So you want to work with undergrads: II and a half. Industry experience?

First, Daniel Promislow from the University of Georgia sent me a link to a book he co-authored on getting an academic biology job. I haven't read it, but a book will probably have more carefully-thought-out advice than a blog post.

Second, Chuck brought up an interesting point in the comments to my previous post:

I think it is both amusing and sad that having any kind of work experience in the fields which your students can expect to be employed is completely absent from this list.

It's a good point. In the searches I participated in, some (but not all) of the applicants for the jobs had experience either in industry or in government, but I don't think the search committees explicitly looked for practical experience as a criteria for choosing members of a short list. This may have been unusual - the result of a combination of the positions in question, the institution (private SLAC in most of the searches), and the times (ten years or more after oil & gas stopped booming... last time). But it might also have been a pure academic's ivory tower bias.

I think we did consider professional experience as a plus when it provided evidence of the ability to teach certain subjects. But the experience alone wasn't enough - the applicant needed to put it in some kind of context and demonstrate that he or she had some idea of how to take that experience and translate it into effective teaching. ("My three years working for Big Oil Company on exploration of fractured shales allowed me to see the practical side of my training in rock mechanics. I have developed a lab exercise for Structural Geology that teaches the basics of rock fracture while showing the importance of fluid flow - both gas and water - through cracks in rock." - Not a real quote, btw - I haven't read any applications for structural geology positions.) Industry or government experience could be used to support statements in the cover letter, the statement of teaching interests, or the statement of research interests.

Different arguments are going to be effective for different positions. (If you're being asked to teach a course in Ore Deposits, it shouldn't be difficult to explain why industry experience is important. If you're being hired to teaching Mineralogy, Petrology, and additional advanced and introductory courses that fit your interests and the department's needs, you could still make the case, but it won't be as obvious. You would need to be explicit - talk about how your experience used the skills students need to learn to work on all sorts of different rocks, and how you can teach the fundamentals using ore deposits as an example.)

And different institutions have different attitudes toward vocational training. Private liberal arts colleges, in particular, see themselves as educating citizens, not training geologists. Most of my students at my previous institution aren't geologists now - there are doctors, lawyers, nurses, investment bankers, teachers, and at least one owner of a catering company/bed & breakfast. Students majored in geology because they liked it, not because the major would guarantee them a good job. And that attitude allowed the department (and similar departments) to survive in the 90's, when geology jobs were scarce and geology departments were being shut down for lack of students. And courses for non-majors are a significant portion of the teaching load at those schools - and from the administration's point of view, the non-majors courses may be the only really important ones. A career-oriented argument ("I know what students need when they graduate") probably wouldn't be very effective in that context. An argument about connecting textbook knowledge with important issues in the real world, on the other hand, might work.

Small public colleges, on the other hand, tend to be more practical. A connection to jobs (and the skills necessary to get and keep jobs) would probably be a better sell. (Public liberal arts colleges are a bit of a hybrid. My department thinks practical experience is important, despite having hired me. We've got several people in the department with varied experiences outside the Ivory Tower. But there are plenty of other faculty across campus who will argue that extreme focus on a career is not the purpose of the institution. Any prospective faculty member would need to remember that general education is a big part of our mission, too.)

In all cases, applicants for jobs at undergraduate institutions should remember that they'll be teaching a lot of non-geologists. I've seen a lot of applications that don't seem aware of just how important non-majors are.