Tips for applying to US/UK jobs from abroad?

In our most recent "ask a search-committee member" thread, an academic abroad writes:

Perhaps someone can say a bit more about applications from those who have made a career abroad and are now applying in the US or UK? Our career trajectories tend to look a bit different, and sometimes the whole AOS/AOC thing doesn't apply as straightforwardly either. In some countries, lots of publications come through edited volumes, not journals, and sometimes we have publications in foreign languages.

Moreover, for those whose semesters are structured differently, or for universities in which student evals play less of a role, we might have different teaching materials. For example, my seminars meet only once/week over the course of 15 weeks...The focus here also tends to be on reading less and engaging more intensively with the material. This means my courses are structured differently, and my syllabi look different.

Where I'm at, institutions also place more emphasis on research-based teaching and less on "intro" or survey courses, since those tend to be taught as lectures by the full professors. We aren't in a liberal arts system either, so there are few "gen ed" courses and students to be offered. It's not that I can't teach such classes. (In fact, I love teaching these kinds of courses.) But there is little opportunity for me to do so.

Likewise, it seems like valuable application material space is often spent explaining these differences - and/or why one has made one's career abroad and why one wants to enter/return (in)to the US academic system, when it seems to me that space could be better spent motivating why one is an awesome scholar and a potentially good future colleague.

International scholars can bring lots of really good things to the table and can be really great additions to a department, but I feel like they are often overlooked unless they are senior scholars who have already made their careers, or unless they attended a US/UK institution and went straight from there to the US/UK job market.

Are departments less inclined to give interviews to international junior and mid-career scholars? Any tips for successful applications?

Recent grad then seconded the query, writing:

I'd also like to hear more about how applicants who are applying from positions abroad (but who have phd's from a US/UK institution) are viewed by search committees. I've applied to a few things overseas this year, mainly in Southeast Asia, and the possibility has crossed my mind that taking a position there could hurt my prospects in the US/UK market, especially for US teaching schools.

These are really good questions, and to be frank, I'm not sure what the answers are. It would be great to hear from people who have served on search committees. However, to speculate a bit my guess is that--for better or worse--the kinds of differences 'an academic abroad' writes about may indeed place candidates from abroad at a disadvantage in the US market...at least for jobs at teaching-focused institutions, if not R1's. Allow me to explain, and then offer up a few suggestions for how, if this is indeed the case, candidates might best grapple with it.

Suppose you're a candidate like 'academic abroad' and your primary teaching experience is research-focused upper-division courses that meet once per week. Suppose further that all of your syllabi are designed for that type of course. Finally, suppose you are applying to a teaching-focused job in the US with a 4/4 teaching load, most of which are intro-level courses that meet two to three time a week. Set aside for the moment the normative question of what search committees should care about for the time being. Instead, focus on what they are likely to care about in point of fact. At least offhand, search-committees plausibly care--for obvious reasons--about how well-prepared you look for the job you are applying to at their university. If, coming from abroad, you have little to no experience teaching the types of courses their institution offers, then it is not hard to imagine a search committee member wondering how good of a fit the candidate might be for their institution. Although as 'an academic abroad' points out, a candidate from a very different system abroad may be able to teach intro courses in a US-like environment, the problem from the search-committee side of things is that it is hard to know how to evaluate this, since by hypothesis the candidate in question doesn't have a track record in the kind of environment at issue. Further, as someone who had to entirely revamp my pedagogy to adjust successfully to the environment I am now in, it is also not hard to imagine search committee members thinking that adjusting to their environment may be very difficult for a person coming from a very different environment. For these reasons--although, again, I am just speculating--it does not seem implausible to me that candidates from abroad may be at a significant disadvantage. 

Assuming this is right--for better or for worse--what should job-candidates take away from this? One possible takeaway is that candidates from abroad may be best-served by trying to put together 'US-type' teaching materials--syllabi and other teaching documents (including a teaching statement) that show that the candidate has thought quite a bit about how they would teach the kinds of classes offered at the university they are applying to. Conversely, I suspect it may be a bad idea to "explain the differences" between the system one currently teaches in abroad compared to the job one is applying to. Why? Well, my guess is that, if anything, this might only serve to highlight the appearance that one is a "bad fit" for the job one is applying to (viz. "Wow," a search-committee member might think, "the system this candidate teaches in is so far different than ours, I have no idea how their teaching style could ever translate here"). In other words, from a purely "optical" standpoint, my guess is that candidates from abroad may be better off not drawing attention to differences between their background abroad and the job they are applying to--but rather, instead, trying to appear throughout one's dossier that one is well-prepared for the job one is applying to (again, via 'US-type' syllabi, teaching methods, etc.). Although this might seem unfair--that one should have to do so much extra work to appear like a good fit for US jobs--my sense, again, is that for better or for worse this is just how job-markets operate in general (not just in academia): the most competitive candidates are likely to be those who look the part for the job they are applying to. If this is right, it may suck, and it may be unfair--but it still may be what the wise job-candidate needs to do.

Finally, although I'm not sure, one other possible takeaway is that candidates like 'recent grad' may indeed be taking a real risk if they take some temporary job(s) abroad. I have some experience with a similar phenomenon in the US: I found out the hard way that 'trajectory' matters. Coming out of grad school, I got interviews at R1's. However, as soon as I took a visiting position at a teaching-focused institution, my R1 interviews dried up. When I asked around, the answer I got was, "You look more like a candidate for teaching jobs now." In other words, fair or not, my sense once again is that, generally speaking, this is the reality: the kinds of jobs one takes may serve to partly define the kinds of jobs one is most competitive for in the future.

Still, perhaps I am wrong about all of this. What do search-committee members think? Are candidates from abroad at any disadvantage due to differences in their background and experience? If so, what can such candidates do to compensate?

Comments

[Search committee member]

This is a totally different kind of issue, but bear in mind that lots of departments at not-very-well-resourced state universities (and maybe SLACs, I don't know) have to pay for searches out of their departmental budgets. So if you're in SE Asia - or even Europe - another thing to consider is that you're way more expensive to fly out than a US candidate (especially if the department is decent and wants to do you a solid and give you an extra day or two to recover from jet lag before job talk). So if at all possible, you might want to arrange to be in the US for as much of January/February as you can, and let search committees know that in your cover letters. It sucks, and it's not fair, but with tons of good candidates, that can be a tie-breaker between people you like roughly equally on first pass.

[Recent Grad]

I know this isn't applicable to the OP, but one thing I'd like to hear addressed (if anyone can speak to this) is how search committees view teaching experience in the equivalent of lower-level or general education courses at foreign institutions. I know that not all overseas positions provide opportunities to teach these sorts of courses, but some do. Even if one had the opportunity to gain this sort of experience overseas, is there a presumption that it isn't applicable to US institutions because of differences in institutional or classroom culture?

[Amanda]

My impression is, that if one's best shot on the job market is teaching institutions (i.e. you are not fancy) then it is bad idea to take a postdoc anywhere that is not the US or Canada. Typically those postdocs involve little teaching, and if they do involve teaching it is very different than US schools. It may not be fair, but I think this is the way it is. (there might be some exceptions, of course.)

On the other hand, if you are looking for research jobs, the key will be having a lot of high quality publications in English. And by "high quality" I mean publications perceived as high quality within the US research school system. So even if in your home country it is common to have publications in anthologies, and in your own language, this is not a good strategy if your goal is to have a job in the US. If you want a job in country X, alas, you must work with in country X's system.

At my PhD institution (a pretty wealthy R1) we didn't interview someone once because the cost of flying them overseas for an interview was too much. (it would have meant we could have only flown out 3 instead of 4). So if you have means of funding your flyout, you might want to casually mention that in the cover letter, ie. "I know that finances can be an issue, so I just wanted to mention..."

[Amanda]

Lastly, I should add some schools cannot are not legally allowed to have candidates fund their own flyout, but this varies by institution.

[Mike Titelbaum]

I'll have to think about the more substantive questions here, but here's a first step that I'm surprised how often people skip: If you have publications on your CV in foreign languages, translate the titles into English!

[Lauren]

I don’t know that I have substantive advice to offer more broadly, but I also think that, for teaching schools (and by this I mean all schools where teaching is an important component of hiring/tenure decisions, even if teaching and research are equally important), how you talk about your teaching methods would matter. If, for example, you have only taught majors, the ways of engaging students might be quite different for teaching a gen ed philosophy class. There also may be cultural differences in teaching style, too; I once observed a teaching demo that my colleagues who had spent time in a European department described as a decent European lecture, before concluding that it would never work with our students here. So if you do get a fly out, it is important to think about how the student populations and institutional expectations might be different than in your current environment. Signaling that you understand that and have tools to address it might go a long way in making you a more attractive candidate.