How Executives Can Build a Side Career in Teaching
Many executives — seeking an intellectual challenge and looking to give back — are intrigued by the idea of teaching. Here are three strategies business professionals can follow to position themselves for an adjunct professorship, whether their goal is a part-time side project, or a potential career to step into post-retirement. First, identify warm leads. As with any job search, you’re far more likely to get noticed if someone on the inside can vouch for you. Second, prepare your pitch. You’ll want to keep this to approximately two paragraphs. Third, be ready to produce a CV and syllabus. If you pass muster with your interview, CV, and syllabus, you’re well on your way to a teaching gig.
Many executives — seeking an intellectual challenge and looking to give back — are intrigued by the idea of teaching. For nearly a decade, I’ve taught executive education at business schools around the world, from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia University to leading b-schools in Brazil, Russia, Kazakhstan, France, Spain, and more.
As a result, I’m frequently asked: how can you land a teaching gig? Here are three strategies business professionals can follow to position themselves for an adjunct professorship, whether their goal is a part-time side project, or a potential career to step into post-retirement.
First, identify warm leads. As with any job search, you’re far more likely to get noticed if someone on the inside can vouch for you. Make a list of connections you know who work, full-time or part-time, at the universities you’re interested in approaching. (LinkedIn can help.) If you can’t find any, even tenuous connections can be useful.
One friend, eager to help me years ago when I mentioned my desire to teach, had attended Duke’s Fuqua School of Business as an MBA student. She’d kept in touch with the admissions director — clearly not the right person for me to speak with — and offered to put me in touch. Grateful for any connection, I said yes, and the admissions director ultimately referred me to the head of the executive education program, who hired me.
If you have no connections whatsoever, you can still make a cold approach. Years ago, this helped me land a guest lecture at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. The most relevant people to approach will vary by university, so it’s partly trial and error, but good bets include department chairs, the heads of “centers” or initiatives (for instance, a center for healthcare management), or program heads (executive education, the executive MBA program, etc.).
Second, prepare your pitch. Once you’ve identified who to talk to, you’ll need to have a short pitch ready. Don’t overwhelm them with information at this point; you’ll want to keep this to approximately two paragraphs, so they don’t permanently relegate your message to the “I’ll read this later” file.
The first paragraph should include a short bio, laden with social proof that shows why you’d be a good choice to teach for their program. Contrary to many people’s perceptions, as an adjunct professor, you don’t need to have a Ph.D. (unlike those who are pursuing a full-time, tenure-track career in academia). I’ve taught for leading business schools on four continents with only a master’s degree — in theology.
Academic credentials are great, and cite them if you have them, but what matters here is your relevant professional expertise. For instance, as I describe in my book Stand Out, key metrics you could cite include things like having worked for well-known companies, held high-profile roles, been quoted in leading industry journals, written for prominent publications, received awards in your field, etc.
It’s also useful to cite any previous teaching experience you have, whether it’s leading internal company workshops or speaking at conferences. Academicians won’t be completely reassured unless you’ve taught at other universities previously, but this can take the edge off their worries because it shows you’re at least a decent public speaker and won’t freeze in front of the classroom.
The second paragraph should include ideas about what sort of classes or programs you might be able to teach. Take the time in advance to scour their course list, which will be available online, so you have a sense of what they currently offer. You can suggest a mix of pre-existing courses you could teach (you never know if a professor will be going on leave shortly and they need a replacement) and new ones you could create. To that end, identify holes you can fill in the course catalogue. One way to do this is to compare and contrast between the offerings of different schools. If University A has a course in change management but University B doesn’t — and this is your area of expertise — then you may want to propose it, because similar schools obviously value the topic.
Third, be ready to produce a CV and syllabus. If you receive a positive response to your inquiry, your contact may suggest an in-person meeting or video call at this point, or will ask you to send along two items. (Both steps are close to mandatory; only the order varies.) The first item they’ll request is a curriculum vitae. CVs are a format popular in academia and are similar to resumes, but are much more detailed (see this article for a useful run-down of the differences). Set aside at least one to two hours to flesh out your resume and transform it into a viable CV.
The second item your contact will likely request is a syllabus of the course you propose to teach, if you’re developing it from scratch. (If they’re interested in having you teach an existing course, they’ll probably send you the last professor’s syllabus as a starting point, which you can then modify.) To create a new syllabus, you’ll need to specify the topics you propose to cover and the order in which you’ll teach them, among other things. The Chronicle of Higher Education shares a detailed guide on crafting a syllabus. The process — which is essentially distilling your entire concept for the course — can take anywhere from 5 hours (if you already have a clear vision of the course and your reading list) to dozens of hours, depending on the amount of research you feel you need to do.
If you’ve passed muster with your interview, CV, and syllabus, you’re well on your way to a teaching gig; the only question is timing. Sometimes the process moves quite fast; when I first connected with Duke Fuqua, they were already looking for someone to teach communication skills and social media, so they plugged me into their teaching roster in less than three months. In other cases, the lead time is much longer, because programs are set far in advance (I was first approached by Skolkovo, a top Russian business school, in November 2017, and completed my first engagement with them 13 months later).
Teaching college, graduate, or executive education programs can be a rewarding experience. To be clear, the money for adjunct teaching is not great: paltry at the university level, better for business and executive education programs. But it’s a way for professionals to master new challenges, share their hard-earned knowledge, and gain a valuable new credential. If you’ve longed to head back to the classroom, these strategies can help you break in and develop a new facet of your portfolio career.
Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist and professional speaker who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out. You can receive her free Recognized Expert self-assessment.
How Executives Can Build a Side Career in Teaching
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