How Do I Become a Senior Lecturer?

Senior lecturers are education professionals whose main responsibilities include teaching, overseeing the work of graduate students and researchers, and performing some administrative duties, such as improving curricula of lecturers and participating in recruitment processes and departmental decision making. In most cases, senior lecturers are instructors who have been faculty members for some time and who are relatively established in their fields, though they often are not in tenured positions. To become a senior lecturer, it is often essential to have a doctorate degree in your field of choice, though in some instances it might be necessary to bypass this step by earning impressive professional credentials, such as respectable publications or exceptional career performances. A person who wants to become a senior lecturer must also be an excellent teacher, capable of performing administrative duties, such as recording and filing paperwork, and an active participant in his or her field.

In order to become a senior lecturer, your first step should be to earn a doctorate degree. To do this, you should earn an undergraduate degree in a field of your choice then think about in which specific area in your field you would like to concentrate. Most academic professionals have very specialized areas of interest. For instance, a person who earns an undergraduate degree in a field such as business information systems might pursue graduate study specifically in information system security.

If you are interested in a field with many real world, professional applications, such as finance or accounting, you might not need to earn a doctorate degree. Instead, you might earn a master's degree and perhaps professional certification. It is important then that you spend a number of years in the professional world, completing a number of high profile projects. If academic faculty believe that you have a strong understanding of your field and that you are able to effectively convey this information to students, it is possible to become a senior lecturer.

A person who wants to become a senior lecturer often does have to have some teaching experience prior to becoming a faculty member. Many students get their first teaching experience while they are in their graduate programs. It is common for programs to allow graduate students to teach undergraduate courses in exchange for partial tuition.

Administrators at many universities believe that their academic departments are strengthened by the presence of notable scholars. For this reason, a person who wants to become a senior lecturer should perform continual research and publish papers on his or her work. It might also be necessary to attend seminars and to present your research.