Ten years ago, I wrote about how to make the leap from industry into academia. I described campus visits, coffee meetings with department heads, the importance of being a “seat filler” at faculty events, and the patient art of staying top-of-mind for sessional opportunities.
Most of that advice is now obsolete.
Not because it was wrong — it worked for the world it described — but because the world it described no longer exists. The shift to online and hybrid learning, accelerated by the pandemic and now embedded permanently, has fundamentally rewired how higher education hires, who it hires, and what those hires actually do day-to-day.
In Part One, “How to become a university lecturer,” I helped you navigate the old labyrinth. In Part Two, I want to show you that there’s now a side door — and for many of the executives and senior practitioners who approach me, it’s a far better fit than the front entrance ever was.
Here’s what I’ve learned in the last ten years.
The campus visit is dead. Long live the Zoom interview.
It used to be that breaking into academia required physical proximity. You needed to be in the foyer at the right networking event, at the coffee shop near the business school, sitting on the industry advisory panel. Geography was destiny.
Today, the most interesting teaching opportunities are entirely online. You don’t need to live near a campus. You don’t need to fly interstate for a guest lecture. You don’t even need to be in the same country as your students.
This is genuinely transformative for industry practitioners. The senior consultant who lives in Silicon Valley can now supervise a research student in Sydney. The retired CFO in Melbourne can facilitate a finance unit for students based in South Korea, Auckland, and Singapore — all in the same cohort. The barrier of “I’m not near a university” has simply been removed.
The credentialing arms race has cooled
A decade ago, I told people they’d likely need to be doing or completing a PhD. That remains true for traditional permanent academic roles. But the rise of industry-focused, higher education providers has created a new category of opportunity where your industry credentials carry equal weight.
Chancellor Institute, for example, hires PhD-qualified facilitators for academic supervision but also welcomes senior practitioners with deep industry experience for facilitator roles. The combination is the point. Students at this level — many of them mid-career professionals themselves — want lecturers who have both done the thinking and done the doing.
If you’ve spent twenty years running supply chains, leading marketing teams, building tech startups, or managing hospitals, that experience is now genuinely recognised as a teaching credential, not merely a supplement to one.
The economics have improved (if you choose your battles)
In Part One I quoted the standard sessional rates for a lecture, a tutorial, and for marking. Those numbers were already modest a decade ago. With inflation, they’ve barely held their ground at the traditional universities.
But the modern, online-first providers operate with very different cost structures. No lecture theatres to maintain. No parking buildings. No vice-chancellor’s residence to refurbish. That overhead reduction translates, at the better providers, into more competitive rates for the people who actually deliver the teaching.
Just as importantly, the time economics have improved. A facilitator delivering an online unit doesn’t lose two hours a day to commuting. They don’t sit in three-hour curriculum committee meetings. They don’t fill out workload allocation forms. The hourly rate matters less when you can actually capture the hours.
Research supervision has been democratised
This one surprises people. Ten years ago, supervising PhD or Masters by Research students was something that happened only after years of building a research track record at a traditional university. It was, frankly, gatekept.
Today, higher education providers that offer research degrees actively seek experienced supervisors from outside their permanent staff — particularly PhD-qualified industry leaders who can bring real-world research questions to their students. If you have a doctorate and you’ve stayed connected to a field, you can supervise research students again, even if you left full-time academia years ago (or never entered it).
For many of the executives I see, this is the most rewarding work they end up doing. Their students are typically working professionals doing applied research on problems that actually matter to industry. The supervision is intellectually rich, the outputs are practical, and the relationships often last well beyond the degree.
The application process has been radically simplified
Part One described a courtship: months of coffee meetings, advisory panels, guest lectures, gradually moving towards a sessional offer. That was the only path because the traditional universities had no efficient way to evaluate outside talent at scale.
Online providers have built proper application systems. At Chancellor Institute, the application process is essentially: fill in a form, upload your CV, write a short bio, indicate whether you’re interested in teaching, research supervision, or both. Successful applicants go on an eligibility list and get called when opportunities match their expertise. It takes about fifteen minutes.
I should be honest — this efficiency cuts both ways. You won’t have a six-month relationship with a department head before being considered. But you also won’t need one. Your CV, your industry track record, and your written expression of interest do the work that a thousand coffee meetings used to do.
What hasn’t changed: the things that actually matter
Re-reading Part One, I’m struck by how much of the substantive advice still holds.
Be realistic about expectations. Teaching is still hard work, still requires preparation, still rewards those who genuinely care about students’ learning rather than their own performance.
Know who you want to teach. The dynamics with first-year undergraduates, executive education participants, and postgraduate research students remain very different. Online delivery doesn’t change that — if anything, it amplifies the differences.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The collaborative culture of higher education means most facilitators work with several institutions. This is healthier for you and healthier for the sector.
And nobody ever got rich teaching. That much is still, regrettably, true. But the people who do it for the right reasons — to share what they know, to shape the next generation, to stay intellectually alive in their later careers — still find it among the most rewarding work of their lives.
A practical next step
If Part One was about navigating a labyrinth, Part Two is about recognising that someone has built a perfectly serviceable bridge over the moat.
If you have a PhD, or significant senior industry experience, or both, and you’ve ever wondered whether teaching at university level is for you, I’d suggest the lowest-cost experiment available: spend fifteen minutes filling in an expression of interest with Chancellor Institute. Indicate whether you want to teach, supervise research, or both. Attach your CV. See what happens.
The worst case is that you’ve spent fifteen minutes and learned something about how the modern sector works. The best case is the start of a second career that, ten years from now, you might be writing Part Three about.
You can apply at chancellor.education/vacancies