I think the warning signs have been there for many many years. I remember Charles Clarke (?) or someone in the government talking about the economical importance of university research and the practical inability to fund "blue skies" thinking at a high level. This is all well and good but the problem is the same government decided to push for more people to get university degrees which of course increased the number of lecturing staff required as well as the absolute number of graduates wanting to go into academia. All this whilst failing to increase the funding in the arts, humanities and social sciences at matching rate???

I know they do that in industry but I have not seen it done in academia. Most departments I have encountered in my institution still do it by hand.

I would be surprised if it is just your CV - it would have to be very, very bad for it to be the case, e.g. you forgot to list your publications, you wrote it in Chinese, etc. :S

Are you getting poor references? By poor this does not necessarily mean that the referees are slating you but it could be something like your referee just printing off a very imperonsal standard letter (very common with busy senior academics). Are your referees sufficiently "heavyweight"?

Have you talked to your HoD or other senior academic about your career plans? If you are being rejected so frequently they can probably tell you straight away what is going wrong.

Many people will be uncertain about standards in Pakistan. The key is to produce papers in well-respected journals in your field then it really doesn't matter where you did your PhD.

It is weird that this is not better known about because it was already happening in 2000 when I first started university.


There are downsides though. The overall academic sector will become a lot smaller, in particular, the new universities and the Arts and Humanities are going to take a big hit. The 50% target has generated a lot of jobs in the academic sector and reducing it back down is tricky. Also, there are specialist courses, like Computer Animation, which are very well taught by some new universities and are crucial for maintaining Britain's skills diversity. Will these survive if the academic sector is shrunk? I don't know.

I think changing the "two-tier" system is more the domain of the primary and secondary systems. By the time people get to A-Levels the damage is already done and I am not a fan of positive discrimination.

If Science and Technology is important then more money should be invested in it not by taking it from the Arts and Humanities education but from a specific national science and technology budget. It should be noted that Parliament only recently re-instated the Science and Technology committee after it was scrapped in 2007 and made part of the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills. The reinstatement occurred because politicians realised that discussion of science funding and policy got lost within the considerable remit of the DIUS and was being badly neglected. This really infuriates me because actions like these totally contradict the public statements about "science" being important to the country.

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I think the real worrying thing for me is the "commercial rates" on loans and the emphasis on Science over the Humanities.

The current income contingent repayment loans is probably one of the most balanced deals that students and taxpayer can get. The student only pays when they earn above a certain income threshold and the interest payments are absorbed by the taxpayer. There is a partnership between State and Student and to me the balance of the burden seems reasonable in that the Student repays much of the cost of their education but the State provides a safety net and prevents the total money owed spirally out of control.

I think if we start down the road of charging commercial rates and emphasising the "economically useful" subjects - this will do considerable damage to this student-state partnership. At the moment, people who study the Arts and Humanities already find it tough but, if we get into a situation where students take on the majority or all the risk for their tertiary education, I cannot see why anyone would want to study the Humanities at all!

No matter how tight the State's purse strings are it is necessary to maintain funding in these areas and we should not dismiss them as economically irrelevant.

(PS I'm a scientist!)

It is not unexpected or uncommon. Academics are strange beasts to be honest. They are expected to teach but few have formal teaching training. They are expected to act as managers but often receive little or no training in this area. And as long as they get published and attract grant money they can be as incompetent as they like in terms of teaching and management.

Also, "network" as much as possible, if there are any conferences or meetings, start doing the rounds and put the word around that you need a job. it works.

Teaching is already affected with universities reluctant to take on new permanent teaching staff and in some cases offering incentives for voluntary or compulsory redundancy. Research will see a hit but the full effect may not be observed for another 12-18 months because research council spending plans tend to operate over 3-5 year cycles.

> Trouble is, i've yet to find any jobs for which I tick every box on the job advertisement

This is entirely normal. You cannot expect to be able to fulfil all the job requirements and often prospective employer will not be able to find the "perfect" postdoc either so they will have to compromise.

Beware of "inside jobs" though. Sometimes you see adverts with impossibly detailed job specs which no one, other than someone already in the group and is being lined up for the post, can fulfil.

Make a lot of noise and start complaining! You are paying an awful lot of money for your education so make sure the university is fulfilling its end of the bargain!

I think it is a question of how good you are and whether you have the confidence to believe that you can command a permanent academic post in the future. This is something were you need to talk frankly to your supervisor and other academic colleagues about. Unfortunately it is so competitive out there that if you are only "ok" then you are likely to be facing a lot of rolling contract work or a lot of teaching. Key indicators are whether you have any burning research questions that you want to answer and practical, well thought out ideas about how to investigate these questions. If you have those and both the passion and skills to do it then go for academia.

What field are you in? What are your options outside of academia?

When applying for my postdoc, I applied for numerous jobs in industry and other field unrelated to what I did my PhD in. It was a good way of finding out where someone of my skills and background could be needed, what kind of income I could command and generally to see what options I had. This maybe a good time for you to get out there and have a look around.

Also, have you spoken to your Head of Department of the Head of your Faculty/Division? They can often give you a no-holds-barred reply about your future prospects in academia. It maybe that you are lacking something that you are unaware of but which senior academics can identify straight away or your record sadly may not be as good as you think it is.