lecturer positions however.  They operate a weekly emailing service that's handy.  Titles are confusing.  Also, the time frame is very different than in the US (as far as I can tell, they operate with a much shorter lead time to appointment). 

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/

[scotia]

I am not in English but, yes, the system in the UK is different to that in the US and there are several threads on the subject if you hunt through this board. There is no interview season - positions are advertised as they need to be filled and the job market operates year round. The UK is small compared to the US, but is a lot bigger than Delaware.  Be very careful not to refer to the UK as 'the country' - it is made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and you risk offending the residents of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland if you suggest the UK is a single country (the English don't seem to notice).  The UK has over 100 universities. This figure does not include the universities with split sites, nor does it include university sector colleges, some of which are trying to obtain university status.

I have not seen any evidence of an adjunct system in the UK. It is sometimes possible to get work as a seminar leader or tutor, but I have never heard of these being full-time posts and, certainly in my (social science) department, the work usually goes to PhD students.

[sandgrounder]

Scotia's right - there aren't really full-time adjunct positions. British universities tend to employ hourly paid teachers to do seminar teaching etc and they often tend to be PhD students. If you are based in an area with a few universities, it might be just possible to pick up enough work between them to survive but it's a horrible way to live. There are occasionally teaching fellow posts advertised but these tend to be poorly paid and with heavy teaching loads.

[foolstop]

Scotia is bang-on about referring the UK as "a" country, of course.  My point was purely rhetorical; I was trying to indicate the relative size of the job market.  It gets confusing, in any case, when one is a Scot teaching English Lit in the US. One tends to forget this kind of provincialism, occasionally even when football and religion are involved.  Most folk think we're from Australia, or Texas, anyway, and I'm fine with that

d:)

[ace777]

Thank you for replying.  This was very helpful already.  It's hard to know nothing about a system.

The reason I was asking about adjunct positions is because that's what people tend to do in the U.S. if they don't get a job as an assistant professor.  It doesn't pay well (high school teaching pays much better), but a lot of people adjunct so that they can credibly continue applying to permanent positions (i.e. they have institutional letterhead to print application letters on).  So if by the end of the post-doc I didn't get a job as a lecturer, that'd be it?  My academic career would be over?  I'm assuming it would be very odd to apply for academic positions without any institutional affiliation whatsoever.   

[ace777]

Or maybe in the UK people do sometimes get jobs as lecturers after giving up institutional affiliations.  I just found an online source from the UK that says:

in the current climate, it is very common for scholars to finish PhDs and take 1-3 years to build enough publications to make short-lists – during which time they have to subsist on part-time teaching or non-academic work.

Do you think people can realistically get jobs as lecturers after having to do non-academic work?

[foolstop]

I'd say, and again its sort of a guess, that it would be much more acceptable in the UK to be non-affiliated for a period.  The Academy is not such an Industry, in my experience, and the real-world &c, is likely, perhaps, to be favourably received.  The students, if not the Faculty, tend to be much more skeptical, for better or worse. 

[empyrean_aisles]

My field is English literature <snip> I'm wondering what the job market is like for English PhDs there, after a post-doc.  I'm aware that it's more competitive than the US, but is there at least a decent number of lectureships that open up?

To answer the first part of the OP's question: English lit is a very, very difficult field to get a lectureship in at the moment. It is better in language/linguistics, and better still in film & media studies, but if you are a straight-down-the-line lit person then, in my humble opinion, you will have a much better chance of finding a permanent post in the US. Yes, of course it's a highly competitive field in the US as well, but as the US is so much bigger than the UK there are more jobs out there, and therefore more that will fit your qualifications and research areas. There have been very, very few posts coming up at entry-level lecturer grade for English at all in the past few years. This is probably an RAE-related malaise but, to tell the truth, I can't see it changing until at least a few years after the RAE (as depts will have used their new-hire budgets up on higher-level hires so as to scoop senior scholars with high quality publication lists).

Sorry if this is depressing news, but if you have the right passport to live and work in the US, for heavens sake take advantage of the larger number of jobs being advertised in English! Many of us in the UK can only dream about being able to work there.