Preparing for the challenges of the job market

This post continues our new series, The Smart Scholar, which explores the attributes and qualities that make a successful academic applicant on the job market.

In my last blog post I provided tips on how to stay organized on the job market. Now that you have created your system to keep track of the positions you apply for, I want to focus on the challenges you may encounter when on the job market. Below I provide three challenges to consider and potential solutions as you prepare for your job hunt.

Determining the best institutional type

Before considering applying for positions it is important for you to consider the type of institution where you would like to work. For instance:

Do you want to work at a research intensive university where research productivity is important for faculty?
As an administrator do you want to work for a smaller liberal arts institution where you are able to have a lot of interactions with students?
Do you see yourself at a comprehensive state university that serves a large population of commuter and adult students?

As graduate students and novice professionals we are often taught about the importance of elite intensive research universities or those with a recognizable brand. However, these types of institutions are not the best fit for everyone. So before applying, contemplating the aforementioned questions can help you target your job search.

If you are interested in a university and are not sure of their designation, you can review the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education website to learn more about a university’s classification.

Succeeding in a competitive job market

One of the biggest challenges facing job candidates is the highly competitive job market. For faculty, the number of tenure-track positions is shrinking while the number of individuals vying for those positions has dramatically increased. Moreover, due to the limited number of administrator positions typically available, the candidate pool can be saturated. Although this is a challenge, I see this as an opportunity for you on the market. An important question to then consider is, “How do I differentiate myself from the competition?”

For those of you who are considering faculty opportunities you can differentiate yourself from the competition by:

Having a diverse research skill set where you could support doctoral students using a wide variety of methodologies in your field along with being able to teach various research methods courses.
During your doctoral experience, ensure that you purposefully develop a research agenda that is unique.

Why? Because on the job market you want to be able to demonstrate your scholarship is innovative and provides a new perspective the current department does not have—which positions you to become an authority in your discipline.

On the staff and administrative side you can differentiate yourself by being someone who can not only run initiatives but can develop initiatives that bring money to the university. Given the increased pressure to fundraise for administrators, having the ability to develop revenue generating programs and/or an ability to fundraise can set you apart from the competition.

Considering, “What is my next job after this?”

I know some of you may be wondering why I am asking about my next job, when you have not yet secured this job. However, I believe for faculty, staff, and administration candidates this question is critical. My approach to applying for a job is to consider how my new employment opportunity would position me for my next job.

For example, if your goal is to serve in an administrative capacity that is responsible for overseeing several different departments and supervising staff, but you have little supervisory experience, it may be beneficial for you to look for jobs that allow you to fill this gap. Additionally, gaining this experience ensures you become a viable candidate for your next position because you took the opportunity to gain relevant experience before you had to.

What other challenges do you believe are facing job candidates? Are there any challenges that you believe are unique to your discipline? Feel free to share with me on Twitter (@ramongoings) to continue the conversation!

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Author Bio: Dr. Ramon B. Goings is an assistant professor of educational leadership at Loyola University Maryland. His research examines gifted/high-achieving Black male academic success PreK-PhD, diversifying the teacher and school leader workforce, and the student experience and contributions of historically Black colleges and universities to the higher education landscape. As a writing coach and editor, Dr. Goings enjoys supporting the scholarly development of doctoral students and professors in higher education. For more information about Dr. Goings, please visit his website www.ramongoings.com and follow him on Twitter (@ramongoings).

Three tips for organizing your academic job search

This post continues our new series, The Smart Scholar, which explores the attributes and qualities that make a successful academic applicant.

In my two previous posts, I discussed the under-appreciated skills for scholars on the job market and two practices that are useful for underrepresented scholars in the academy. While these approaches will certainly support your ability to be an ideal candidate, it is equally important to explore how you manage multiple applications. Thus, for this post I would like to focus on the actual job search.

Below are three tips on how you can enhance your organizational and logistical approach to your search for your next academic position.

Keeping up with where jobs are posted and shared

Do you know where to find jobs for your discipline? If not, start by reaching out to your scholarly village and learn where you can find opportunities. Generally, academic positions are listed on university websites. However, because of the amount of work it takes to look at individual university websites, there are many job forums that cover jobs across disciplines:

Higher Ed Jobs
Chronicle Vitae
Inside Higher Ed

In addition to general job boards, there are discipline-specific venues to find jobs. For instance, in my field of education, job seekers can find positions on:

As an applicant you must allocate time to learn where jobs in your discipline are located and keep them bookmarked on your web browser.

Develop a tracking system to keep up with due dates

If you are open to a variety of opportunities, you may be applying to 10 or more positions during the job season. Given the quantity, it is vital that you have a tracking system to keep up with the various due dates. When I work with my dissertation clients who are on the job market I have them keep an Excel spreadsheet with headers (like the example below) in order to keep up with all of the requirements. Additionally, in order to ensure I did not miss a due date I would review the document every day.

Apply for jobs where you are a fit

When searching for jobs, conventional advice may be to apply for as many openings as possible so you have the greatest chance to secure a job. I would caution against this mantra when searching for academic positions. As a faculty member, I can observe that being on a search committee takes a lot of work. Search committees are responsible for:

Screening applications
Conducting phone and in-person interviews
Taking candidates on tours of the university and city
Deliberating to make a hiring recommendation

Given the amount of time involved in the search process, it is in your best interest as an applicant to apply to jobs that are a fit for your skillset as well as your career aspirations. I suggest taking this approach because if you are not a good fit for a position, the odds are your application will not proceed past application review. Due to the competitiveness of the job academic market, there are many applicants who are a direct fit for the position and meet all the criteria. This competitive market ultimately leads to search committees weeding out applications early in the process. My suggestion? As the applicant, your first job is to do your homework on a role and confidently apply only if you are an ideal candidate for a job.

Do you have a system you use to stay on top of your job search? If so, feel free to share it with me on Twitter (@ramongoings) as the academic community would love to hear about innovative ways to stay organized on your job hunt.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Six ways to optimize your research assistantship

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on making the most out of a research assistantship.

So you’re one of the lucky professors who’ve secured funding to hire a graduate research assistant. Finally! Somebody to help you hit fast-forward on the slow process of picking through archives, working on a digital project, or crunching data. But for some academics, especially those working outside of the sciences, the relationship between the professor, the graduate research assistant, and the job can be nebulous. Here are some tips to make sure everyone gets what they need from your research assistantship.

1. Be clear about your expectations, with yourself and your assistant.

This may be harder than it sounds, especially if your project is more open-ended in nature, or your department doesn’t set many guidelines for the relationship. Think about it ahead of time, and then talk it out with your assistant.

2. Decide on the skills you want them to come away with at the end of your time together.

In your initial meeting, discuss the experiences you think are possible to gain from the assistantship, and see which ones your assistant thinks would be more helpful for them to have under their belt when applying for grants and jobs in the future. Some of the work you need them to do will not be negotiable! But if there are choices they can make—”It would be better for me to be able to put ‘has built sites with Omeka’ than ‘fluent in Excel’ on my CV”—find out if you can tailor the work they’ll be doing, so that they come away with experience that helps them as well as you.

3. Find out where they are, and meet them there.

It’s not fair or helpful to set your assistant loose at the archives, when they have never used a finding aid. Talk about what their experiences with research have been; if they don’t have the level of skill you’d like, start them small, tell them how to do things, and help them work their way up.

4. Be transparent about the amount of time you expect the assistant to work, and what structure that work will take.

We’ve heard informal reports that some professors expect more work from their assistants than the number of hours per week that the job officially specifies. Try not to do this—and try not to expect assistants to do last-minute, “emergency” work on holidays or weekends. There may be a culture of exploitation of graduate students in the academy, but there are ways you can avoid being part of it.

5. Let them know how they’ll be evaluated.

Graduate assistantships can feel like a mentoring relationship, which they are, but they’re also a job, and your employee will want to know how they’re doing. Does your department have a structure you can use to evaluate the job performance of graduate research assistants? If so, let your assistant know what it is. If not, you might consider instituting an informal process—perhaps a chat in the middle of the assistantship to review how things are going.

6. Try to help them use the assistantship as a stepping stone.

Wherever possible, introduce them to archivists, colleagues, and staff; mention their work, and talk them up to help them get traction in your field. Recommend conferences, and if your field allows for it, collaborate on a publication, and give them fair credit.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Requesting letters of reference for alternative academic pursuits

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on requesting letters of reference for non-traditional pursuits.

Once you’ve decided you want to apply to alt-ac jobs—that is, not-quite officially academic jobs but those that still have a scholarly scope, such as at nonprofits, libraries, museums, newspapers, high schools, or in business—you may wonder whether you need to seek out reference letters at all. Some of these jobs (like a high school teacher at a private school) will certainly want you to have academic recommendations. Others may not require it, but may be open to receiving letters that attest to your readiness to step into the kinds of non-academic positions you want. If you can collect such letters now, while the people you worked with in grad school remember you best, do it.

Here’s how to go about getting the best alt-ac recommendation letters possible, whether you want to ask for a standard letter or one tailored to a particular position.

If it’s still early in your grad career, cultivate people outside of traditional academia who can speak to your good qualities.

Standard advice for preparing for a faculty job search is to spend your grad-school years seeking out collaborations and relationships with people who may be able to write letters for you when the time comes. On an alt-ac track, you should do the same, but it may be a little bit less obvious who to target.

Ideally, throughout your grad school years you’ll have sought out a variety of experiences:

Internships
One-semester assistantships
Tutoring positions

They can all help you develop skills you think you might like to use in an alt-ac career. Then, when it comes time to apply to jobs, think broadly about the kinds of letters you could request. Just because you aren’t applying to work in a library doesn’t mean that your supervisor from that year of work at the archives couldn’t speak about your organizational skills or your sense of initiative. And the fact that you had that experience in the first place shows that you are interested in a number of different work settings, and can function well outside of a traditional academic context.

If you’re already at the end of your years at school, and it’s too late for all that, consider asking friendly academic advisors for an alt-ac letter.

Some grad students or recent grads may be wary of requesting alt-ac letters from their academic advisors. This is because—unbelievably, considering the state of the academic job market!—there is prejudice in some departments against students who openly air their alt-ac ambitions. You may fear losing access to departmental resources if you’re out of the closet (so to speak) when it comes to the alt-ac path. And given the fact that a requirement to submit letters may not be as standard for alt-ac jobs as for faculty job searches, you may not want to risk it.

However, if you do think you can go ahead and ask advisors for a letter, do it. They may be well-placed to testify to the ineffable qualities you hope to translate into an alt-ac position. If you have been your advisor’s research assistant, he may have a great sense of your diligence, organization, and resourcefulness. If you were head TA for her big lecture course, you were effectively her employee, and you proved your own managerial skills, punctuality, and attention to detail.

As with any other letter you request, make sure to tell your academic advisor as much as you can about the position(s) you’re seeking.

They may be a little bit less confident of their ability to write a letter for a position that (unlike Assistant Professor) they’ve never held, so it will be good to be extra-specific in your request.

If you’re going for a particular job, include the job ad, and let them know just how you think your experiences will fit the bill, so they can hammer home the point in their letter. If you want to have a letter on hand for the future, tell them what kinds of jobs you might be seeking, and what qualities you want to highlight for employers. That should make the process easier on them, and result in a better letter for you.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Four hidden cost drivers around faculty promotion and tenure review

This post is part of a series on contemporary best practices for promotion and tenure reviews in higher education. For a fuller picture, take a look at our recently released free best practices checklist.

Processes for managing promotion and tenure reviews can eat up lots of time, as anyone who has ever been a candidate or reviewer can tell you. But inefficient processes can also consume scarce budget dollars in ways that may not be so obvious.

Here are the top four hidden costs of P&T review processes—and how to avoid them.

1. Producing hard copies of candidate files.

At most institutions, the costs of buying and servicing copiers and supplying toner and paper come out around three and half cents a printed page. Three and a half cents is not a lot, but number of printed pages used to execute the tenure and promotion review process in hard copy is often enormous.

At many institutions, each P&T candidate produces a dozen hard copies of their file. Each file contains hundreds of pages and dozens more are added by administrators and internal and external reviewers weighing in. Thirty candidates submitting 12 copies of files with 450 pages—plus 50 more pages added by reviewers—results in 180,00 pages and a cost of over $6,000 a year.

Paper-based processes produce a high cost for the environment as well as. Printing that many sheets of paper consumes more than 21 trees in each review cycle.

2. Conditioning, maintaining, and allocating campus space to archive files in hard copy

Storage space is another hidden cost of P&T processes based in paper. Keeping decades of old paper files requires spending money to heat, cool, and maintain the space used for storage.

More significantly, hard copy archiving prevents storage space from being considered in plans to alleviate the space crisis that is impacting most institutions. Not that long ago, colleges and universities simply built new buildings when more space was needed, but soaring construction costs and lack of funding for capital investments are prompting institutions to consider whether they are using every inch of existing space most efficiently. Increasingly, institutions are deciding to redeploy even spaces formerly used for storage to other, more pressing needs.\

Growing numbers of schools are shifting to digital archiving for P&T files in order to free up more square footage for space reallocation plans that can defer new capital expenditures. Adding to the attractiveness of digital archiving are other benefits, such as protection for data in the event of flooding, fires, and other disasters in the campus environment and making historical data on case outcomes readily available for analysis.

3. Scanning hard copies of files for archiving

Many institutions managing P&T files with paper decide to archive files digitally, which saves the cost of allocating, conditioning, and maintaining scarce campus space for file storage. But this approach adds the annual cost of scanning thousands of pages by hand. Whether you hire a third party to do this scanning (as many institutions do) or have your own staff carry out the work, this method takes up resources you could deploy for other priorities by having documents submitted in digital form.

4. Legal fees and settlements

Lawsuits related to tenure and promotion decisions are one of every administrators’ worst nightmares. Even when the institution wins, legal fees can quickly mount to six-figure sums.

Outcomes of P&T-related lawsuits often hinge on whether or not the university can document that the right steps were followed in the evaluation process and that candidates received clear communications about expectations and requirements. Having a system that documents all information centrally and allows leaders to access that documentation quickly and easily is critical.

The best cost-saving strategy, however, is focusing not on prevailing in lawsuits but preventing them. To do this, central and college-level administrators need to be able to see the status of all pending cases to identify any that have stalled and take action to ensure compliance with timelines of campus policies and labor bargaining agreements. Administrators also need to have instant access to information to address candidate questions about fairness and formal grievances, including the date of initiation and completion of each review step and the composition of each committee involved in evaluation.

Assess your school’s practices

Interested in bringing down the administrative cost and time involved in faculty promotion and tenure review at your institution? Use this free best practices checklist to see how your processes compare to what the most progressive colleges and universities are doing.

Five modern progressive steps to protect faculty promotion and tenure files

In an unexpected event, what will happen to your school’s faculty promotion and tenure records?

Most of us—fortunately—don’t walk around imagining worst case scenarios. But thinking about how you’ll protect your tenure and promotion files if the unexpected happens can prevent the review process from grinding to a halt and loss of critical information.

Here is a quick list of smart steps colleges and universities today take to minimize the losses of an unexpected disaster or breakdown.

Floods, fires, and other natural disasters can result in permanent loss of data if the information is stored only on your campus. Access to information can also be disrupted for extended periods of time if servers fail or if there’s only one person who really understands how to use your system and that person unexpectedly is out or leaves the institution.

Here are some key recommended principles to follow, within the modern academic technology ecosystem, to protect your promotion and tenure information, and the continuity of your faculty review processes:

Make sure processes have no single point of failure. Digital systems for file management should be easy enough to understand and use that any appropriate user on campus can pick up the work.
Use a system that provides anytime, anywhere access so work can continue if natural disasters, public health crises, or security issues interfere with people’s ability to get to campus.
Make sure data is copied in real time to a second database that can be promoted quickly if the first database fails.
Store information in data centers meeting best practice standards: located in low-risk floodplains, protected by automatic fire detection and suppression equipment, and equipped with generators able to provide backup power to the entire system.
Several times a day, backup data to a geographically separate data center that meets the same key standards.

Assess your school’s practices

Interested in improving security around faculty candidate materials, or a number of other aspects of promotion and tenure review at your institution? Use this free best practices checklist to see how your processes compare to what the most progressive colleges and universities are doing.

How to find grants (and other funding opportunities)

This post continues our series—begun last fall during faculty hiring “high season”—by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on where to search for and find grants.

Applying for grants and fellowships to cover the costs of your education and research can be an exhausting prospect. (Can you say “neverending deadlines”?) But if you land one funding opportunity (or more), the benefits are huge.

You can include the honor on your CV
You may get to meet and hobnob with new people outside of your institution who administer the award
You get money!

And once you’ve landed one grant, other grants tend to follow. So you should start building a record of success sooner, rather than later.

But how do you know which grants to apply for? Here are some ideas to get you started.

Tap the resources of your institution.

Find out if your home university has an existing system to help grad students apply for grants. Offices of Grants and Fellowships are an obvious place to look; if you’re unsure about this, ask faculty or staff in your program to direct you. The staff in an Office of Grants and Fellowships will help you figure out which institutional opportunities might fall in your wheelhouse.

A few opportunities may be available such as:

Small pots of money for professional development such as conference attendance
Short-term research fellowships to fund trips to archives or field sites
Year-long dissertation fellowships

See if your institution can help you think outside of the box.

Some scholars pursuing certain projects may be able to find money from granting agencies that aren’t giving their funds solely to academics. The organization, The non-profit, nationwide Foundation Center maintains several databases, some of which are targeted to non-profits and other agencies who want to apply for grants to support their institutions. For example, their Foundation Grants to Individuals database collects listings relevant to students, artists, and researchers. Access is paid, but your institution may have a subscription. Check with the people in the Office of Grants and Fellowships—they will be able to help you figure out how to target your search.

Read the acknowledgements.

When you’re reading a book, or looking at an article or paper, especially when it’s by an author whose work is similar to yours, check the acknowledgements section. The author will thank the funding agencies whose largesse made their research possible. Google the fellowship, and put it on your list if it feels like a good fit for you.

Don’t forget the bigwigs.

There are some organizations that will be top-of-mind for everyone in your field.

For scientists, the National Science Foundation.
For social scientists, the Social Science Research Council.
For social scientists and humanities scholars, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
For education researchers, the Spencer Foundation.
For scientists, artists, and historians, the Smithsonian Institution.

These may seem like long shots to you, but applying for big, prestigious grants is very good practice. If you score one, it’ll add luster to your CV and help you get more money in the future.

Hit up databases online.

A definitive universal database of fellowship and grant opportunities for grad students doesn’t exist. Here are a few good links to favorite and follow.

The NIH has a page listing non-NIH funding opportunities for researchers.
The website ProFellow, run independently by consultants, maintains a database aimed at a mix of undergrads, graduates, and professionals. You have to create a profile to browse.
PIVOT offers listings for a range of types of academic funding (not just for grad students).
Search the listings of H-Announce for notices of fellowships, grants, and prizes for humanities scholars.
The McNair Scholars page, run by the Department of Education, offers a list of opportunities, segmented by subject matter and specialization.

At the core, finding grants and other funding opportunities is a chore. But if you know where to start your search, it can make navigating the process a little easier.

Share with us on Facebook and Twitter where you look for and find grants.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Four common security threats to confidential promotion and tenure materials

Confidential evaluation letters, voting records, candidate rebuttal statements—faculty promotion and tenure cases contain highly sensitive information that must be made accessible to only the right parties during the review, and archived afterwards. But both longstanding and newer processes for managing materials can jeopardize the security of confidential information.

Here are four common ways institutions needlessly expose sensitive faculty information to the risk of access, intentionally or unintentionally, by people who aren’t supposed to view it—and how colleges and universities can guard against these risks.

1. Paper files stored with weak physical site security

Campus rooms that are used to hold hard copies of active and archived files often have very weak security. Spaces may be left open but unmonitored when someone steps out to use the restroom or get coffee. Rooms can be accidentally left unlocked for longer periods as a result of human error or during maintenance and cleaning. And institutions often many copies of keys to locked rooms in circulation. The network of personal relationships that exist on any campus can easily give rise to situations tempting people who aren’t supposed to access materials to do so.

In addition, paper-based review processes commonly require mailing hard copies of materials to external reviewers, at which point the security of the documents are outside the institution’s control entirely.

Most campus administrative buildings just aren’t designed to be high-security environments. Rather than beefing up physical site security, it is generally more effective to adopt secure digital measures for document access and archiving, especially in light of the efficiency gains also offered by technology-based solutions.

2. Electronic copies downloaded onto travel drives or individual reviewers’ hardware

Many institutions that would never consider allowing reviewers to carry off hard copies of sensitive materials make the switch to a digital system—which turns out to allow readers (or even, amazingly, to require them) to download files of sensitive information onto their personal computers. Or—even worse—the system involves the reader walking around with confidential candidate materials on travel drives.

These processes create enormous risks. Travel drives may accidentally fall into the wrong hands. Files downloaded onto computers may remain there for years to come and be viewed by anyone who gets access to those computers either legitimately or illegitimately.

To avoid these risks, forward-thinking modern institutions increasingly seek a secure technology with in-application viewing that allows users to quickly open and read files without downloading them onto their hard drives.

3. File protections dependent on (perfect) execution of too many steps

When institutions use standard file-sharing platforms to make materials accessible to reviewers, administrative staff must manually change user access permissions multiple times for each candidate across long, complex workflows—workflows that often vary from one department or college to another. Recusals of committee members or administrators, called for due to conflict of interest, pile on further potential points of failure.

With so many different users needing differing permissions to different documents at different times along different candidates’ reviews, it becomes nearly impossible to avoid security lapses produced by human error.

This is why, in order to accomplish a safer promotion and tenure practice throughout the institution, more and more colleges and universities are searching for a system that permits automated workflows nuanced enough for all permissions and recusals to be hardwired into the review process, at the beginning of each case.

4. Digital files stored in campus servers with weak security

In higher education as in other industries, cybersecurity breaches are on the rise. Information as important as that found in P&T records merit the highest levels of security. In many cases, though, institutions store their data on servers with protection that is insufficient and outdated.

While institutions can make the continuous investments to stay ahead of illicit data access, doing so is time consuming and expensive. Most colleges and universities today recognize they get a higher level of protection, at lower cost, by using a qualified third-party partner.

Assess your school’s practices

Interested in improving the security of faculty candidate materials, or a number of other aspects of promotion and tenure review at your institution? Use this free best practices checklist to see how your processes compare to what the most progressive colleges and universities are doing.

On faculty engagement, and making the Faculty Information System a reality

The Interfolio team is off to a racing start this year. We have been hard at work, listening to our clients’ direct feedback and keeping a pulse on the needs of faculty members and academic staff all across the world.

And now, as a result of continual conversation with our clients, filled with honest input and thoughtful suggestions, I’m proud to say Interfolio has reached a milestone that we’ve been working towards for some time—the first comprehensive technological approach to supporting scholars and their institutions.

In light of some pivotal technical developments recently rolled out to link our separate faculty technology modules, we now feel confident in saying that we offer what the higher education sector as a whole has long been saying (to industry, and to each other) that they need: the Interfolio Faculty Information System.

The role and value of the Faculty Information System

For some time now, it has been clear that colleges and universities are deeply in need of a practical, modern set of transformative capabilities to address a variety of widely felt tensions between the institution’s academic mission and its existential necessities.

This is a refrain we hear in our frequent conversations with a wide variety of institutional stakeholders, including chief academic officers, deans, academic technology leaders, institutional research directors, diversity and inclusion officers, university human resources management, and others on the administrative side of academic institutions.

In the absence of a widely adopted faculty-centric workflow and information system, critical transformative questions are left unanswered or can be answered only with much isolated, manual effort. These questions include:

How does the number, type, and productivity of faculty in our various departments compare to those of peer institutions?
Where are our measurable research strengths? Which approaches have been most successful in securing funded research?
What is the likely impact of the upcoming cycle of P&T cases on budget requirements?
At what points in the employment lifecycle are we experiencing the greatest losses of faculty from underrepresented groups? In what areas would additional or new efforts prove most impactful?

But perhaps even more poignantly, we have taken note of the abundant complaints from hundreds of thousands of active scholars and students about the technological status quo, indicating that the practical tasks required of them when pursuing their own academic careers seem perpetually to present logistical headaches and inconsistencies.

Virtually always, such complaints lead back to reveal an ill fit between universities’ chosen technology and the actual administrative processes being undertaken. Professional academics are fatigued from technical exercises in data and document management that they see as jumping through hoops, with only disparate and isolated benefits to them. And on the far end of the spectrum, some scholars have begun to express hostility and skepticism about the legitimacy of the data collection and use by the institutions that employ them.

Evolving into the Faculty Information System

The historic modular development method

Until recently, when an institution worked with Interfolio, they adopted one or more separate modules that focused on certain key clusters of need: running faculty searches, conducting tenure reviews, storing confidential letters for past graduates, formatting faculty activity data into reports (or CVs), and so on.

That was intentional, and the modular approach is not going away.

With the development of the separate modules, we were addressing the known, agreed-upon sources of pain we were hearing about from academic officers, departments, and staff. Even knowing the wider implications of what we were onto, we deliberately sought to help client institutions move off of paper, improve process efficiency, clarify and record communication, knit together reporting, and unify data into a central hub—because those were clear “wins.”

But for the reasons I’ve touched on above, all of these somewhat mechanical considerations fall under a shared vision that could transform how scholars and universities interact: strategic ways to pair the actions that the scholar takes throughout their career with the actions that academic leaders take to study the institution’s activity.

From product line to platform

Last month, we rolled out a unified platform interface that unites all of our modules within a single, consistent Interfolio environment:

And at the same time, we released some new functional connections to allow data and documents to flow between the modules (including, for example, between our faculty activity reporting module and the individual’s Dossier). These product developments lay the first brick on the road in a new direction for Interfolio—towards an integrated platform focused on the full scholarly and career lifecycle of faculty members.

Now an academic institution can account for the full path or trajectory of all its scholars, from graduate school through retirement, within an increasingly mature online environment that has been built in collaboration with higher education from day one.

Situating Interfolio within the higher education technology landscape

By focusing on the scholar and supporting their lifecycle events (e.g., reviews, promotions) and professional moments (e.g., biosketches, profiles, service work) in a central system, Interfolio can ease the individual and institutional burdens with transparency, equity, diversity, data collection and insight.

Unlike yesterday’s discrete technical tunnel vision, the Faculty Information System:

Is more faculty-focused than an applicant tracking system (ATS), supporting deep artifact review, referee letter support and complicated shared governance work-flows.
Is more committee-minded than a human resources information system (HRIS), allowing for deep understanding of the divots resulting from disparate inequitable processes emerging from differing departmental approaches.
Is more action- and impact-focused than just faculty activity reporting (FAR), allowing for data to support the numerous faculty lifecycle events and professional moments of an individual, while supporting the insight and governance needs of the modern institution.
Is more comprehensive than research information management (RIM) or current research information systems (CRIS), as it supports profile, teaching, service and professional data sets that comprehensively tell the whole story of the scholar, as well as the department, school, and institution.
Is focused on the lifelong compilation of the scholar’s story by providing an enduring, transferable Dossier.

This most recent development in Interfolio’s mission in higher education, the announcement of the Faculty Information System, is just the next step in a story with a lot of history already, and even more to come. Every day I’m inspired to see our seasoned team find new successes in offering the drivers of higher education—namely, scholars—a smart new category of technology worthy of their role.

Three under-appreciated skills for scholars seeking academic positions

Our new series, The Smart Scholar, explores the attributes and qualities that make a successful academic applicant.

Since competition on the academic job market shows no sign of letting up, there has been increased conversation about the skill sets and tools needed to secure a job. For those seeking faculty positions, there is the sage advice of ensuring that you have:

Published in respected refereed venues
Crafted a strong cover letter and CV that showcases your abilities
Established meaning relationship with colleagues in your discipline

While these skills are important, there are other less defined skills and knowledge that are critical to success in landing your perfect job.

Below are three under-appreciated skills that scholars seeking academic positions should cultivate.

Ability to communicate and collaborate across disciplines

As scholars we are trained to be discipline experts. Although possessing this depth is useful to ensure our research extends the knowledge in our respective fields, it is imperative that in today’s market, scholars have the ability to communicate and collaborate across disciplines. There are continuous instances of universities wanting to increase faculty’s ability to generate revenue through large-scale grants and contracts. Given this aim, scholars who can connect their research to other disciplines and communicate with faculty across various fields hold an advantage. Funders are increasingly looking for grant teams to be interdisciplinary in nature. Your ability to communicate this skill set to search committees may be the intangible skill that separates you from the pack.

Developing interpersonal communication skills

While your credentials, ability to publish, and flawless application documents may get you an interview, it will be your interpersonal communication skills that will give you an advantage over other applicants. Throughout interviews you are being assessed by a committee that has lingering in the back of their mind, “Could I work with this candidate for the next 30 years?” As a result, you want to be personable and develop rapport with search committee members and others who you meet across the university. While “likeability” is important to the employer, it should also be important to you. You should also gauge whether you could see yourself working with the interviewers as colleagues for the next 30 years.

Treat everyone with respect—you never know who your future boss will be

Academia is a small world. Given that scholars can move frequently for positions, it could be likely that at least one colleague at the institution you are applying to will know at least one colleague from your current institution. Thus, you want a reputation as someone who is dependable, respectful, and trustworthy. Part of this is ensuring that you treat everyone who you interact with, from a university president to a facilities worker, with respect. You never know who may eventually make a decision or have the ear of the decision maker that can impact your future job opportunities.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Author Bio: Dr. Ramon B. Goings is an assistant professor of educational leadership at Loyola University Maryland. His research examines gifted/high-achieving Black male academic success PreK-PhD, diversifying the teacher and school leader workforce, and the student experience and contributions of historically Black colleges and universities to the higher education landscape. For more information about Dr. Goings, please visit his website www.ramongoings.com and follow him on twitter (@ramongoings).