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Job-Market Reporting Thread (2025-26)
Job-Market Discussion Thread (2025-26)

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Trends in areas sought on the job market?

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

Is it possible to create a thread on changes in what areas are being sought in the job market?

I can't find dedicated places discussing this issue, but it seems really important to me. LEMM hiring looks borderline dead, at least for people doing armchair (i.e. non-science-based), non-social-oriented LEMM. But isn't that what most people are trained in? And isn't that what interests most people who go on to do philosophy in the first place?

There's a lot of discussion about publications, prestige, etc., but I think we need more discussion about area. IMO it just seems like hiring in the most popular areas of philosophy is close to 0. Given that so many graduate students get into philosophy precisely to work in these areas, we need to start a conversation about it. Moreover, it would be helpful to discuss what things, if any, someone with that background could do to change how they are perceived. I worry that publishing a single paper on hotter topics just makes one look like they're "selling out" and not seriously interested, at least if one already has several publications on more traditional LEMM.

Another reader submitted the following reply:

I think it is terrible difficult to "play the market" with respect to areas of specialization. The problem is that in the USA, for example, it can take 5 to 6 years to get a PhD. So, what was hot when you enter your PhD will probably be saturated by the time you go on the market. Right now – this year … and maybe a few more – philosophy of digital technologies is super hot. There are many many jobs (especially in Europe). But soon every university that is going to hire someone in this area will have hired their person. So there will not be any more job openings for a long time. No worries though … a new area will be hot. The important thing is to do interesting work, and get a strong education (which includes the sort of mentoring you can get at the elite universities). Whatever successes I have had have been due to my publishing … place articles in good journals. And write on interesting topics.

This broadly right to me when it comes to particular research areas or "hot topics." However, I think it's also worth noting that some job market trends have been pretty consistent over time with respect to AOS's (see here and below):

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In terms of what someone like the OP can do now to improve their candidacy (given that it seems like they work in LEMM), I guess I sort of do wonder whether it might help them to work on a hot topic. Then again, who knows? As I've noted before, I also often wonder whether working on currently-hot topics can backfire, as if one works on similar topics as most other candidates, then it may be hard to stand out in a crowded field. So, maybe the above respondent is right and the best one can do is to simply do good work. 

What do you all think? Are there particular trends on what is sought on the market that are worth bearing in mind or planning for? And what, if anything, should a LEMMing do to best deal with the fact that hiring in armchair LEMM fields seems to be moribund?

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11 responses to “Trends in areas sought on the job market?”

  1. techy but not AI

    I agree with the quoted reply above: it’s important to do interesting philosophy. It may also be a good idea to be open minded about 1) the fact that a good scholar needs to constantly learn new things, and 2) some of those things may be outside of your subfield at times.
    Take phil of AI/data/tech for example. Very few people who currently work in this area started out as trained in this area. Many come from “armchair” fields like ethics/political phil or phil of mind/language. You can sometimes tell by reading their papers– many are essentially applying what’s “old news” in those other fields to this new context and are very light on the technology. IMO, this makes the phil of AI subfield much more interesting, because you get to see these experts, who are trained in completely different traditions, coming together, doing translational work, for the same application context. Many also hold on to their initial expertise in LEMM and I think that makes them better overall candidates (for teaching reasons).
    Yes, it does require people to pick up on a bunch of techy stuff on their own and they sometimes get it wrong in embarrassing ways. But I’ve seen applied philosophers making some claim about LEMM which they clearly just picked up and got wrong in embarrassing ways also.

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  2. Just an observation

    Not sure this is relevant, but is it others’ experience that most people are trained in LEMM, and LEMM is what interests most who go into philosophy in the first place?
    If so, then yes, there is a HUGE mismatch with where the jobs are.

    Reply
  3. Bill Vanderburgh

    I worry that trying to predict future hiring trends is near impossible since who will retire (and be replaced), what enrollment trends will be, what departments and deans will think is desirable in five years, etc., are things mostly unknown to the relevant decision makers right now, too. They’ll decide four years from now what they want to hire five years from now. Probably, basing your choice of AOS on what areas are hot right now is also a mistake since those trends may be ephemeral.
    Trying to get to the end of PhD is a risky proposition to begin with. If you aren’t working on something you really enjoy, have some ability in, and can make a new contribution to, you probably aren’t going to have the motivation to finish. Or the publications and letters of recommendation to get a permanent job. (Of course, even if you do finish, with good pubs and letters, odds are still not great that you’ll get a perm job.)
    A good plan, I think, is to develop a strong AOC, almost a second AOS, something that is different enough that it makes you noticeably broad while still being strong. That second area could be something highly in demand for teaching or a “hot topic”. If it is sufficiently different than your main AOS, that will give you some flexibility in what jobs you can apply to, and some extra cachet with departments. Another good idea, if you can manage it, is adding an AOC in an area nearly every department has teaching needs in even if they aren’t hiring in that area (logic, ethics, feminism, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, applied ethics, non-western, etc.). (For me, that combo was philosophy of science + early modern + logic.)
    Caveat: Claiming too many AOSs and AOCs fresh out of grad school looks suspicious to many hiring departments. Ideally you should have strong evidence of experience in anything you claim as an AOS or AOC.
    BTW, in the graph, aren’t Core and Open jobs often going to LEMM folks?

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  4. social political

    “But isn’t that what most people are trained in? And isn’t that what interests most people who go on to do philosophy in the first place?”
    I think we need a bit more empirical evidence on these possibilities.
    That being said, as a social and political philosopher, I think LEMM is super interesting in the sense that these “core” areas bring so much insight into the so-called more applied areas, e.g. how speech acts sheds insight on hate speech; how epistemology helps us better understand racial profiling and even the ethics of protests.
    I think it’s often possible to connect LEMM to “trends,” and this might be helpful in developing AOCs.

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  5. aucourant

    I think statements of the unpredictability of the trends in field are a bit overstated. Philosophy of technology and AI in particular has been a foreseeable for some time, though I think the rate of change is harder to gauge (and depends on macroeconomic conditions). Things like this are downstream of more widely visible trends in grant awards and sources of donations (what areas are people making quick money in?) academy wide. Similarly, the recent rise of gender-race-nonwestern positions is philosophy “catching up” to decades old trends in the humanities. With places replacing their logic requirements, the situation for logicians is likely to become somehow even more dire, as a lot of those hires are linked to teaching required courses.
    Easy predictions:
    – LEMM will never again be “core” in hiring, that was an artifact of a much more rarefied academic environment which was both a matter of a different culture and flush university funding due to the GI Bill, etc. in the 50s—never to be seen again.
    – Philosophy of mind (and the rest of LEMM) will continue to become more naturalistic and adjacent to cognitive science both for internal reasons but also due to external reasons, like where grant funding can come from. More generally LEMM that is philosophy of science will come to be dominant (if its not already) as it counts as a social science for the NSF, etc.
    – History of philosophy has already likely had a decline on a broader timescale than above, but I believe that this is the next big decline to happen. The degree requirement ratchet only goes one way and grad students in plenty of places don’t care for these courses very much (“not relevant to my research”). Since history has fewer natural funding allies (and philosophers are not well taken by historians, not that they have money anyway) there will be little pressure other than tradition to keep them. The exception will be non-Western stuff.

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  6. Inevitable Intellectual Itinerancy

    Just an observation,
    “is it others’ experience that most people are trained in LEMM, and LEMM is what interests most who go into philosophy in the first place?”
    No, I’d say that a lot of people are motivated by going into ethics or political philosophy.
    This provoked the following thought: a classic model of human interests can divide-
    (1) Interest in people.
    (2) Interest in ideas.
    (3) Interest in non-human, non-abstract objects.
    In the case of philosophy, we are usually interested (to varying degrees) in ideas about people/ideas/non-human, non-abstract objects.
    People who are primarily interested in ideas about ideas are often also interested in ideas about people. Also, people who are primarily interested in ideas about non-human, non-abstract objects can’t really deny that ideas about people are important, given their salience in our culture (political ideas, ethical debates etc.).
    On the other hand, there’s a balancing act. If you just do outright political/social activism, then you almost certainly won’t be able to publish in good journals. Thus, the demand seems to be for ethically/politically relevant philosophy, which isn’t too applied. From a departmental perspective, this makes sense in at least two ways: (1) it provides students with a possible gateway into more abstract philosophical issues, via something salient in their lives, and (2) it seems important to most people on the search committee, while still having the potential to publish in top journals.
    So, if someone is willing to do any research area, provided it gets them a job, I’d recommend focusing on something people-orientated but still somewhat abstract. This includes ethics and political philosophy, provided that they aren’t too abstract, but also various issues in LEMM.
    So ontology is a terribly difficult area for employment, but ontology of race is more promising, even though it’s not (directly) ethics or political philosophy. Aesthetics is a bad area, unless one can make it non-abstract, e.g. if you work on the aesthetics of inequality, then that opens up political philosophy/PPE jobs. I’m also not sure that classic moral theory (utilitarianism vs. Kantianism etc.) is having a good time, and I would personally steer clear of such topics even if I was looking for an ethics job.
    Really, there are a lot of topics in the sweet spot: gender and philosophy of mind, metaphysics of race, epistemic justice/violence/values/whatever (though the “epistemic theory of X/epistemic X” craze might not last much longer), language of migration etc. I am all too familiar with the popularity of such topics, because LEMM people researching these topics are very good at jumping into my own research areas and getting jobs instead of me!

    Reply
  7. LEMM

    Predicting what will be a ‘hot’ topic in the future is impossible, but you can still make decisions on what departments always need. I work in LEMM, more on the language side really, but I chose to have a strong additional AOS in metaphysics as comparatively there are more jobs going in metaphysics than language. This is not because people find language uninteresting, but simply because every department needs a course or two in metaphysics. Courses in language are less central these days, more likely to be done by someone just filling in, and so hiring decisions are made in line with this.
    My thought when on the market was which areas are essential to any department, and what hires in what areas would be great additions but non-essential (you only make those hires once a department has filled all the other holes in their offering). (Also note, almost no department has filled all those essential holes, so some topics will always feel like they are non-essential/a nice luxury to have if you can afford them – my view is that in ‘core’ LEMM areas, language and aesthetics have been the big losers from the growth of this style of thinking)

    Reply
  8. sisyphus

    PhDs are like good scotch…
    PhD grads are caught in a similar problem as the purveyors of finely aged alcohol. Both seem to be stuck trying to figure out what the market going to be like 5, 10 (or more) years out. Some economists actually work on problems like these. I’m not familiar enough with any of their research, but I’d be surprised if there aren’t at least some strategies that have been developed to deal with these kinds of issues (would be curious to hear from someone who might know…)
    Beyond that there are two problems I see with the notion of trying to guess the trends years out. First – the data is incomplete! Without knowing the prevalence of which AOSs PhD grads have, merely seeing trends on the job end of things helps very little. For example, while there are a lot of ethics jobs (~25%), if %50 of the pool of jobseekers have AOSs in ethics, you’d be a fool to go into ethics! Without that data, looking at AOS hiring trends is of little value.
    Second, the idea of picking an AOS for the reasons of getting a job seems limited. On the one hand, sure, other things being equal, why not go into a field that seems “hotter” rather than one that seems to be cooling off. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that’s a good AOS choosing strategy. The best strategy is to pick the AOS you’re best in. For example, I can fumble my way through teaching intro logic, but I’m no logician! If I’d chosen logic as an AOS simply because it seemed “hot”, I’d probably have a bad publishing track record, etc. because I’m just not that good with it. I’m much better off having chosen a less “hot” AOS that I’m actually good at (i.e. an AOS where I can actually write a paper that gets published). Go with AOSs that you have a knack for. Back to my opening analogy: if you’re good at making scotch, and bad at making wine, even if everyone seems to want wine, you’re probably better off sticking with making scotch.

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  9. realistidealist

    I think that grad students should just work on the topic they are most interested in and passionate, and to areas that they feel like they can make a value contribution. Excellent and interesting work will follow from this. Grad school is difficult enough already, and life too short, to do anything else.

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  10. realistidealistfollowup

    a second point worth noting is that when on the market you can use your research proposal as a springboard to selling yourself as interested in/engaged in other projects in more ”trendy” areas, and you can do this at the time of applying, when you know (rather than preemptively guessing or betting) what the areas of hiring interest are that year.

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  11. Curious

    I am in general curious about the market statistics on this issue, especially as someone who does not work in the analytic tradition: how hireable are people that solely have ‘core analytic’ training these days? For example, much of the very traditional continental philosophy (think Heidegger), is no longer appealing to many schools, and indeed, it is becoming irresponsible for graduate programs to encourage students to be so one-dimensional in their research. Is such a thing the case also in LEMM or Core Analytic Philosophy in general? How responsible is it for graduate programs to recruit and support graduate students that solely specialize in these areas?

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