How Long Between when one gets a PhD and when one obtains an academic job in archaeology?
Lots of people ask that question so I set out to find the answer, at least for UK based archaeologists. As part of looking at the number of staff positions post I also noted down years staff obtained a job and year they obtain their PhD. Now the records are so and not every department website has this information so I had to look at personal websites and academia.edu. Even then the record is not complete but out of 442 archaeology academic staff in the UK I managed to get this information for 159 (36%). The results are-
| Years Between | Number of Staff | |
| negative | 11 | 7% |
| 0 | 23 | 14% |
| 1 | 18 | 11% |
| 2 | 17 | 11% |
| 3 | 10 | 6% |
| 4 | 21 | 13% |
| 5 | 12 | 8% |
| 6 | 4 | 3% |
| 7 | 11 | 7% |
| 8 | 3 | 2% |
| 9 | 9 | 6% |
| 10+ | 20 | 13% |
They range from negative 10 years (yes, they were a lecturer for 10 years before they got their PhD) to 29 years after obtain a PhD. The average was 4.32 years between PhD and permanent academic job. It would seem your best odds to obtain an academic job is within the first few years of obtaining a PhD BUT not all is lost and it is possible to get a job later (3 decades!), but less likely. These numbers are a little more tricky as this ranges from people getting jobs from 1970 to present and there is a difference in the numbers between decades. I will post about that tomorrow.
November 25th, 2011 → 3:53 pm
[...] Open Access Archaeology ← How Long Between a PhD and Academic Archaeology Job? [...]
November 28th, 2011 → 8:23 pm
[...] In my last few posts I have looked at how long it takes between a PhD and an Academic Job both overall and by decade. As part of that same dataset I also collected information on where academic [...]