Corporate coaching has spread rapidly from the US across the world, with the business sector happy to buy in such support for employees they are grooming to be high flyers. The higher education sector, in contrast, would appear to offer a less obviously lucrative, and perhaps more sceptical, market. Yet coaches in the US, and to a lesser extent in the UK, are working with an increasing number of academics, helping them to confront not only the challenges they share with many other professionals (notably the sheer lack of hours in the day) but also the pressures specific to the sector.

Nathalie Houston, associate professor of English at the University of Houston, has just begun to offer coaching to academics outside her own institution. In addition to her full-time tenured job teaching and researching Victorian literature, literary theory and the history of the book, since 2009 Houston has been involved in the ProfHacker blog, where a team of more than a dozen writers offer “tips about teaching, technology and productivity”.

“I write about time management and work-life balance,” she says, “topics I’ve been interested in for a long time.”

Recognising that she often provided informal coaching to colleagues, friends and students, Houston decided to gain a formal qualification and set up a practice that she hopes to extend to about 15 clients.

She “meets” them, either for 30 minutes three times a month or 45 minutes twice a month, by phone or by Skype – mostly, she says, “on Fridays, when I don’t teach or have university meetings, and on Saturdays, so it’s compacted into a certain section of my week”.

The basic principles are simple. “While therapy tends to look to the roots of the problem, to trace it back to some dynamic or trauma,” explains Houston, “coaching is about what you can do now to change the situation.

“As one well-known coach said, if a stick in a river gets stuck, you don’t ask what made it stuck – it just needs a nudge to go on floating down the river. Coaching focuses on the nudge. It’s action-oriented, and present- and future-directed.

Read full story, and I’m ahead on this one, thanks to The Kerslake Company! We have been in discussions recently within the LTDU at the University of Winchester, re bringing together a group of people who are interested in coaching, which you can see from my PGCLTHE assignment, I am.

Recently, I decided to act on this expectation and launched a “Reading Challenge” to my history undergraduates. This voluntary event encourages them to read 20 books for pleasure during their degree. It is not an attempt to force on them a “canon” of worthy literature; it presents them with a wide range of books from which they select titles that interest them.

Those who wish to take part receive a long bibliography broken into sections, including 20th-century fiction, philosophy, short stories and so on. The idea is that they choose and read at least two works from each area until they have reached the required number. Successful participants will receive a certificate and a small prize, but this will not be large enough to be an incentive in its own right.

In planning this with colleagues, it was suggested that we outline how a healthy amount of leisure reading can broaden knowledge, stimulate ideas and sharpen comprehension skills – and thus help improve a student’s chances of gaining higher grades. But I was instinctively resistant to this idea. I didn’t want students to think of this as “work”.

As it’s still in its infancy, I can’t say yet if it has worked. But when I ran the idea past my seminar groups, the reaction was positive – many students indicated that they would like to take part. We are also looking into the possibility of building some form of reading group into the challenge, and another colleague has offered to host an annual round-table discussion on a selected title. The idea is to create a structure that helps guide and motivate students to read for pleasure, supplying direction and encouragement, and – if possible – to build an undergraduate reading culture.

Read full story.

“We appeal to viewers who have curious minds, and we reach parts of their brains other channels don’t reach,” he says. “We are always interested in covering mainstream subjects, but we go in deep. One of the natural places to look for people who have a credible, authoritative position and who can argue a strong view of the world is in the academy.”

He and his team recruit suitable academics in a number of different ways. Some are already well known via their books, public appearances and the media. During BBC Four’s autumn/winter season, Robin Lane Fox, reader in ancient history at the University of Oxford, will present a bold new interpretation of the origins of Greek mythology in Greek Myths – Tales of Travelling Heroes. Lisa Jardine, centenary professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London, will be examining the ethics of science through the archives of her father, Jacob Bronowski, in My Father, the Bomb and Me.

• you can identify universities by their internet domains.
• you are constantly looking for a thesis in novels.
• you have difficulty reading anything that doesn’t have footnotes.
• you understand jokes about Foucault.
• the concept of free time scares you.
• you consider caffeine to be a major food group.
• you’ve ever brought books with you on vacation and actually studied.
• Saturday nights spent studying no longer seem weird.
• the professor doesn’t show up to class and you discuss the readings anyway.
• you’ve ever traveled across two state lines specifically to go to a library.
• you appreciate the fact that you get to choose *which* twenty hours out of the day you have to work.
• you still feel guilty about giving students low grades (you’ll getover it).
• you can read course books and cook at the same time.
• you schedule events for academic vacations so your friends can come.
• you hope it snows during spring break so you can get more studying in.
• you’ve ever worn out a library card.
• you find taking notes in a park relaxing.
• you find yourself citing sources in conversation.
• you’ve ever sent a personal letter with footnotes.
• you can analyze the significance of appliances you cannot operate.
• your carrel is better decorated than your apartment.
• you have ever, as a folklore project, attempted to track the progress of your own joke across the internet.
• you are startled to meet people who neither need nor want to Read.
• you have ever brought a scholarly article to a bar.
• you rate coffee shops by the availability of outlets for your laptop.
• everything reminds you of something in your discipline.
• you have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event.
• you have ever spent more than $50 on photocopying while researching a single paper.
• there is a microfilm reader in the library that you consider “yours.”
• you actually have a preference between microfilm and microfiche.
• you can tell the time of day by looking at the traffic flow at the library.
• you look forward to summers because you’re more productive without the distraction of classes.
• you regard ibuprofen as a vitamin.
• you consider all papers to be works in progress.
• professors don’t really care when you turn in work anymore.
• you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text.
• you have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in the same general area.
• you have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation.
• you reflexively start analyzing those Greek letters before you realize that it’s a sorority sweatshirt, not an equation.
• you find yourself explaining to children that you are in “20th grade.”
• you start referring to stories like “Snow White, et al.”
• you frequently wonder how long you can live on pasta withoutgetting scurvy.
• you look forward to taking some time off to do laundry.
• you have more photocopy cards than credit cards.
• you wonder whether APA style allows you to cite talking to yourself as “personal communication”.

Yes – this might be Americanised, but do you realisise JUST how true some of this is! (My postgraduate project)

The report, What Do PhDs Do?, from the UK GRAD programme, found that about 60 per cent of UK PhDs in physical, engineering and biomedical sciences leave academia, compared with about 30 to 35 per cent of arts, humanities, social science and economic PhDs. The report says that over time these proportions increase as, for example, PhDs on short-term postdoctoral positions move into other employment sectors. Report author Ellen Pearce said: “The figures will raise serious issues about how universities retain PhD students and sustain the teaching base of UK universities.”

The report, which analyses what UK rather than overseas PhD students do, found the students to be highly employable. Nearly three-quarters got jobs – in or outside academia – six months after graduating. This compared with 69 per cent of masters students and 61 per cent of undergraduates. UK PhDs are about 50 per cent less likely to be unemployed (3.2 per cent) than first-degree graduates (6.6 per cent).

“It is hard to say whether this is brain drain or brain circulation,” Ms Pearce said.

The report also found that the percentage of female PhD graduates had increased from 40 per cent in 1999 to 46 per cent in 2003. In all, 12,520 research students were awarded PhDs in 2003. Between 1999 and 2003, there was a 31 per cent rise in the number of PhD students registering for their final year.

“We interviewed employers from different sectors and found them to be highly enthusiastic about PhD students,” said Ms Pearce. “Their response puts all the emphasis on transferable skills into perspective. It is clear that PhD students have a high value in the market.”

Stephen Court, senior research officer for the Association of University Teachers, said there had been a sharp decline in the number of young entrants to academia coming from the UK.

“It is not surprising that a high proportion of people with PhDs do not choose a career in higher education,” he said. “Universities are finding that the prospect of fixed-term contracts and the low pay they offer are extremely unattractive to potential academics.”

In 2002, Sir Gareth Roberts’ report SET for Success put in motion a major programme of transferable skills training for PhD students.

Morgan Kavanagh, a director at recruitment consultants Huxley Finance, said: “We recruit for clients who require high-level quantative skills, so we look only at PhDs – first-degree graduates simply can’t compete.

“PhDs are much more sophisticated in their thinking and have a broader toolkit of skills to draw on in the demanding roles we place them in.”

The general manager in a private engineering firm said: “We’ve found that PhD graduates have a combination of maturity and autonomy that is more useful for our work than engineering graduates with a similar length of experience in industry.”

Jocelyn Prudence, chief executive of the Universities Colleges and Employers Association, said: “Higher education recognises that recruitment and retention of academics is a vital area and for that reason the framework agreement on pay modernisation addresses work-life balance, career development and renumeration. These have been shown to be the most important issues people consider when making decisions about their working life. The framework will deliver on all three. Real progress is already being made to offer postgraduates an academic career that is both attractive and fulfilling.”

The UK GRAD report shows that 38 per cent of PhDs are in the biosciences, 33 per cent in the physical sciences (including engineering), 14 per cent in the arts and humanities, and 11 per cent in the social sciences. Some 4 per cent of PhDs were doing theses in other areas such as education.

Taken from the Times Higher Education Supplement
Claire Sanders
Published: 08 October 2004

• IT HAS LONG BEEN KNOWN”… I didn’t look up the original reference.
• “A DEFINITE TREND IS EVIDENT”… These data are practically meaningless.
• “WHILE IT HAS NOT BEEN POSSIBLE TO PROVIDE DEFINITE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS”… An unsuccessful experiment, but I still hope to get it published.
• “THREE OF THE SAMPLES WERE CHOSEN FOR DETAILED STUDY”… The other results didn’t make any sense.
• “TYPICAL RESULTS ARE SHOWN”… This is the prettiest graph.
• “THESE RESULTS WILL BE IN A SUBSEQUENT REPORT”… I might get around to this sometime, if pushed/funded.
• “IN MY EXPERIENCE”… Once.
• “IN CASE AFTER CASE”… Twice.
• “IN A SERIES OF CASES”… Thrice.
• “IT IS BELIEVED THAT”… I think.
• “IT IS GENERALLY BELIEVED THAT”… A couple of others think so, too.
• “CORRECT WITHIN AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE”… Wrong.
• “ACCORDING TO STATISTICAL ANALYSIS”… Rumor has it.
• “A statistically oriented projectION OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE FINDINGS”… A wild guess.
• “A CAREFUL ANALYSIS OF OBTAINABLE DATA”… Three pages of notes were obliterated when I knocked over a glass of beer.
• “IT IS CLEAR THAT MUCH ADDITIONAL WORK WILL BE REQUIRED BEFORE A COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING OF THIS PHENOMENON OCCURS”… I don’t understand it.
• “AFTER ADDITIONAL STUDY BY MY COLLEAGUES”… They don’t understand it either.
  “THANKS ARE DUE TO JOE BLOTZ FOR ASSISTANCE WITH THE EXPERIMENT AND TO CINDY ADAMS FOR VALUABLE DISCUSSIONS”… Mr. Blotz did the work and Ms. Adams explained to me what it meant.
• “A HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT AREA FOR EXPLORATORY STUDY”… A totally useless topic selected by my committee.
• “IT IS HOPED THAT THIS STUDY WILL STIMULATE FURTHER INVESTIGATION IN THIS FIELD”… I quit.