From Semester Prep to Career Prep: Questions to Prompt Faculty Reflection
It’s no secret that faculty preparing for promotion, the job market, or other career advancement opportunities greatly benefit from making time for regular reflection & goal setting.
In this blog post, I’m kicking off a new mini-series here On The Teaching Track called “From Classroom to Career.” These posts will prompt you to take stock of your career goals and commitments as you navigate your professional life, inside and outside of the classroom.
At the beginning of any new semester, I like to take stock of my current and future service commitments, key areas for growth or professional development, & how I plan to document my impact. If you’re looking to jumpstart your own career reflection, I encourage you to work through these questions on your own. It can also be helpful to share and discuss these with trusted colleagues or mentors.
Service Commitments
Service in support of teaching is a significant part of my career, and I would like to write more about it on this blog. Unsurprisingly, I’m not a fan of the service shaming that I often see among faculty. While I can understand where these faculty members are coming from, I work hard to ensure that my service commitments remain in close alignment with my values and other professional obligations. There is a significant difference between this and accepting service opportunities solely for the sake of “seeing and being seen.” It can also be easy to become overwhelmed and accept too many service opportunities than is reasonable or expected for a single semester or academic year. After all, we don’t want to disappoint our department chairs and the colleagues who depend on us.
The following questions help me take stock of my current commitments at the start of the year, which in turn enables me to be more proactive about what to say yes or no to as new opportunities present themselves.
How do my service commitments align with and/or fuel my other professional obligations?
What do or will I do to ensure that my service commitments don’t distract from or undermine my other professional obligations?
What is my service philosophy or focus for the upcoming semester or year?
How do I plan to show up, contribute to, and be present in these spaces?
Skill Set
No matter how long you have been teaching, facilitating, or leading, we all have room for growth. If you think you’re the exception, you might benefit from some prolonged reflection ☺︎.
What skill sets do I want or need to cultivate this year to advance my career?
What weaknesses do I want to neutralize? This is not an uncommon career reflection question, but it feels like a negative way of framing an otherwise important question. Instead, I like asking myself what areas or competencies I want to build greater confidence in.
Impact
Our CVs tell important stories about our values, purpose, and expertise. I caution faculty from saying yes to opportunities solely because they want to add more lines and pages to their CV. Instead of cataloging random, loosely-connected activities, consider the broader impact you want to make.
How will I quantify and document my impact and not fall into the trap of collecting CV lines just for the sake of CV lines?
How will I tell the story of my impact across my professional materials and platforms? (dossier, website, LinkedIn, etc.)
Looking for More Teaching-Related Career Management Advice?
I’ll continue to post in this series over this academic year. In the meantime, if you are teaching faculty (or administrators who support NTT) seeking additional career management guidance, BYTE is here to help. BYTE fuses teaching development with career management, and we offer workshops, retreats, and keynotes that can be tailored to your unique institutional context. To learn more, visit us at www.brandingyourteachingexcellence.com.
As always, thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of my content or have ideas for collaboration, please contact me at gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.
