Moving Up

Better Luck Next Time

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines An Academic in America On Stupidity, Part 2 Exactly how should we teach the 'digital natives'? First Person Polished Applications Nothing stunts civility like graduate-student insecurities and competition. gift. Career News Fish in the Shallows Stanley Fish would like professors to impart knowledge without viewpoint. Even if that were possible, it would be undesirable. gift. First Person The Welcome Mat On his first day on the job, an assistant professor is handed an unusual gift. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Jean Dowdall

Search consultants don't work for candidates. We work for institutions with positions to fill. But all of us have been called by applicants like you looking for advice about why you weren't selected in a previous search and how you can improve your chances the next time around.

Unfortunately, it's difficult for us to spend time with you individually. So I'd like to use this column to offer some advice that may help you generally.

Every administrative search has dozens of candidates who don't get the job. If you were one of them, you may have been fully qualified but simply lost out to someone who seemed a slightly better fit. But you may also have lost out because you didn't have the right skills and experiences, or because you were in a search that just didn't make sense for you.

Before you plunge right back into another one, think about what you can do in the coming year to make yourself a better candidate the next time around. Some of my suggestions have to do with building your experiences, and others with using better search strategies.

Do you have the necessary breadth of experience? Moving up the administrative career ladder usually involves taking on a broader range of responsibilities.

If you are a department head and you want to be dean, you'll be expected to oversee colleagues and issues in a range of fields, not just ones familiar to you. If you are a chemist and want to be a dean of science, you need to be able to understand the issues faced by the biology department (e.g., animal care). And if you want to be dean of arts and sciences, you need to be prepared to make tenure recommendations for faculty members in fields with which you may have no familiarity.

As you prepare yourself for that kind of step up, seek ways to serve on committees that give you multidisciplinary experience. Take on the responsibilities that make you familiar with faculty members in other fields, and do the work necessary to earn their respect. Once you have made some interdisciplinary connections, you might consider asking them to serve as references. And if you can find ways to collaborate with them, so much the better.

The same principles apply to administrators in nonacademic areas of the university. If you are a budget officer seeking to become a chief financial officer, you will probably also be overseeing offices like human resources, facilities, and security. You need to be able to demonstrate familiarity with the issues faced by each of them.

Likewise, if you are a director of residence life seeking to become a vice president for student affairs, you need to be familiar with student activities, the judicial system, career services, and the many other areas that may report to student affairs.

Have you maintained the appropriate academic and professional activities while serving as an administrator? Many administrative search committees expect a new dean or provost to have continued to teach, publish, and bring in grants, even while serving in a substantial administrative post. I don't see that expectation in other campus offices -- e.g., student affairs, finance, or development.

But in the academic arena, if you are seeking a position in an institution likely to have such expectations, you need to invest time in maintaining or building your credentials. A year or two without teaching or writing may not harm you much, but a protracted period of inactivity in those areas is likely to put you out of the running at certain institutions.

Do you have the necessary financial skills? The more senior the position, the more you are likely to be expected to be accountable for a budget.

That can mean advocating persuasively on behalf of your unit's budget, garnering new sources of money (grants, private donors, corporate partnerships), managing effectively the money that you have, digging out from under an inherited deficit, and dealing with deep midyear budget cuts.

If the promotion you seek has such expectations, find ways to get budget experience in your current job so that you can make the case that you're ready for the next level of responsibility.

Can you build strong relationships with external partners? Increasingly, institutions expect their leaders to form strong ties to people and groups outside of the university.

That used to mean fund-raising skills and experience, but increasingly it has a broader connotation. For administrators in finance, it may mean linking with neighboring institutions or similar colleges at a distance to form cooperative-buying organizations. For those in a state system, it may mean finding common ground with sister institutions for legislative lobbying purposes. For academic administrators, it may mean developing joint programs that capitalize on the strengths of each institution in a partnership.

Are you looking for the right positions? You can significantly increase your chances of success if you focus on searches for which you are a plausible candidate. That may sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many candidates overshoot.

If you're a department head, there's a chance that you might be selected in a provost search, but not a very strong chance. If you've been managing a budget of $2-million, you might be hired into a position that involves managing a $200-million budget, although it's unlikely.

But, you may think, if you take my advice and limit your expectations, you may never stretch toward your real goal, and every once in a while a candidate gets a job that looks like a huge leap. How do those people succeed?

I would speculate that the big leaps can be made under a few different circumstances:

• An institutional link: Some aspect of your background may link you so strongly to an institution or its mission that it balances out your limitations. For example, being an alumnus or a member of the institution's sponsoring religious group may give you a leg up. Or maybe you have strengths in an area that is a special niche or a special issue of the institution (e.g., strong financial management or fund-raising skills in an institution facing severe financial challenges). Such an affinity can allow a candidate to make a big leap in his or her career path.

• A personal relationship: If you have strong pre-existing ties with members of the search committee or the search consultant, they may be able to advocate on your behalf. That could win you an interview, but then you will be on your own to persuade others that you are ready for the job.

• Committee interest in talent as well as experience: Search committees sometimes decide to focus on what they perceive to be a candidate's inherent ability to do a job, even though he or she may have little direct experience. They may be willing to take a risk on an untested candidate, particularly if references whom the committee knows and trusts are prepared to make the case for the candidate's potential.

• Enormous personal charisma: Some candidates are so compelling in an interview that a search committee is persuaded to overlook their limitations. That isn't something you can prepare for, but it's a factor that can sometimes explain the remarkable leaps that occur from time to time.

Exceptions aside, most consultants will tell you that in almost every search, at least half the candidates lack even the basic qualifications for the position; you don't want to be in that part of the candidate pool.

Search consultants want to see strong candidates in our searches. Invest your time and energy now to make yourself ready for the searches you enter, and increase your odds of a better result.