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This was originally published at The Rumpus on April 24, 2017.
By mid-morning, it was so hot her breath felt as if it were being drawn back into her. She took the tin washbasin out to the front yard, filled it with cold water, and shampooed her hair. If she turned her head, she could watch her reflection in the kitchen window as she leaned over the tub. Her hips seemed so wide in that position, tapering down from the wraparound skirt to legs that were girl-like. She watched her hair turn from yellow to brown with the wetness.
Around noon, with her hair now sticking to the back of her neck with perspiration, she heard the screen door slam once, then again. It was odd for him to come home in the middle of the day.
She went to the kitchen but he was already gone. This was the way he did things. She looked at the kitchen table for a box, some sign of the gift she was sure he would sneak in and leave her just as he had every anniversary. She heard his truck backing down the dirt drive. There was no chance she’d catch up with him.
This time of day, the sun came in through the slatted windows and settled on the yellow linoleum in stripes. Now she saw it. There lay her gift, basking in the sunlight. A gray-green lizard the size of a shoe. It stood so still she thought it was fake. A joke he had played on her, like the time he told her he was fixing the kitchen faucet and put a gag faucet where the real one had been. She remembered how she ducked and screamed, thinking she would be splashed with water when the new faucet came off in her hands.
But this was not plastic. He had tied a long piece of thick string from one of the lizard’s ankles to the kitchen table. Around the neck was a thin yellow crinkly ribbon that she had seen him pull out of the junk drawer the day before. She had suspected it was to wrap her gift. The ribbon was tied sideways around the animal’s neck in a bow. The lizard squinted as it turned its head slowly to look around the room. Its bulgy, liquid eyes scared her. She moved and the thin plates of skin on its back stood up. Now it turned its head swiftly and the scales rippled as if it were shivering.
She heard herself sigh, rubbed her hands on her skirt, and walked toward the white pine cupboards, making a full circle around the lizard’s body. It watched her. She found an aluminum pie pan under the sink and grabbed the pitcher of cold water from the refrigerator. She put the pan on the floor, poured the water in, and inched it over to the animal with a broom, backing away quickly and waiting to see if it would drink. The lizard sat on its squat legs and narrowed its lids into slits like cat’s-eye marbles. It appeared to be asleep.
Throughout the day, she kept going to the kitchen to check on it, afraid it might get loose in the house. In the late afternoon, she stood a distance away and threw a leaf of Bibb lettuce by the pie pan. She didn’t want anything to do with it, but she didn’t want it to starve. The creature, startled, was set into motion, skittering back and forth, first in one direction, then another, yanking itself back again and again by the string. For a while, she took a seat across from it, leaning forward. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she said.
She finished cleaning the house and had no choice now but to come back to the kitchen. She had to clear out everything to wash the floor, which meant moving the tables and chairs and putting it somewhere. Outside was where she wanted it. She could tell him it escaped, ran away. But that wouldn’t be honest and if they had promised each other anything when they married, it was honesty. Letting his gift run away, or rather, pushing his gift out the door, wouldn’t be a white lie. It would be flat-out deception.
She moved the chairs into the hallway and tried to untie the string, cursing him for making a knot she couldn’t undo. She went to the junk drawer, took out the scissors and, grasping the string, clipped it quickly and led the lizard toward the kitchen door, then the porch, like a dog on a leash. When she opened the screen door, the lizard tried to run back inside, as if it were afraid of the outdoors. She pulled it along, but it planted all four paws firmly on the floor. Its nails made a pitiful sound on the linoleum, then became stuck on the doorjamb. She gave a tug and over it rolled, like a child’s toy truck. Another tug, and it was up again and furious and ran towards her. It followed her the whole length of the porch until she scooted over the banister and tied it to one of the posts. She walked around to the back of the house and let herself in.
What a gift, she thought. Her present for him was wrapped and put away in a bedroom drawer days before he suggested they skip gifts this year. She had bought him a new jacket and white shirt. She undid the ribbon to look at them, then replaced the clothes and surrounded them with tissue paper. They looked so nice she took the shirt out again and held it up to her cheek. It felt so crisp and cool.
When the day had cooled, she bathed and changed into a fresh cotton dress and lifted her hair away from her neck to pin it up.
*
“What’s it doing out there?” he said when he came home. “Don’t you like it?”
On the table, she had put a candle and the gift box in navy blue paper and the good dishes, but he didn’t look at those.
“What’s it doing?” she said absently, for she had taken him to mean that the thing was doing something interesting or different and that she should go and look.
The lizard stood very still, as if it might be dead. The bow was gone.
“Why’d you put it out there?” he said.
“Because it belongs out there,” she said as she closed the screen door.
From the heat, his black hair had separated into individual strands, making him look older and scraggly.
“You didn’t like it,” he said and began to follow her around the kitchen.
She retrieved his favorite pasta dish from the oven and the salad from the refrigerator and he followed right behind. Their bodies made a shadow on the yellow floor that looked like the silhouette of two shy, hesitant boxers in a ring.
“Oh, I like it,” she said. She was intent on getting the dinner ready and didn’t look at him. “I like it just fine. You didn’t pay any money for it, did you?”
His face looked tight.
She motioned toward the window with her cooking mitt. “It’s just that there’s a million of them out there, and it’s a shame to throw away good money after one.”
“I bought it, all right? Cheap. From a guy at work. I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d think it was funny.”
“I do think it’s funny. I laughed.”
“It’s really neat,” he said, trying to convince her. “It looks prehistoric or something.”
She made him sit through dinner before opening his package.
She expected him to say, I thought we agreed, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked eager, put his glass down, and said, “Well, let’s see what this is.”
He seemed stunned for a moment when he saw the clothes and then whistled low as he lifted them out of the box. He felt the material, ran his fingers down the length of the lapel, and smiled at her. “This is a good one. But what‘s it for? God knows there’s nowhere around here to wear this.” And then he laughed and said, eyes crinkling, “What have you got up your sleeve? I think you must be up to something, baby doll.”
“They’re interview clothes. You’ll need something nice to interview in if you try to get transferred back home or if you go to another company. Isn’t that why we came here? So you’d have a better job after this one? The next step up, you said.”
He went back to examining the jacket, rose half out of his chair and sat down again.
“Isn’t it?” she repeated and motioned with the back of her hand to the open bedroom door. “Try it on.”
He was standing now. He had the jacket on and went to the mirror, looking at himself this way and that, sizing up every angle.
“I told you,” he said. “I’ve got to put in a couple of years first before I’d even try to move on. You don’t just go looking for another job when you’ve hardly been here. You have to pay your dues.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I was hoping that once you were here for a while, you’d like it.”
“What’s there to like?” she said. She began biting some ragged skin on her bottom lip. She fingered the rim of her glass. She knew her voice sounded bitter but she didn’t care. “You told me about the place. Patience, you said. You’d have to be brain-dead to have this much patience. To want to live here. You’d have to be a fool.”
He stepped in front of her. “I’m a fool then,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets.
“You’re a fast learner. Everyone has always told you that. You’ll find another job. You don’t have to stay at that place.”
“You don’t want me to blow what I have, do you? If they get wind of me applying other places it won’t look good. And if I go in there now and ask the boss for a transfer back to where I came from, they’d die laughing. There are other guys, ahead of me, willing to pay their dues.”
She thought of those other men and what they and their wives must be like to be so patient, so accepting. She found herself wondering, for the first time since they had been together, what other kinds of men she could have married. Maybe I should have waited, she thought. And then she thought, I’ve heard about this. This is how things change.
“You act as if I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “They said I’d have to wait two years for a transfer. At least two years.”
“Oh, great,” she said, fingering the glass again. “I’ll be dead in two years in a place like this.”
He smiled at her. “There she is. My melodramatic sweetheart.”
He removed his jacket and draped it neatly over his chair. He stepped behind her and put his arms around her.
“Look,” he said. “Baby doll. This is nothing. We’ll laugh about this later. It’ll be a story. Like a joke about how many miles we walked to school when we were kids.”
She looked through the window to where there was a thin stream of orange light across the horizon and nothing more. Some people might think the sight was beautiful. To her it had become barren.
“Let’s eat,” she said. “It’s getting cold.”
And in the end, after they had finished dinner and lain together and after she waited for the movements of his body to cause hers to shiver, she turned on her side and closed her eyes. He put his hand on her hip and said in a whisper, “Baby doll? You still awake?”
She was in the lazy space between wakefulness and sleep and, so, didn’t answer. She thought she heard the animal stumbling off the porch, down the steps, and into the night, finally free.
Before she dreamed, an image came to her of the liquid eyes. As she began to fall asleep, her body jerked, quick and hard. She felt as if she were jumping straight up into darkness.
***
Rumpus original art by Aubrey Nolan.
Salvatore Florio, currently reader in philosophy at the University of Birmingham, will be moving to the University of Oslo, where he will be associate professor of philosophy.
Professor Florio specializes in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and philosophy of mathematics. He is the author, with Øystein Linnebo (Oslo), of The Many and the One: A Philosophical Study of Plural Logic (OUP, 2021), along with other works, which you can learn about here and here. He also serves as Coordinating Editor of The Review of Symbolic Logic.
In addition to his position at Birmingham, he is also a professorial fellow at Oslo. He takes up his new position at Oslo in September, 2023.
The post Florio from Birmingham to Oslo first appeared on Daily Nous.
It's been a number of years since this blog has had any new series on job-market tips, such as our Job-Market Boot Camp and Notes from both sides of the market series. Given that these past series mostly involved me and other authors sharing our impressions on various job market materials, interviews, etc., they didn't necessarily provide a representative picture of how different search committee members at different types of institutions see these things.
So, in this new series, Tips from Search Committee Members, I'd like to rectify this. In today's post, I'd like to ask search committee members to answer some or all of the following questions:
Finally, if there are any other questions you think are worth addressing not listed here, please feel free to volunteer and answer them. Really curious to hear your answers!
Alastair Wilson, currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, has accepted a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds.
Professor Wilson’s research is in philosophy of physics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and epistemology. He is the author of The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism (Oxford University Press, 2020), among many other works, which you can learn about here and here. You can read an interview with him here.
He takes up his new position at Leeds in September, 2023.
The post Wilson from Birmingham to Leeds first appeared on Daily Nous.
Simon Kirchin, currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent, will be moving to the University of Leeds, where he will be Professor of Applied Ethics and Director of the Inter-disciplinary Applied Ethics (IDEA) Centre.
Professor Kirchin works in ethics, and is the author of Thick Evaluation (Oxford University Press, 2017; open access), among other works, which you can check out here and here.
He takes up his new position at Leeds in January, 2024.
The post Kirchin from Kent to Leeds first appeared on Daily Nous.
Utrecht University has hired 11 new philosophers.
They have each been hired as “Universitair Docent,” which is a permanent position, pending a standard one-year probationary period.
(The following information has been supplied by Daniel Cohnitz, head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht.)
Uğur Aytaç will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Political Philosophy of Technology in September 2023. He will be a PPE Core Teacher.
Marie Chabbert will join the History of Philosophy group as universitair docent for History of Modern Philosophy.
Sanneke de Haan will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Ethics, starting September, 2023, while continuing her 0.2 FTE appointment as Socrates Professor of Psychiatry and Philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy & Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam (funded by the Stichting Psychiatrie en Filosofie).
Jamie Draper was appointed in 2022 and will take up a position at the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Political Philosophy and Environmental Ethics, starting September 2023.
Chiara Lisciandra will be appointed in the Theoretical Philosophy group as universitair docent for Practical Reasoning, starting September 2023.
Uwe Peters will be appointed jointly in the Theoretical Philosophy group and the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, starting October, 2023.
Carina Prunkl will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Ethics of Technology, December 2023.
Janis Schaab will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Moral, Political, and Social Philosophy, starting September 2023.
Emily Sullivan will be appointed in in the Theoretical Philosophy group as universitair docent for Philosophy of Science.
Juri Viehoff will be appointed in the Ethics Institute as universitair docent for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, September 2023. He will be a PPE Core Teacher.
Sarah Virgi will be appointed jointly in the department’s History of Philosophy group and in Islam and Arabic Studies as universitair docent for Islamic Philosophy.
You can learn more about philosophy at Utrecht here.
The post Utrecht Hires 11 New Philosophers first appeared on Daily Nous.
UPDATE: To clarify, this post is soliciting self-reports from people who have been on the market recently (e.g., in the past few years), particularly this last job season. Because job-market conditions may change over time, recent data is probably the most helpful for current and future job candidates.
A reader writes in:
Something that I think would be very beneficial, and a necessary supplement to the job discussion and reporting thread, is an anonymous survey that those on the market fill-out and whose results get posted on the Cocoon ... It would indicate the profile and results in terms of interviews and offers of each candidate willing to fill it out. Maybe it need not even be a survey. In fact, maybe it would work better if you simply could post something like the below template in a post, and encourage folks to fill it out. I am suggesting this partly in response to my having a crappy year on the market (got nothing) despite my CV being the strongest it has ever been. Getting any information I can about what the profile of someone who is having success looks like would be really beneficial to me, as well as to others who I see lamenting their crappy year in the reporting and discussion threads.
It would look something like this:
[Also] questions about where one's interviews were coming from (R1, SLAC, State School, Postdoc). That would probably be useful too.
I'm not entirely sure how useful such information would be, as there will presumably be many selection effects based on who chooses to self-report. Still, insofar as some candidates (such as the OP) may need to make important life decisions about whether to stay on the market, and if so for how long, some candidates might find this kind of self-reported data useful for gauging how they stand relative to others on the market, how much luck is involved on the market, and so on.
So, if you were on the market this year, and you'd like to self-report on any or all of the above, please do feel free.
A couple of important notes: (A) while I doubt that many people will be scouring a thread like this trying to figure out "who is who", readers should probably bear in mind that, at least in principle, the more info that they report, the greater the possibility of people figuring out who they are; and (B) I'd like to reserve this thread for reporting, not discussion--so I'll only be approving comments that self-report data like that above.
Kenny Easwaran, who until recently was professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, has accepted a position as associate professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine.
Professor Easwaran works in epistemology, decision theory, and philosophy of math, and related areas. You can learn more about his research here and here.
He takes up his new position at Irvine this summer.
The post Easwaran from Texas A&M to UC Irvine first appeared on Daily Nous.
UPDATE: comments now open!
A reader writes in:
My area of specialization is political philosophy and I have seen philosophers who work on and publish in analytic philosophy journals in the politics or political science departments of different universities. Do any cocooner’s have any insights on how they were able to tailor their job applications to work not just for jobs in philosophy but jobs in politics departments?
Good question! Do any readers have any helpful tips?
In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
Here’s a follow-up question to our recent discussions of perception, personal politics, and the job market:
Let’s say I work on a historical philosophical subject that is not evidently political (even though I secretly think it is), and that I also teach philosophy of religion semi-regularly. Let’s say I’m also a member (non-TT) of a department that has issued pro-BLM and pro-Roe-v.-Wade statements with which I wholeheartedly agree. If I link to those statements on my personal website, how would that be perceived? Again, my support is genuine, but I also hope to show search committee members where I stand in a politically ambiguous subfield.
Interesting question. For those of you new to the discussion being referred to, a number of people indicated here that they have a bias against people who work in philosophy of religion.
Bearing this in mind, what do you all think? Should someone like the OP (above) try to broadcast their progressive political views to combat any such bias?
Relying on the private sector to decarbonize is a recipe for abandoning workers.
Your department or college may be able to pay for your participation in ANY Professor Is In work, including our formal programs, as well as editing of your professionalization/job search/tenure documents. What follows is context and scripts for asking your department to fund your participation in Unstuck: The Art of Productivity and The Art of the Academic Article, and/or The Professor Is In Pre-Tenure Coaching Group, but you can use it to ask for any kind of professional development or program improvement support. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at [email protected] for more help!
****************************
Your department might pay for your enrollment in this course, and the only you will find out is to ask. Don’t be afraid. Department heads get requests for funding all of the time. There is nothing shameful about it. In fact, learning how to ask is great practice for the rest of your career.
The best way to loosen the departmental purse strings is to show the money is going to solve a problem the department head considers worth solving.
So what problem does the course solve?
You also have to show the stakes of not solving the problem.
Stating the problem and stakes is not enough. You also have to show why this particular thing you are asking to be funded will solve the problem.
***********
Here is an example email that you can use to approach your dean, department head or PI to make the request that the course be funded. NOTE: IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT YOU DO NOT USE THESE EXAMPLES VERBATIM, AS WE HAVE THOUSANDS OF READERS AND CLIENTS, MANY IN THE SAME DEPARTMENTS. WE SUGGEST YOU SLIGHTLY REPHRASE THE MODELS BELOW IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
>Dear <administrator>
I have an opportunity to enroll in a coaching program designed for academics to
//produce a full draft of journal article in 10 weeks
//support my success on the tenure track
//help me complete my research and writing for tenure
>and I am requesting departmental support to cover the costs. The course is being offered by The Professor is In, a career services organizations with well-documented and unparalleled success since 2011 in assisting academics in all phases of their careers.
>The benefit of
// The Art of the Academic Article, over other programs, is not only the extensive experience of the two coaches offering guidance but also the ongoing access to the online material. I will be able to use the course material for not just this article, but all future ones as well.
//The Professor Is In Pre-Tenure Coaching Group is that it provides individualized, confidential small group coaching as I confront the challenges of mapping out a publication trajectory, establishing an effective writing schedule, managing a sustainable balance of research, teaching, and service, managing the demands of conferencing and networking, and grasping the elements of a successful tenure case (including the role of external reviewers) to support my success in that arduous process.
>As we have discussed,
//I have XX articles in progress that are necessary/would improve my third year review/tenure review/post doc production/chances of success on the job market. This course would assure that I produce xx articles in the next year. It also increases my chances of publication in the mostly highly ranked journals because it includes instruction on positioning both in terms of discipline and journal rank.
//I have an active research program underway, while also being dedicated to effective teaching and productive service to the department. This coaching program will give me the support of Dr. Karen Kelsky- who has not only been a dedicated academic development coach since 2011, but is also a former R1 department head who in that role mentored 5 junior faculty to tenure – and a small group of peers who can together serve as a sounding board for decisions I need to make about publishing strategies, writing timelines, teaching dilemmas, and work-life balance – to name just a few topics the group covers. The program will assure that I avoid common pitfalls and focus my time and effort most effectively toward eventual tenure success in a way that is *individualized* for our specific field, department and campus expectations.
>The next session of the course starts on XXXX. Please let me know if you are willing to support this effort and I will purchase and submit the receipt for reimbursement/contact accounting to arrange payment.
OR [another style of approach- adapt as you see fit!]
As we have discussed, one of the critical components of raising the profile of our department is to increase faculty publications and the quality of those publications. This course would assure that I produce xx articles in the next year. It also increases my chances of publication in the mostly highly ranked journals because it includes instruction on positioning both in terms of discipline and journal rank.
It is no secret that balancing research, service and teaching is a challenge for all junior faculty here at xx. With this course, I will have the resources to achieve the balance required for success. With your support, I will be able to avoid common problems like false starts, writer’s block, and perfectionism, while assuring I choose the best journals to target, and submit a draft to a strong journal in an efficient time frame.
The next session of the course starts on XXXX. Please let me know if you are willing to support this effort and I will purchase and submit the receipt for reimbursement/contact accounting to complete the registration/ xxx
The post How to Ask Your Department To Pay for Professor Is In Help appeared first on The Professor Is In.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.
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A silicon wafer, a thin material essential for manufacturing semiconductors, at a chip-packaging facility in Santa Clara, Calif.
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The post Trans on the Job Market: a Crowdsource Post appeared first on The Professor Is In.
In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a new prof asks:
I finally got a TT job! What can I do over the next few months to set myself up for success in the fall?
Big congrats, and great question! I think a lot may depend on what kind of job it is. If it's a job with a low teaching load at an R1, then I'm not sure. If, on the other hand, it's a job with a pretty hefty teaching load, then I'd suggest trying to get a lot of research done and a few papers out to journals this summer. In jobs with a lot of teaching (especially your first year), you might find that you have very little time to focus on research, and if you don't have papers out at journals, you might begin to worry about "falling behind." Other than this, I guess I'd suggest asking new colleagues if they have syllabi that they are willing to share, as this might give you some idea what the norms around teaching are at the institution. Then again, it's been a long time since I started my first job, so I'm probably missing obvious tips that might help the OP.
What do you all think? Any tips for someone about to start a new job in the fall that will help them set themselves up for success?
In our March "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
I have a question about the job market. Recently on Twitter, I have seen quite a few people posting about either permanent jobs or good postdocs they have secured. However, when I then check out their CV, I am surprised to see that it doesn't align with what I have previously been told/seen about getting permanent jobs/postdocs. To give an example for each, I saw someone getting a permanent job when they had only a few publications, only one of which was a top ten (Leiter) and not top five, and the others were co-authored or lower tier journals. For the postdoc, I saw someone getting a good postdoc with actually no publications as well. At my institution I had been told that you need about three top five publications to get a permanent job, which struck me as close to impossible short of you being a generational talent. And for a postdoc I had been told at least two decent publications minimum.
So, is this a sign for optimism in that if you interview well or are good in some other ways, you can escape the "publish or die" mantra that I've so much heard about?
I'm curious to hear what readers think. I suspect there may be differences in hiring for different kinds of positions (e.g. permanent jobs and postdocs at R1s vs. SLACs, etc.). At R1s, for example, grad program prestige, letters of recommendation, and writing samples may go a long way. Conversely, at SLACs, things other than publishing (such as teaching) matter a great deal. Indeed, having served on a number of search committees at a SLAC, my sense is that people on the hiring side of things can very much take "the whole picture" into account with candidates. Publications matter--but they are by no means the only thing that matters. Teaching matters a lot too. So do your research statement and writing sample--and more generally, how interesting and promising a committee finds your overall research project. And, of course, interviews affect the hiring process too. At schools like mine, people generally want to see evidence that you know how to publish and are likely to publish enough for tenure--so, above and beyond a few publications, more publications may not matter tremendously. Finally, it's worth bearing in mind many people only get permanent jobs after a number of years on the market. It took me over 7 years, for example--so, over a period of time like this, you don't have to be a generational talent to publish a bunch of papers.
Anyway, these are just my thoughts. What are yours?
Steering humanity out of the climate crisis demands action in a very literal way. Boots on the ground, people rolling up sleeves and getting hands dirty retrofitting existing infrastructure, such as poorly insulated houses, type stuff. The goal is to re-make our built environment to be energy efficient and drive down carbon emissions ASAP. So we really need lots and lots more skilled tradespeople — fast. Aka, the kind of multifaceted, hands-on skills that technologists haven’t figured out how to automate yet.
Fixing this problem absolutely, therefore, demands human beings. Lots and lots of people to come in, eager and willing to learn new stuff, and take up green retrofitting jobs. So it’s a job discovery problem. And a training/upskilling/reskilling problem. Which means digital technology can of course help. And this is where a U.K. edtech startup founded last year, called greenworkx, is angling to step in — with a new spot of supportive construction: A digital pathway designed to boost the flow of skilled workers into green jobs.
The London-based team, which has just closed a £600k pre-seed funding round, describes what’s it’s building as “the go-to talent portal for green jobs”. The app soft launched towards the start of the year, after the co-founders formally incorporated the startup in mid June last year. The early stage funding round was led by Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Ada Ventures, and a number of angel investors in the climate and edtech sectors, including the CEOs of Multiverse (Euan Blair), MyTutor (Bertie Hubbard) and Octopus Electric Vehicles (Fiona Howarth).
Commenting in a statement, Nikolas Krawinkel, partner at Mangrove, heralded the opportunity of the looming “green industrial revolution”, writing: “We’re on the cusp of a green industrial revolution, which will require a huge rethink of our education and training systems. The greenworkx team have a deep understanding of digital-first learning methodologies and we’re excited to work with them to take on this profoundly important challenge.”
“The urgent ramp-up needed in the green workforce is a unique opportunity to build a fairer, more equitable future by bringing millions into a rapidly-growing sector of huge social and environmental importance,” added Matt Penneycard, founding partner at Ada Ventures, in another supporting statement. “We’re incredibly excited about the double impact that greenworkx can have in empowering people to access well-paid, future-ready jobs, whilst simultaneously directly driving the net-zero revolution to address the climate crisis.”
The startup’s vision is to build a platform and digital tools to drive awareness and accelerate the uptake of green jobs, using techniques like bite-sized learning and algorithmic matching of jobseekers to connect them with relevant opportunities to help build and power up the green economy.
Co-founders Mat Ilic and Richard Ng bring backgrounds in public policy work and education and edtech to bear on this skills funnel challenge.
Ilic, the policy guy, says he was inspired to tackle the people side and the green jobs challenge as he was reading John Doerr’s book, Speed and Scale — which is literally subtitled an “action plan for solving our climate crisis now”. “It was the first time that net zero felt like a manageable problem,” he tells TechCrunch, saying the book helped him realize “how significant people are” — especially “the people we need to bring about the transition, not just people to make lifestyle changes” — and so the “loose idea was was born then and there”.
Ng, who started his career as a maths teacher before moving into edtech and, latterly, training software engineers at U.K. tech apprenticeship startup Multiverse, says he’d felt pretty settled in that career — until he got speaking to Ilic and also got the green jobs itch.
“He was explaining to me this problem that in order to reach Net Zero we need to deploy all this green infrastructure… and I remember being really shocked by this because I thought wow, this is obviously a huge problem, which is really high stakes, really time urgent, and yet when I think about skills and future work so often it’s purely about ‘oh we need to code’,” he says in a video call with TechCrunch, offering a tacit critique of the full-throttle focus on ‘learn to code’ of the past (many) years. (Code, after all, may well end up being automated by powerful technologies like generative AI — even as we’re still in desperate need of double glazers, plumbers, electricians etc etc.)
There are also of course plenty of people for whom learning to code is never going to be the right fit. And Ng says he realized there’s an unfolding opportunity for all sorts of workers to thrive in green jobs as demand for these more hands-on, people-facing skills keeps growing — as well as being excited by the chance to build out the kind of support for vocational training and learning that the U.K.’s traditional educational system has not been geared toward.
“We need people to work with data, that’s very necessary, and there’s a bunch of people working on that now. But I was like this is also super, super important and really, really underserved,” he says. “Coding, unfortunately, is phenomenally inaccessible for a bunch of people… [Whereas] these jobs… are really, really meaningful, they’re pretty well paid and they’re actually very accessible as well. And so, for me, it was also about making sure that as we think about this really important challenge Net Zero we’re also using that as an opportunity to make sure we have this bright future of work which is hopefully much more inclusive and accessible to the communities which I care a lot about.”
The scale of the retrofit challenge means the skills supply problem is vast indeed. Ilic cites a statistic suggesting at least 30 million roles will be needed globally by the end of the decade — and half a million in the U.K. alone, just for domestic energy retrofitting. (And the startup’s stated mission is to get 10 million people into green jobs over 10 years.)
While the challenge is global the U.K. certainly has some of the worst insulated homes in Europe, making that element a particularly acute local problem. Solutions can also be interdependent, too — since, for example, poorly insulated homes aren’t a good fit for low carbon heat pumps — which means tackling drafty buildings is really a prerequisite for speeding up the decarbonization of U.K. housing stock.
“We’re talking about half a million different professions and trades needed in already an existing skills shortage in construction — and that’s before we start talking about the other aspect of this, which is the existing workers who need to be reskilled in what’s basically the biggest reallocation of capital and the means of production since the Industrial Revolution,” says Ilic, adding: “And no one seems to be talking about it with the level of urgency and emergency and scale that is needed — and more fundamentally, we’re here because we believe it’s eminently solvable. And that’s what’s so practical about the way that we’re looking at this challenge.”
Some other startups are talking about it, of course. Denmark-based Lun, for example, recently bagged seed funding to build software tools to encourage more tradespeople to focus on installing heat pumps, instead of taking on less climate friendly jobs. While US-based BlocPower has already been beavering away for almost a decade with a residential retrofit-as-service platform focused on low-income communities. But it’s fair to say the scale of the change needed across our societies is so absolute — so root and branch — that it’ll need a tsunami of startups tackling as many bits and pieces as possible if we’re to drive the necessary system flip at the blistering pace now required to avoid even worse heating and weather extremes (not to mention the risk of runaway climate change).
Greenworkx’s app is soft launched at this stage — with a handful (around 40) of green skills seekers signed up to a (free) introductory retrofit course they’re offering.
Early users are more of a mix than the team’s expected target youth demographic (i.e. 16-24-year-old school and college leavers who did not follow the academic higher education route to university) — with Ng noting other profiles of interest include immigrants in their mid thirties to forties seeking a career switch into more stable work. Another early user he mentions was a former nurse — a women in her late fifties who could no longer continue working in a patient-facing role (owing to developing allergies) but who was looking for another job that allows her to keep serving her community and retrofitting social housing fit the bill for her. (“It’s a way to basically continue serving her community.”)
To locate their first users they’ve been partnering with organizations and charities that are focused on employability. But as they seek to scale up they plan to expand the pool of jobseekers via digital marketing on social media and tapping up the sorts of influencers who might resonant with key targets. They’re also planning a possible green jobs travelling roadshow to take their message of climate opportunity around the country in an electric bus.
The early product is still quite a manual experience, per the co-founders, as the team has been focused on understanding learner profiles and needs so they can better tailor the platform experience. But the goal is, ultimately, to automate the process of matching jobseekers to green skills opportunities to be able to scale the platform and its outputs.
“We’ve had our first proactive inbound from a small company this week looking for energy assessors and retrofit assessors,” notes Ilic. “So it’s been really interesting to see that. And in terms of where we focus attention on the job side, so really a lot of investment is going into decarbonizing social housing at the moment — housing associations, local authorities and smaller energy efficiency or construction companies are all looking for these sort of energy efficiency professionals or trades. So some of that is them reaching out to us some of it is us working with them. So we’re pretty confident that for this kind of batch of people that we’re taking through — both the understanding retrofit courses as well as some partnerships that are more focused on domestic energy assessment or retrofit advice — we should be able to get our first job outcomes and then explore how it goes from there.”
For larger energy companies and construction firms the first focus is likely to be on upskilling an existing workforce, rather than trying to hire scores of new workers. So the startup is thinking how it might best support those goals. They’re also still figuring out how much training content they might offer themselves — vs working with partners and/or employers to provide it. But the overarching goal is to find ways to support as many people as possible to think about a career switch, skills upgrade or first leap into green jobs.
“We’re a b2b proposition. And the ultimate goal is to create value by giving people the talent they couldn’t otherwise reach — so filling roles,” says Ilic. “But I think we’re exploring a range of different steps in between, including actually having that curriculum and training proposition to support reskilling existing workers, because if we’re building a high quality digital curriculum for connecting people to these jobs from a standing start, actually it’s also relevant for people that are learning about low carbon heating technologies in their current jobs. So both reskilling and recruitment are going to be part of our value proposition.”
“We are starting supply side. We want to build a tool that will matter so much to learners that they will obsess about,” he adds. “They would be prepared to pay for it even though we’d never want to charge them for it because we want to create a frictionless route for them to be able to access these roles. Because that’s partly in our collective interest — as I said, we’re looking at servicing the labour demand — but, yeah, we feel that the business side will become kind of apparent as things unfold; as you see the kind of exponential growth, say the consumer demand for solar among other things, so that’s what we’re planning.”
This report was updated to correct a citation by Ilic: The projection is for 30M retrofit jobs being needed globally before the end of the decade, not in the U.K. — there the projection is for half a million roles being required by 2030
UK’s greenworkx takes aim at the domestic retrofit skills challenge by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
Here's a question: can we have a thread in which recently *successful* job applicants who have gotten TT jobs describe their own application process?
In particular, I'm wondering about time spent on materials. How much time did you spend personalizing your cover letter, e.g., or preparing for the first-round interview? (I'm wondering whether I've been spending way too little time on these initial steps, myself.) Does the process that went into a successful application compare in any notable way to the many unsuccessful applications?
But really, any tips from those who have been recently--especially within the last job cycle or two--successful in landing TT jobs would be much appreciated.
I think this is a nice idea. Do any recent job candidates who have gotten tenure-track jobs have any tips or insights to share? How much time did you spend on various materials, and how did you develop them?
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