The #1 thing I wish all graduate students knew about preparing for their academic job talk or teaching demo
If you are getting ready for the academic job market, then this post is for you. 💪✨
Just in case you're new to my blog, hello, my name is Dr. Echo Rivera, and I help people who share data create engaging presentations.
And for years now, I have been helping a lot of academics with their job talks and teaching demos.
So, I wanted to make this post to talk about probably the biggest mistake that I see people make when it comes to preparing for their future job talk, or teaching demo. 😩
But before we get started…
If you’d like to learn how to create better presentations, then be sure to sign up for my free training to get started!
Topics in this post
Getting ready for the academic job market
How graduate schools set you up to fail when it comes to preparing you for a job talk, or teaching demo
Getting ready for the academic job market
So, ideally this post found its way to you well before you have even applied to any academic positions.
If you have already applied for positions or you have a campus visit, then this post might be a little challenging to read. 😥
Not to freak you out but this post would've been really useful months ago, maybe even a year ago.
But better late than never, right?
The reason it's so important that you read this post now is because I know you have a lot going on right now.
Like so much. 😱
Probably some stuff with your dissertation, your defense (maybe you're submitting it), or just dealing with graduation.
Maybe you have one or two final classes that you need to finish.
Maybe you have some research or teaching responsibilities that you need to wrap up.
Plus, I don't know the whole figuring out your career path thing. 🤷♀️
And there's the whole thing where now (or soon), you're going to be doing things like finding and reading application instructions, looking for job postings, and then actually preparing your application materials.
That is so much going on. 😳
And if you are like 99% of academics, then I know you're not thinking about something that really should be on your radar. 🚨
The job talk and teaching demo.
I know you are probably thinking that I am completely out of touch with reality right now, but hear me out.
Because look, I didn't want to make this post because I know you're under a lot of stress right now and I hate adding to it. 😫
And this is not going to be a message that people want to read, but I had to make this.
I had to do it because every single job talk season, I have candidates email me in a panic saying:
"I just came across your work. I need emergency help with my job talk.”
“Can you please help, can you please design my job talk?”
“Can we do a one hour kickstart kind of session to make sure I'm on the right path?"
And every single time I can't help because they reached out too late. ⌛️
It is heartbreaking, it is terrible. 💔
And I want to prevent it.
If you are here reading this post because I had to say, "No, I am so sorry," I promise it is not because I'm just heartless and because I don't care.
I do care, a lot.
And that's what this post is for.
To understand all of this, we need to go through this together. 🙌
I can see where you're coming from and why it feels possible to do it in this way. 🧐
In a healthy, reasonable academic system, it would make sense for you to focus on these things first like your:
dissertation
courses
research and teaching
career path
And then it would make sense for you to focus on:
reading those job postings
reading application instructions
And then you focus on:
applying for positions
worrying about the job talk when you actually have an invite.
That makes sense in a lot of ways. 🤔
“I'm not going to worry about this thing, until I actually get the invite. Because I need to do these other things to get the invite.”
Totally get that.
And I would love more than anything for that to be the way things work.
If I were under control of this whole academic hiring system, I would change a lot of things, including this.
But in order for that to actually work, you need one of two things. 💡
2. How graduate schools set you up to fail when it comes to preparing you for a job talk or teaching demo
a. This only works if grad school taught you how to create effective and engaging presentations.
First, this only works if your graduate program provided you with the comprehensive training that you need to create effective and engaging presentations.
So a question for you, did your graduate program do this? 🤔
Did you receive formal, comprehensive training on how to create effective engaging presentations? (Meaning like a full graduate level class on how to do this).
Or, an intensive training that was 40 hours or more?
And yes, that is actually what it takes to learn the skills you need to put together an effective job talk or teaching demo that works in this extremely ridiculous, competitive market. 😲
It’s a challenge to combine high level written communication skills, verbal communication skills, and visual communication skills.
So yeah, I would be shocked if your answer to this is yes. 😱
Because the most common ways that graduate schools teach how to present data are either not formal or they're not comprehensive.
There are 4 common ways grad students are taught how to present their data and why they will never work. 🙅♀️
1. Osmosis 👀
One of the four most common ways are through osmosis, meaning no one ever took the time to explicitly give you presentation advice, because think about it, if a grad program thinks that something is really important and needs formal training, then there's usually a class for it.
So, if it's never talked about and if it's not included in the curriculum, then that kind of means they're expecting you to learn it in other maybe informal ways.
It's kind of like osmosis, like just learn by watching.
2. Tips & tricks & hacks passed down from mentor to mentor 👉
The second common way is sort of this informal passing of knowledge from one person to the next.
Tips, tricks, and hacks passed down from mentor to student, mentor to mentee.
That kind of thing. Or, like a senior grad student to a junior grad student, and so on.
Almost like this verbal wisdom being passed around.
3. 60-90 min training/webinar 👩💻
The third way is a little bit more formal.
It's a very, very short 60 to 90 minute in person training or webinar.
This is usually done by a third party (I used to do these).
Someone who has expertise not just in how to create engaging presentations but knows how to teach it to others.
So formal, but not comprehensive.
4. 1/2 day or full day workshop (usually at a conference) 🧳
And then finally, if you are lucky (or if you have extra resources, or your department does), then you might actually find yourself getting a half day or full day workshop.
Sweet!
This is again, usually done by a presentation skills trainer.
And in academia, this is usually done at a conference (like a pre-conference workshop). Not always, but there are departments who hire someone to come in and provide this training for that day.
Again, this is something that I used to do as well.
And formal? Yes.
And in terms of how comprehensive it is? It's better than a 90 minute webinar, but it is not comprehensive enough to prepare you for a job talk or teaching demo.
Now I'm curious, does this describe what your grad program did (or does), in terms of presentation skills training?
Sometimes this is referred to as data visualization training.
Though those aren't necessarily the same thing, but still, I'm curious.
If so, which ones did your grad program do? 🧐
So, why are these not enough? What are the problems with these?
Starting with the first two: osmosis and this passing down of tips and tricks.
For either of these to work, it would need to be the norm for most academics to present in an effective and engaging way.
Death by PowerPoint would have to be rare, instead of the status quo that we know it is.
So, that's why this will never work.
Because if we keep continuing to present the SAD way, the Standard Academic Delivery way, then this is what people are going to be learning and sharing with each other. 🤦♀️
So, those don't work.
Now what about these last two? 🤔
They're a bit more formal, but they're not fully comprehensive.
The reason why you want a comprehensive training is because short trainings often make participants feel good about their presentation skills, without actually helping them develop advanced presentation skills (the type of presentation skills you need for a job talk or teaching demo).
Remember, we're specifically talking about preparing you for job talks and teaching demos. 💡
That's the context of this post.
The risk with these short training options is that for either of these to work, especially for that one hour or 90 minute webinar, presentation skills would have to be relatively easy to learn. 💁♀️
For example, it would have to be just a:
PowerPoint class
or slide design basics workshop
or data visualization workshop
or storytelling workshop
or 10 tips for better presentations type of thing
Part of one of those skills is usually what you could learn in say up to a full day workshop. 😨
So, this will never work because to create a memorable and impactful presentation (which again, is what you need to do for a job talk, teaching demo, or a high stakes presentation), what you need are a combination of those skills.
Memorable and impactful presentations require skills in:
Software: PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, etc
Scripting
Storytelling
Data visualization
Psychology: To understand your audience and create a presentation that gets them excited about your work, and shows that you know how to communicate to them.
Graphic Design: Visual thinking
Creativity
Supplementals: How to create supplementals like handouts
What human could possibly learn this in four to eight hours? 🤯
Let alone one hour or 90 minutes. It's just not realistic.
This is why I often say that graduate school sets you up to fail, when it comes to preparing you for a job talk or teaching demo. 😥
Learning by osmosis, or just with tips, tricks, and hacks, that is a guaranteed way that you will continue the legacy of death by PowerPoint.
And it's not even your fault.
It's not because you are bad, or there's something wrong with you.
It's a problem with the training approach.
And look, just so you know, it is almost impossible to get an offer if you have a really bad job talk or teaching demo. 😩
And then there's the short training (so formal, but not comprehensive) that tends to lead you to creating a kind of good, kind of bad presentation.
Something that won't impress a committee because it's just kind of mixed. 🤷♀️
Quite a few clients have come to me after getting a full day data visualization workshop specifically. And they do have a few really beautiful slides, with beautiful graphs. And it's like, yay!
But literally every slide before that, and every slide after that is death by PowerPoint. 😞
And then there's just this lack of a cohesive story and not having a good storyboard from start to finish.
By the time they get to presenting their graphs, the audience is gone. The audience is completely disengaged. 😐
So, ultimately it doesn't work as a cohesive package.
You need to be able to have that cohesive package and it all needs to be good from start to finish, in a very consistent and balanced way.
Not having comprehensive training leads to imbalanced presentations. Comprehensive training balances that out. 💡
So, has graduate school prepared you for a successful job talk or teaching demo?
Not if your training has been one of those four options, or even all four of those options. 🙅♀️
But like I said, there was kind of a backup option.
There's one of two things that needs to happen.
So, if you don't have that training, then what's the backup?
The whole strategy of waiting to worry about your job talk until you get the invite (until it basically feels relevant and urgent), would be totally fine if you had enough time between the invite and the visit to catch up and learn this skill, AND enough time to then create that effective job talk and teaching demo.
b. This only works if you have enough time between the invite & visit to (a) catch up and learn this skill AND (b) create an effective job talk/demo
So, wouldn't that be nice. 😆
As my mom always says, "If you're gonna dream, dream big."
Because back to reality, there is something horrible happening to academic job applicants right now.
A lot of people seem to be getting less than two weeks notice, before they have their job talk or teaching demo. ‼️😭
I don't know how widespread this is, but it is the number one comment that people leave in this video that I created about tackling procrastination and how to have a stress free presentation design workflow.
That video does not apply to job talks though because, first of all, it's stressful.
You can't create a job talk without stress. It's a very stressful thing. 😩
And, you have less than two weeks, which is absolutely horrible.
I think this is awful, and I'm so sorry for anybody who has to do this. That's just not enough time.
I feel like six weeks is really what people should be getting at minimum. Eight weeks would actually be ideal in my world.
But I don't control the system. 🫤
So again, think about it.
What human could possibly learn all of that, and then go forth and create a professional yet engaging job talk or teaching demo that gets an offer, all in less than two weeks. 😱
Even if you had literally no other responsibilities, no job, no class, no dissertation, no kids, no family.
I don't even think this would be possible. 😥
So, do you see what I'm saying?
That's why it is so ideal to have this part of learning presentation skills completely done before you even apply for positions.
You should know how to do all of this before you even apply. 📝
Because you're only going to have two weeks to actually put together your job talk.
Oof! So no, you're not going to have enough time to do both.
You're not going to have enough time to wait until you get the job offer to worry about improving your presentations.
At this point, I can see a question forming. 💭
“What if I do it after I apply, but before I get the invite?”
Fair question! If that's where you are right now and you've already applied, then yeah, do it. 🙌
Don't wait. Start learning right now because it's better now than never.
It'll be stressful, it'll be a lot of change at once. It's going to be a steep learning curve, but it's way better than if you waited for the invite.
But if you are asking because you want permission to procrastinate, I'm not granting that permission. 🙅♀️
Please don't wait.
Because, here's the thing, it is not just time in terms of literal hours that it takes to learn this.
Like any skill, part of what you need is practice time. ⏱
You need months (or years) of practice, so that it is easy, fast, and you have a plan in your head so you can do it in seconds.
I can build a lot of my slides in seconds, in minutes, because I have so much practice.
And you need months, if not years of practice to get that fast.
Here's an analogy. 💭
Imagine your friend has said this to you:
"I know I'm going to have the most important piano recital of my career at some point two years from now. I'll only get two weeks notice before the actual recital date. But you know what? I have so many other things going on in my life right now so I'm going to wait to learn the piano until I get the notice."
What would you tell your friend? 🤔
That's what it kind of feels like for me when I hear people say:
"Yes, I do want an academic position. Yes, I understand that presentation skills are a part of it, but those are soft skills that need to go on the back burner. I need to prioritize other things."
That is a huge mistake.
And it is why I am making this post in hopes that it reaches you in time. ⏳
So, think of it like learning the piano.
You have to do a little bit here and there. You have to learn in advance, so that when you get that two weeks notice, it's no big deal. 😌
It'll still be stressful, but you're like: "I got this, I can do this, I can put together great slides very quickly."
So yeah, not good news I know, I'm sorry. 😞
Now if you're savvy, you might have actually thought of a third scenario where this could actually work out.
Maybe you're thinking:
“Hold up, but if bad presentations are the norm, maybe the search committee will be expecting it and I don't need to have this type of engaging visual presentation that you're talking about?”
c. This only works if search committees are okay with standard talks
I see where you're coming from. Because honestly that would be fair.
It would be super fair because the committee would have been doing death by PowerPoint themselves, and they've been in charge long enough to not provide presentation skills training.
So, they're kind of the ones who are part of the system and they didn't give you enough notice.
You'd think they would be more understanding. 🫤
Like if someone in the committee said: "Wow, that job talk was so confusing and boring. We can't hire them.”
And then others responded with: "But our presentations are boring and confusing too. We shouldn't judge them for what we do!” and “Plus, we only gave them two weeks’ notice and we know grad school doesn't include training.”
That would absolutely be the fair way to do this.
In a supportive, healthy, compassionate academic system, that would happen. 💯
Wow, now we're really dream it big aren't we?
That would be amazing.
But that's not what's going to happen.
That's not how it works, that's not how humans work.
Humans are kind of judgey. 😬
And we really like to project, and we really do judge other people when they kind of do the exact same thing we do.
We do all sorts of fun cognitive tricks, and use all sorts of cognitive biases to not even see how we're actually doing the same thing. 😳
So, when it comes to the job talk, yeah, it's going to kind of go like: "Wow, that job talk was confusing and boring. We can't hire them.”
"Yup."
“Agreed.”
Just remember when it comes to the job talk, you are being judged on how well you can communicate your work. 🗣
And that means, you need to have a mind blowing, memorable, engaging professional presentation. Full stop. 🤯
It doesn't matter what the committee does.
It only matters what you do in that moment.
So no, I am so sorry, this does not apply either.
That's why I said earlier, that I am really hoping this post reaches you before you even apply. The earlier the better. 📆
That way you have the time that you need to invest in your presentation skills.
Is it fair? No, no, it's not. 😔
And I know it sucks.
Especially if you're coming to this post because your job talk is in a week.
Or, you've already done a few job talks and they haven't been going well.
But I am here to help. I got your back and it is never too late. 💪✨
You are here now, we can fix this.
So first let's assume it's the ideal situation, and you are watching this in advance.
Lucky you! 👏💯🤸♀️🌈
For you, the preparation for your job talk and teaching demo should start years before your job talk if possible.
I would say, in my ideal world where I'm dreaming big, you start this after you've defended your masters or something like that.
That would be my recommendation for the most stress free, fun, easy way. 😁
That gives you the most opportunities to actually practice it, and practice these skills in a variety of contexts like guest lectures, conference presentations, webinars, that kind of thing.
That would be my ideal. ✨
So, if it’s already past that time for you, then the next best time is now.
Because again, the ultimate goal is that by the time you get the invite, you:
feel like a pro at this,
know you're a visual thinker,
know how to design,
know how to storyboard that presentation.
You know all of that, so you can spend that full two weeks just on creating it. 🔥
You don't need to learn anything new. You're just focusing on creating the presentation.
So that is the goal, and why it would be ideal for you to start years early if you're hearing this in time.
And if that's the case, if all that work has already been done and you already know how to design presentation slides, then that's when it really makes sense to bring someone like me in at the last second with two weeks or less. 🙋♀️
And then that's when we can really tailor it to the job talk situation.
We can focus more on things like the storyboard and then that's when I can help.
But it's too much to try to do both of the design skills and the presentation skills along with actually creating the job talk.
So, if you’ve got that ideal situation and you are ready to get started with your training, then make sure that you check out my free training workshop.
It's called The 6 Gears of Creating Engaging Presentations.
It’s where I talk about the system I use so that it doesn't take forever to create engaging presentations.
And you sort of build that momentum so you get faster over time.
That is the next best step that I recommend if you haven't applied for any academic positions yet!
If you have already applied but you haven't gotten any invites and you are like, "Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. I need these skills right now."
Then I have a special note for you here, so please read it.
And basically, a nutshell version is that I mentioned in the beginning that I train academics and I have an online professional development program.
This is sort of the comprehensive and formal training that I was talking about.
I show you how to learn all of these skills across these courses.
So, if that sounds like something you're interested in, then be sure to check out this link.
If you have already gotten that invite to a job talk, or you've already been giving invites to a job talk, then I'm really sorry.
I know this was probably a stressful post for you to read, but I have a special note for you as well and you can check out that special message here. I am here to help however I can.
I do hope that this helped. Again, I know this probably wasn't the news that you wanted to hear but honesty is what is needed.
Thank you so much for reading.
If you know someone who could really use this information right now, please share the post with them.
And again, I do have a free training workshop to get you started. 💪🔥
Thanks again for being here and reading to the end.
I hope you have a great day, and I will see you in the next one. Bye! 👋
with joy,
Echo Rivera, PhD
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