Validate Your Job Talk Posted on January 20, 2009 Dr. Nalini Negi explains how to develop and test a successful job talk.

One of the things that I things that I've found really important was to be broader in my search initially in terms of applying to many, many different places and then, at least the way we do it in social work, is we have a preliminary interview and then we have campus interviews.

It was very important, I think, in terms of helping me prepare was to do my job talk in front of a "friendly audience" at my institution.

I was given the opportunity to do my job talk in front of professors that were on my committee as well as other doctoral students, and I also invited some MSW students, masters is social work students. And I did my job talk and I opened it up to questions and made it seem as close to the real thing but without the anxiety of feeling like, "Oh, no. I'm being evaluated."

I think it's really important to think through your research agenda and try to be as specific as you can and to integrate that in your campus job talk if you can. I had slides which my first couple of slides were my personal sort of background and what made me interested in the research that I'm interested in. Then I talked about some projects that led to my dissertation research, and then, after that, I talked about my research agenda and where I thought about going from there.

I also tried to link my research agenda to the school and the region and how I could potentially work in that sort of environment. So looking through funding mechanisms that maybe were local but as well as federal or at the state level but also looking at potential collaborators like, for example, other researchers at the university at the school or research institutes that would be particularly useful for you, and I think that really helps in terms of making the case for why you would be a valuable addition to that faculty.