What do your lecturers do when they aren’t in the classroom?
When we choose to become academics, it is because we want to teach students like you, to inspire you and make a difference to your lives. Have you ever wondered what we do when we aren’t in the classroom?
For every lecture and tutorial you have, there is a lot of preparation that has to go on in the background. For example:
- Updating our slides
- Preparing what we want to say when we present our slides
- Reading the latest research so that we are sharing up to date insights with you
- Finding relevant examples and developing new case studies
- Thinking about how we encourage you to participate actively in the classroom
- Identifying clear links to your assessment tasks
When we aren’t preparing our teaching we have lots of activities to do to try and give you the best possible experience:
- Meeting our Personal Tutees
- Responding to your emails
- Providing feedback on your initial assessment ideas
- Enhancing our IT skills
- Talking to people from local organisations to try and organise guest speakers
- Marking your work
- Adding new resources to our MyAberdeen sites
Once you graduate and are working in an organisation, you will be asked to take part in something called Continuous Professional Development (CPD) as it's important that even once you have your degree that you constantly update your knowledge and experiences. As academics we have to do the same – we can’t stand still! CPD might involve:
- Reading journal articles
- Attending formal training courses (in person or online)
- Working with a Coach or Mentor
- Presenting papers at academic conferences
- Learning about the latest learning and teaching techniques
- Meeting academics from other Universities to share best practice
- Going out to visit organisations
- Engaging in academic debates
- Upskilling our IT skills
In your lectures you will often hear us talking about our own research – have you ever wondered what we do and why? We will explain more about this in a future blog, but basically we undertake research to make original contributions to knowledge so that managers, students and fellow academics can benefit from our work. Recently, research by Dr Alex Ala, Gianluca Andresani, Dr Feim Blakcori, Dr Rami Hamdi and Dr Gary Mulholland has been published in prestigious world-leading academic journals.
If you have visited the library recently you may also have realised that some of the textbooks we use to teach you are actually written by people here at AFG College with the University of Aberdeen! Examples include:
- Research Methods in Human Resource Management by Dr Fiona Robson
- International Enterprise Education: Perspectives on Theory and Practice by Dr Gary Mulholland
Everyone that teaches you brings with them a wide range of fantastic experiences from industry and/or other Universities. This means that we are sought after to do consultancy work for organisations, this gives us fascinating insights into how they operate and allows us to make a difference to the national and international business community.
In recognition of our experiences in UK Universities, we also get invited to contribute as External Examiners where we review the assessments and student work that has been marked at other UK Universities. This helps us to make sure that standards are the same for students no matter where they study.
Many of your Lecturers are also heavily involved with their professional bodies, this can involve sitting on Committees and having the opportunity to influence their future direction. This helps us to ensure that we are at the forefront of what is going on in the business world and can share those insights in the classroom with you.
Finally, our expertise is often recognised by national and international bodies who request our expertise. For example, I have been working with the British Standards Institute (BSI) to lead the development of a new ISO standard on employee engagement. This has given me the opportunity to lead a team of senior HR experts and academics from 19 different countries and I will be using the outputs and experience from this work to inform my teaching – ensuring that you benefit from the very latest thinking in the field of HRM.
I hope that this has given you some interesting insights into what we do when we aren’t with you in the classroom.
