Promoting yourself as an academic

You acquire many skills while completing a higher degree. Some are discipline-specific, e.g., technical/computational skills, the ability to use scientific equipment, etc. However, many skills are generic in nature and can be used in a variety of occupations outside academia. Examples include:

• writing skills and literacy
• oral presentation skills
• advanced research skills
• information literacy (the ability to use information tools to find sources)
• critical thinking skills
• and many more …

These skills are vital for many occupations. Consider them of equal importance as your discipline expertise when applying for jobs. Indeed, not many roles will require expertise in the narrow field of your thesis. Make an appointment with a careers advisor to discuss ways to "sell" your generic skills.

Creating a comprehensive curriculum vitae (CV), writing a tailored cover letter, and crafting a detailed response to selection criteria are vital steps in successfully marketing yourself as an academic or a working professional when applying for specific roles. These documents serve as your first chance to showcase your relevant skills, and suitability for a role. Since the advent of the internet, however, online profiling offers more creative ways to market yourself. Refer to Profiling below for advice on the online options.

Curriculum vitae (CV)

Your CV should highlight your academic achievements, such as your research outputs and the technical experience gained from undertaking your research that are relevant to the role you are applying for. In a CV, you should also emphasise 'soft' skills (teamwork, project management, communicating complex topics to different audiences, etc.) that are transferrable and show your fit in the role. While a CV is generally the basis to which subsequent documents will refer, tailoring your CV to each role by prioritising information that aligns with the job description is key to standing out from other candidates.

Cover letter

A strong cover letter complements your CV by providing a narrative about who you are, what your motivations are in applying for the position, and explaining, usually with applicable examples, how your skills align with the role. Cover letters are an opportunity to demonstrate your enthusiasm and what makes you the ideal candidate. Remember to keep the tone professional yet engaging, and avoid simply repeating information that can be sighted in your CV.

Response to selection criteria

The response to selection criteria may often be done in place of a cover letter. In this type of document, it is key to address each criterion with specific examples from your research, teaching, or work experience. It is important to show, with examples or case studies, how you meet or exceed the description of the role. Most tertiary institutions will have subtly different ways of responding to this document, so make sure you research how to best address each criterion. Broadly speaking, however, using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to structure your responses will ensure that they are concise, provide relevant examples and are outcome focused.

As teaching-focused positions become more popular in universities, developing skills in delivering innovative high quality and learning, curriculum development, and educational technology can be beneficial to your job prospects. Programs such as the Graduate Certificate in Education (Tertiary Education) and publishing/reading open educational resources (OER) are a good way of developing these skills.

Some universities specify minimum research measures as a condition of employment for academic roles. Indeed, it is not possible to be competitive for academic jobs if one does not publish. Research measures primarily relate to publication output, being research active, and citation metrics, as follows:

Publication output

Publication output is the amount of scholarly work produced by an individual academic and is usually measured yearly. An example of publication output is having a scholarly peer-reviewed paper published in Q1-ranked journals (recognised as the top quartile within their field based on impact factors and relevance). While the process of publication in these outlets can be rigorous, the benefits—such as increased citation rates and enhanced academic reputation—make these journals a critical target for researchers. Online-first versions offer timely access to accepted papers, ensuring early dissemination of findings. Online-first is a pre-publication digital copy that is produced relatively quickly and is considered a valid research output, despite not yet having been assigned a volume and issue number.

Research active

Research active is a term given to someone with a high publication output, or who has at least had a steady stream of publications over a long period. For an academic career, being research active is important, though it is more important to be cited (i.e., referred to in other peoples' publications). The number of times other academics cite your work is a concrete demonstration of your research activity and is captured by citation metrics such as the h-index (see below).

Citation metrics

Citations by other academics about your work is a direct measure of your scholarly influence - your work is being read by others. A citation serves as a demonstration that your work is not only being read but actively referred to by other researchers. It reflects the influence of your ideas and their contribution to advancing knowledge within your field. While citations can also be used to criticise work, in general it is better to be cited than not as it shows your work is relevant. To use Oscar Wilde's dictum: 'It's better being talked about than not being talked about'. Citation metrics such as the h-index, the g-index, and the i10-index are used to help gauge the productivity of a scholar. Briefly, the h-index allows for direct comparisons of citations within disciplines as it reflects quantity and impact in a single value. The g-index gives prominence to an author's highly cited articles, which helps evaluate the difference between authors' respective impacts. The i10-index reflects the number of publications with at least 10 citations.

An online profile has similarities to the CV, in that it generally contains a record of your achievements, and it is a way to market yourself to employers. It is important to be aware of the many creative ways to market yourself and make use of them. Profiling is traditionally divided along academic, professional, and social lines, but the distinctions are blurring as technology advances and impacts society more broadly.

Academic Profiling

Academic Profiling is essential for those interested in a career in academia. These outlets all have their pros and cons, although they are generally useful if you are research active, i.e., productive in terms of publishing articles in your discipline. Being early in your academic career does not prevent you from joining them; they are valuable as they offer free access to research papers and opportunities for networking. Being represented in these online spaces increases your chance of your work being noticed which may lead to other opportunities. The academic profiling tools described below are not just a place to display your research and qualifications, they can also notify you about work opportunities and provide profile and citation metrics. Sometimes called analytics, these determine academic value as measured by download percentiles and general influence within your field.

• Google Scholar is not just an extensive academic search engine but also a comprehensive repository of publications and associated citations. It indexes and records the full text of a researcher's publications and associated metadata, making it a virtual CV of their output. Furthermore, a researcher's citations are automatically collected and added to their citation count over time. Google Scholar does not have scope for interactivity, nor allow you to add personal details beyond name and academic position, key works, and co-authors. It's also important to keep in mind that it is a search tool that is more accessible to non-academic audiences than subscription-based databases.
• ORCID is a not-for-profit online repository for researchers. In addition to storing a researcher's publications, it also functions as a reasonably complete online CV and can be exported and printed as such. Even though it does not show citations, ORCID links to Scopus IDs where citations can be displayed (e.g., 'Scopus' is a citation database). It has become the standard digital identifier for academics, and it is used by all libraries and research organisations worldwide. It is essential to have an ORCID profile, even as a fledgling academic.
• ResearchGate and its competitor sites, Academia.edu and Kudos are commercial, or proto-commercial, sites that depend on uploaded documents from academics to provide access to services. There are ethical and legal issues to be considered when using commercial services, so use them with caution. ResearchGate (RG) has been described as a 'mashup of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn', reiterating the blurring lines of social and professional profiling (Lin, 2012). RG is a site for academics which provides a forum for uploading papers, works in progress, chapters, and conference papers, and selecting key words that describe the work uploaded. This allows your work to be fully searchable. It also provides a chat area where members can post on a variety of specialist and general topics, and members can 'follow' other members, like the same function on social media sites. This is useful for getting an idea of who might be interested in your work. A ResearchGate score (or 'RG' score) is a composite index particular to the RG site comprising citations received for publications, the journal impact factor, the number of followers, 'questions asked' and 'answers given' in chat. Membership requires a university email address.
• Academia.edu has no particular disciplinary emphasis and is open to membership from all scholars. It is the world's largest academic profiling site and a competitor to ResearchGate. Like its competitors, it claims to be an open access repository but is really a for-profit social media site that also offers opportunity for file sharing, providing metrics for measuring citations and research downloads. Unlike RG it does not offer a discussion forum. Its premium service for paid subscribers offers "get more out of your analytics". Like RG it allows academics to follow each other's work and requires a university email address for membership.
• In addition to these sites, discipline-specific sites are also out there, such as PhilPeople for professional philosophers. There are other dedicated profiling sites for academics in the sciences and social sciences. There are ethical and legal issues to be considered when using any of these services, so use them with caution.

Professional Profiling

Professional profiling is a way to market your skills to employers chiefly outside the academic sector. The largest such professional profiling site is LinkedIn with 575+ million subscribers as of April 2020 (Kinsta.com, 2020). While intended as a professional site for corporate, public service, and other non-academic areas, the use of LinkedIn is also pervasive within academia. Recent data indicates that 20 million companies are listed on LinkedIn, there are 14 million open jobs, and 90 percent of recruiters use it for finding employees (Kinsta.com, 2020).

LinkedIn is a social media site as much as a professional profiling site, with a service that allows a member to profile their education, skills, honours, certificates and achievements and membership of organisations. It explicitly functions as an online CV and can be printed in pdf format that is largely ready to go as a document to send to prospective employers. LinkedIn also allows members to choose their employment-ready status, from "currently employed", to "open to job opportunities", and the more explicit "looking for opportunities", etc. Thus, prospective employers can review potential employees even before interviewing them. This is of great benefit for recruiters.

LinkedIn also allows members to join groups formed in professional associations and discussions forums that are related to their interests. This contributes to members' LinkedIn newsfeed allowing them to keep abreast of events, job advertisements, and new publications in their field. Unlike RG and Academia.edu, LinkedIn is not a repository for uploaded publications, although one can draw attention to new publications by means of posting an announcement. In this sense, LinkedIn does not compete with publishers and functions more like a social media tool albeit with a professional emphasis.

Part of the strength of LinkedIn is its ability to foster professional connections, rather like Facebook "friends". LinkedIn allows members to invite other people (whether they are members of LinkedIn or not) to become a connection. Once connected, members can communicate with each other via a chat function. A premium paid service allows members to see who has looked at their profile, e.g., recruiters, and how often their profile has appeared in searches, and the ability to mail people and organisations who are not connections. It is also possible to review other members' public profiles anonymously. However, you can be a LinkedIn member without using these functions.

It is arguable how helpful LinkedIn is in career development, but there is no doubt that building connections is an increasingly important part of self-promotion in the contemporary job market. Membership for the non-premium service is free, so consider joining LinkedIn and building your profile prior to graduation.

Social Profiling

It scarcely seems necessary to describe Facebook as it is already so well-known. As the world's largest social media platform with around 2.6 billion users, Facebook is ubiquitous. However, it is not often recognised how useful it can be as an academic profiling tool. Increasingly more academic and professional organisations have a Facebook site, so it has become a de facto way of presenting yourself, following related professional groups, and in turn being seen by potential recruiters. As with any profiling tool you need to be an active user, and your profile needs to be kept up to date. The Economic and Social Research Council offers several other reasons for social media profiling:

• promote your research and increase its visibility
• communicate directly and quickly with others who have an interest in your research
• develop new relationships and build networks
• reach new audiences, both within and outside academia
• seek and give advice and feedback
• generate ideas
• share information and links (e.g., journal articles and news items)
• keep up to date with the latest news and developments, and forward it to others instantly
• follow and contribute to discussions on events (e.g., conferences that you can't get to in person)
• express who you are as a person (Economic and Social Research Council, 2020).

Despite the various options to separate your professional/academic profiling from social media, be aware that potential employers may also view your social media profiles. It is possible to review your profiles or search for photos of you anonymously to get an idea what kind of person you are. Therefore, it is advisable to refrain from posting anything on social media that that is inconsistent with the professional image you wish to project or that you would not want a prospective employer to see.