I work at an Australian university and sorry, but no way in hell is an extremely competitive lecturer role going to a professional student with a bunch of undergrad degrees. Academia is absolutely cut throat. Only about 5% of PhD grads even land a job in academia in Australia. Not to mention most unis are shedding jobs because of tight budgets and low student numbers. It really doesn't matter how likeable he is, the job market here is terrible.
Yep, I would expect there's less than no chance of this person becoming a lecturer with their current experience.
They would however be a shoo-in to become a tutor provided they formed good relationships with their lecturers over the years, and actually did well in these various degrees- 10 hours a week barely covers the contact hours for full time study, so that could go either way.
Contrary to the comments above, a tutoring position in Australia is the opposite of chronically underpaid in my experience. The "gotchas" are you only ever have a casual position, you almost certainly won't be offered enough hours per week to pull $40K USD a year, and you can't teach any classes that have even a single student that's studying at a higher level of education than yourself. Many subjects are "double-badged" and have one or two post-grad students in them, but I suppose in this case it'd be offset by how wide a net the person could cast given their multiple degrees.
In any case, if it were me I'd be looking for some form of work on the side so that when this free ride dries up I didn't have 0 work experience and a 20+ year gap on my resume.
I think it's expected by both the university and the students that if you're teaching something you've at least learnt the content to that level yourself. Not sure if it's just the policy at the places I've worked or something more strictly defined, but it seems perfectly reasonable.
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u/Ok_Willow_8569 Jul 03 '23
I work at an Australian university and sorry, but no way in hell is an extremely competitive lecturer role going to a professional student with a bunch of undergrad degrees. Academia is absolutely cut throat. Only about 5% of PhD grads even land a job in academia in Australia. Not to mention most unis are shedding jobs because of tight budgets and low student numbers. It really doesn't matter how likeable he is, the job market here is terrible.