Preparing for success in a UK job?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I appreciated the “preparing for success in a new job” thread a few days ago. I was wondering if it might be possible to have a post like this specifically for permanent jobs in the UK? I’ll start one in the UK next year and really feel totally in the dark about what it will be like and much of the info is geared toward US jobs.

Great question! Any readers with jobs in the UK have any helpful tips or insights?

Comments

[It's complicated]

I have recently started a permanent post in the UK in a Russell Group university. I'm in a very good medium-size department.
I would tell the OP that being in the dark is what I'm experiencing here. While my colleagues have been so far absolutely great, it is just not clear what the University expects from me. Coming from the US environment where your teaching load is fairly simple to understand (2/2, 3/3/ etc), here it is calculated via contact hours, but contact hours is interpreted in different ways: sometimes it includes, office hours, other times supervision, etc. I have also a grant, and no one, after several months, have been able to calculate the teaching buyout. Also, for promotion you need to do tons of admin job, and in a sense you have to fight to get the chance to do something that a different professional figure should do in the first place. From what I heard, this is common - and it seems that the institutions, with their heavy bureaucracy, will try to exploit you as much as possible.
The take-home message is: I don't have any advice because the system, to my understanding, is difficult to navigate also for senior scholars.

[Mandog]

I'm a lecturer in the UK and did my PhD in the USA. A couple of things...

1. Start thinking about applying for research grants. Your new uni will have a lot of resources about how to do this.

2. You have next to no authority over your modules/courses. You can't change deadlines, grant extensions, etc. There's no participation grades. I find this much better because it basically eliminates grade grubbing, and the system is much less corrupt than the US one.

3. As you know tenure is not on the table, but you will probably have a 3 year probation. Make sure to get concrete requirements for what you need to do to pass this.

4. Depending on your geographical location, there will be loads of philosophical events on relatively close every week. Make sure to take advantage of this.

[Humanati]

I’ve been working in the UK for 4-6 years at a well-regarded department where the research/admin/teaching split is a third each. If your situation is anything like mine, then:

Seeking out the good stuff:

1: Everything in the UK is a relatively short train journey away; keep an eye out for conferences and workshops to apply to via Philos-L and Philevents. They’re happening all the time, and they’re a lot of fun and great for networking and getting feedback on your work.

2: There are several grants available to fund workshops and conferences; e.g., the Mind association, Analysis’s bursaries, the society for applied philosophy. Get a feel for what these are and what they can be used for if you ever want to organize an event.

3: At some stage, you may find yourself starting to miss the sun and forgetting what it looked like. Thankfully, Europe is close by. Plan the occasional holiday there so you have something to look forward to that can help get you through what can often be a pretty gruelling semester.

4: Some admin roles are way under-loaded. Try to get a sense of which these are and avoid them like the plague. If you can get an admin role that has a reasonable number of estimated work hours associated with it (rare, but they exist), then your working life will be far more pleasant.

5: Try to establish good working relationships with your colleagues. It's not unlikely you'll be co-teaching, and you'll want to lean on their wisdom to help navigate you through the bureaucratic maze in your first few years. Be sure to pay it forward when new colleagues come in later on!

Avoiding/preparing for the bad stuff:

1: Always give yourself more time than you need for everything—way more time. Especially the later into your career that you get, and especially during the semester, when everything is squeezed into 11 weeks of madness. In general: leave yourself a lot of cushion room, because things will inevitably come up. Obviously, this isn’t bad advice for life more generally. But it’s essential for survival in the UK system, where last-minute urgent requests are always flying in your direction and there’s an obsession with customer…I mean, student…satisfaction. And where there are a million bureaucratic rules that you’ll have inevitably missed out on which will require you to put out fires in a panic at some point later on.

2: Enjoy your first two years while they last. The longer you’re there, the more heavy admin-roles you’ll likely be burdened with. You might be tempted to try to avoid them, but unfortunately, at a lot of places, taking on these responsibilities is effectively a requirement for any meaningful kind of promotion. (Speaking of which: check the promotion criteria at your University!)

3: Try to time your marking right if you have any control over when it comes in, so that it doesn’t hit you all at once like a ton of bricks. It’s not unusual to get *a lot* of marking in December/January and in May/June. It’s not like the US, where you often have PhD students helping you out with marking & tutorials as TAs. As a general rule: you’re up for doing almost everything when it comes to teaching—and there tends to be a lot more of it to do as a result of excessive bureaucracy.

4: If you want to be free of the excessive admin and teaching responsibilities, your best bet is to apply for big grants (e.g., AHRC). (Note: applying for and even securing these might even be a requirement for promotion…) This is a blessing and a curse. If you get it, you’re free! (By which I mean: free to be a philosopher rather than a glorified emailer and data manager.) If you don’t, then you’ve just wasted the precious little research time that you have writing about doing research rather than actually doing research.

5: Be ready to have very little autonomy over…pretty much everything. And to be answerable for it anyway! With great responsibility in UK academia comes zero power. You’ll likely have very little room for manoeuvre when it comes to how students on your modules are assessed, how many words of writing you can set for assignments, under what conditions extensions are granted, how many lectures and tutorials your module has, etc, etc. But if your student evals are sub-par or the customers are dissatisfied with your teaching in any way, you'll likely have to explain yourself anyway--usually in some routine form.

Sorry if the latter part of this post sounds overly negative. I’m just trying to be honest—really. I *wish* I’d known all of this when I started out.