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Discussion: applying to international jobs from the US

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

Can we get a thread on applying to international jobs from the US? I feel completely lost since so many places don’t use a tenure system, and I’m afraid I’m wasting my time since I’m a junior faculty at a SLAC and don’t have international recognition. Are there places other than PhilJobs I should be looking at?

I suspect a discussion thread here could be super useful. In addition to the OP’s question about whether international jobs are advertised other places than PhilJobs, I think it could be great to hear some inside tips from faculty who work outside of the US. Are there things that applicants for jobs should know about applying for jobs where you are–particularly applicants from the US?

Does anyone have any helpful insights to share?

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8 responses to “Discussion: applying to international jobs from the US”

  1. AGT

    Subscribe to Philos-L.
    As far as Europe is concerned, every country is different. I recall that on some other blog there was a discussion of jobs in Europe. Daily Nous, Leiter, perhaps here?
    Applying from the US makes the one obvious difference that you will need a visa/work permit. No idea how much this complicates the hiring process. Another fact is the language. With the obvious exception of the UK, you will now be required/expected to learn the local language and at least after some time teach in it.
    More specific information would have to be provided on a country basis, as noted.

    Reply
  2. NonTT

    When I was applying for jobs last year I used jobs.ac.uk for ads in the UK.

    Reply
  3. Not my usual handle

    Okay here is some tentative advice from a New Zealand academic for US candidates thinking of applying for jobs in Australia or New Zealand. Take it with a pinch salt since it is some years since I served on a search committee and I am not as au fait with the specifically Australian scene as I once was.

    1) Obviously there will be no problems with language unless you are particularly bad at deciphering Australasian accents.
    2) There is no prejudice against Americans. American accents abound at my university and three out of the eight permanent members of the Philosophy Programme are originally from the US. Another three are from the UK and only two are native-born Kiwis. Australasian universities are immigrant-friendly institutions (as I can testify being a British immigrant myself and having done my doctorate in Australia). Indeed, New Zealand as a whole is a fairly immigrant-friendly country since more than a quarter of of New Zealanders were born abroad. An even higher proportion of Australians (30.1%) are foreign born.
    3) Most Australasian Universities are technically R1 universities, conferring way more than 20 research doctorates per annum, though most of the doctorates will be thesis-only with nothing much in the way of a taught component.
    4) They are therefore research universities with the expectation that an academic will spend about 40% of their time on research, another 40% on teaching and the remaining 20% on ‘service’.
    5) Thus search committees are highly interested in research potential. Indeed, I would say that we recruit new staff mainly on the basis of research potential and teaching competence. (You are no good to us unless you can stand in front of class and do a decent job, so teaching competence is vital, but teaching brilliance won’t help you if you are not up to snuff as a researcher.) The OP says that they are ‘junior faculty at a SLAC and don’t have international recognition’. If this means the they don’t have a reasonable number of publications in respectable journals (depending on the time out from their PhD) then they won’t get a look-in. If it simply means that they have not travelled abroad and have no foreign friends, acquaintances or contacts, then it doesn’t matter much.
    6) Australasian universities don’t have ‘tenure’ in the American sense. However, there is a thing we have called ‘confirmation’ which is nowhere near such a big deal as the tenure process appears to be in the US. You get it if you do a non-incompetent job in your first couple of years. Once you are ‘confirmed’ you are reasonably safe in your job so long as a) you don’t stuff up spectacularly and b) the department as a whole is not subject to budget cuts and ‘restructuring’ (which in the current climate is a distinct possibility). It is not so much keeping your job once you have been appointed that is the big hurdle, rather it is getting a yourself appointed in the first place – that, and hoping that your job will continue to exist. Australasian employment law has provisions against wrongful dismissal (both in Academia and elsewhere) and this to some extent substitutes for tenure. However, you should check out some of Leiter’s threads on the Diaonia debacle at the Australian Catholic University for some cautionary tales, especially https://leiterreports.com/2023/09/20/what-does-tenure-really-mean-in-australia/. Being fired because of ‘restructuring’ is something that’s happened to some of the top names the discipline. Recently my own institution was almost literally decimated with a 10% cut in staff numbers.
    7) There are are roughly five ranks at Australasian Universities (they vary a bit from place to place); Lecturer, Senior Lecturer (the ‘career grade’), Senior Lecturer above the Bar (which means that you are doing well and are on your way up), Associate Professor and Professor. Being a full professor is kind of a big deal.
    8) Both Australian and New Zealand have systems of what an American might regard as semi-socialised medicine which means the health-insurance is not vital and healthcare won’t be part of your employment package. However, in both countries the public health service has been under pressure from neo-liberal governments which means that you might have to think twice if you or some member of your family has a serious, chronic health condition.
    9) Though you may not notice it if you live in a university bubble, Australia is still a rather racist and sexist society. (This was definitely my impression when I lived in Australia forty years ago, and my daughter, who works in hospitality in Melbourne, confirms that it is still the case.) New Zealand by contrast is perhaps the least racist of the Anglophone settler societies (which isn’t to say that racism does not exist). Though still disadvantaged , the Maori, the indigenous people Aotearoa/ New Zealand, are a lot less downtrodden and a lot more visible than the Aboriginal peoples Australia. For example, the Governor General (the King’s Deputy) is currently a Maori as is the Foreign Minister (and intermittent Deputy Prime Minister) Winston Peters. There is also an enormous amount of ethnic intermarriage. Almost all my Maori students (about 11% of my classes) are also something else. Ethnic percentages regularly sum to more than 100 since since people can, and usually do, put down all their ethnicities.
    10) Relatedly if you come to New Zealand you will need to acquire a smattering of Maori customs and culture and to know enough te reo (the Maori language) to be polite on ceremonial occasions.
    11) In New Zealand if you have job offer it is relatively easy (though not hassle-free) to get a visa and to proceed from thence to ‘permanent residence’ (a sort of semi-citizenship) and then (for a fee) to full citizenship. Permanent residence gives you most of the rights of a citizen including voting rights. Though my wife has lived in New Zealand for 39 years and thinks of herself as a kiwi, she has not bothered to go the whole hog, pay the fee and become a full citizen, remaining, officially, a Brit. There is no problem about being a dual citizen so you don’t have to stop being an American in order to become officially a New Zealander. I think that all the foreign-born members of my department (including myself) are now dual citizens. It is a bit different in Australia, but again it is perfectly possible (and perhaps useful) to become a dual citizen.
    12) Having said all this, I think I should stress the my American colleagues are mostly happy to be here (hence the dual citizenships) despite the fact that they would probably be earning a lot more had they remained in America.

    Reply
  4. pfinocch89

    As far as China is concerned, every university is different. With few exceptions, though, most jobs that would be a good fit for people in OP’s situation will be advertised on PhilJobs.

    Most of these jobs in China heavily emphasize research output, especially in the form of papers published in indexed journals. Most of these jobs also do not require local language learning for the job itself (the extent to which it is otherwise useful to learn the local language various quite a lot; you can do everything in English in Hong Kong; daily life in Wuhan is harder if you don’t speak any Mandarin).

    I’m not sure what the connection between a tenure system and wasting time is supposed to be. But for what it’s worth the situation is a bit complicated. Setting aside the expressive protections many people from the US associate with tenure (though that seems to be disappearing…), many foreign faculty here are not integrated into the tenure system proper.

    I’m happy to answer more detailed questions if anyone would find that helpful.

    Reply
  5. Michel

    University Affairs, for Canada.

    Reply
  6. more on euro market

    I’ve transitioned from the US to the European market, and while it was a learning curve, it definitely can be done. If you’re interested in (non-UK) Europe as a non-EU citizen, you should be prepared and willing to move around between countries, to pick up bits of multiple languages, and to work multiple fixed-term contracts until you figure out how to make a position permanent. For some people this can be disruptive in their lives, but it can also be viewed as a great opportunity to see different parts of the world and perhaps live in some cities of historic interest.

    A practical point to think about is the relative difficulty of learning a particular language, if you want to set yourself up for a permanent position teaching in Europe. For instance, Spanish and Norwegian are supposed to be comparatively “easy” for English speakers to learn. German is intermediate, with added complications if you move to Austria or even Bavaria where people on the street speak a different dialect from textbook high German. Anything with a different alphabet will be more difficult. I’m informed Finnish is impossible. Also keep in mind that learning one language makes further related languages much easier; lots of adjacent European languages are partly mutually intelligible. So, if you spend 3 years learning German and then move to the Netherlands, that’s not wasted effort imo. While the details vary a lot by country, it’s not uncommon to find 3-4 or even 6 year fixed term positions. 3 years is enough time to get a solid intermediate level of a language if you’re consistent about it and keep pushing through the awkward A2-B1 stage. In 6 years you could likely achieve fluency if you are proactive about immersing yourself. I know people in their 30s-40s who have learned German to fluency from scratch so don’t feel like it’s too late! But you can also look out for universities that offer most of their programming in English, which exist in a variety of countries.

    Several EU countries are actively trying to recruit/poach American academics right now, which might work in your favor. I’ve heard this includes Austria and Sweden (take with a grain of salt as I haven’t independently confirmed). Expect the work permit application to be a huge PITA in terms of paperwork but not a problem once completed. You will have a signed work contract before you can even apply for your visa, so the visa isn’t going to be denied. The depts I’ve worked with recruit international people fairly routinely and have extremely helpful university staff whose job it is to help you with the paperwork.

    As far as job applications, I’m not sure I can help since I’m on a research track whereas it sounds like the poster has a teaching job. The circumstance outside the US is a bit different since the SLAC model is uncommon. However there are still plenty of universities globally that want to hire people primarily for teaching purposes. I would start checking Philos-L as a start. In my experience, individual countries’ local job boards rarely turn up jobs that are posted in English yet not on Philos-L.

    Best of luck!

    Reply
  7. northerner

    I have worked in the USA and in northern Europe. From my experience, teaching counts for very little at northern European universities. Of course you have to teach, but you will never get a job on the basis of your teaching. NEVER. You will only ever get a job because of your research or research potential. So if you do not have a healthy publication list commensurate with your career stage (years since PhD), then do not bother applying for jobs in northern Europe. Where I am we do not have tenure, but we have permanent positions (which never go away … but could in a dire financial crisis). And when someone is hired they are usually hired for a permanent position (so there is no tenure-track where you have to prove yourself after being hired). But it is expected that you have about 5 years of post-doc experience in order to get these permanent positions (which should give you the strong publication record you need). I will now say the obvious: things differ from country to country, even in northern Europe.

    Reply
  8. The future of the UK is dim

    Most UK universities don’t have tenure, but you have to pass some probation. UK immigration costs are high, so unless you are desperate, only apply for jobs you know will sponsor your visa costs and the IHS of your whole family. The UK also has some interesting politicians that have extremely high popular support and want to make things difficult. Keywords are “farage” and “settlement.” If election happens tomorrow, I think I would be financially squeezed out of my job due to recurring visa application fees. Many UK universities are facing financial difficulties, and most universities are choosing to cut staff, cut courses, cut teaching quality, and hope to increase international student recruitment. (I’m not sure whether we can infer that this is wishful thinking on steroids.) Take that into consideration when thinking about job security: there will be job cuts.

    Reply

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