An insight into life as a University Teaching Associate in numbers

In September 2017 I started my second short-term contract as a Teaching Associate at the University of Sheffield. I started my first teaching contract in July 2016, following a short and low-paid research contract after my PhD. The past year and a bit have been a steep learning curve, life as a PhD student really didn't do much to prepare for the teaching (and admin) side of academia. So at the start of this term I decided to track my working day to see what I spent my time on and how long I actually spent working! I also thought that this would make an interesting blog post and may provide others with an insight into what life is like as a Teaching Associate/Early Career Academic. 

To track my work I created a number of categories for types of work that I conducted. Table 1 gives a summary of these. For every working day I then noted down how many hours I had spent on each. Note: these are approximate estimates, i.e., I don't have the time to account for everything to the exact minute. I have then investigated my working week and the types of work conducted (continues below Table 1).

Disclaimer: these are my personal experiences and may not represent workload/experiences at other universities or even different departments in the same university.

Table 1: ​A summary of different categories of work conducted over the year and their descriptions.

Category/Abbreviation	Description
Adm	Emails and administration
App	All kinds of application: grant, fellowships, jobs.
Bre	Time spent not working during working hours. Time between coming home and starting work again in the evening also counted as a break.
Coll	Research collaboration, internally and externally
Conf	Conference attendance and preparation. This includes professional development, i.e., non-research conferences/workshops.
Fiel	Fieldwork actual and preparation
Mark	Marking
Meet	Meetings, skype calls
Out	Outreach, open days, presentations, and blogging
Pap	Paper writing
Res	Actual research (that not conducted during fieldwork).
T Del	Teaching delivery in whatever guise it takes
T Prep	Preparation for teaching, e.g., writing lectures.
UG S	Undergraduate supervision, including personal tutees, dissertations, office hours.
PG S	Same as above but for postgraduate
​Oth	Anything else which isn't described above but may be expected as an academic, such as paper reviews

Overall, from the start of my new contract up to Christmas there were 16 working weeks. Here are some general figures from this period:

• Total hours worked: 669 hours
• Average hours worked per week: 41.8 hours
• Average hours worked per day: 8.3 hours
• Longest duration worked in a week: 59 hours
• Longest duration worked in a day: 16 hours

I can then take a look at how this was distributed throughout the term, see Figure 1. In general, student presence, which was mainly between the weeks 5 and 14, was accompanied by an increasing workload week on week. There was a large range in my hours worked per week, peaking at almost 60 hours in Week 13, which was mostly associated with marking. On average I worked 6.8 hours per week more than my contracted hours.

Figure 1: A look at total hours worked in a week (blue line, top) and average hours worked per day (red line, bottom).

Figure 2 then shows which categories of work I spent the most of my time on. Here are the top 5:

1. Teaching preparation: 34%
2. Marking: 19%
3. Teaching delivery: 10%
4. Undergraduate supervision: 8%
5. Administration: 7%

These top 5 account for ~78% of my time. These categories above are perhaps not surprising as my contract is technically a teaching only contract, although I am also allowed time for research and professional development. Note though that these are percentages of my time spent not actual time so this does not give an indication of whether there was enough time for all tasks required.

Figure 2: A pie chart highlighting the percentage of my total time I spent working on each type of work, see Table 1 for categories.

I then took a look at the distribution of selected tasks on a daily basis (Figure 3) to look at whether the type of tasks changed throughout the term. The major differences we can see here are the huge increase in marking towards the end of term. At the same time, teaching preparation levels are maintained at a similar level, whilst teaching delivery is quite variable week-to-week. The majority of workload increase can therefore be attributed to marking at the back end of term. 

Figure 3: A stacked chart to show duration spent on selected tasks on a daily basis.

As an interesting aside I also compared the number of hours "allocated" in the department workload model for my teaching responsibilities which is encompassed by the categories for: teaching delivery, teaching prep, marking, and undergraduate supervision; to the actual time I spent on these.

• Hours allocated using workload model: 336 hours
• Actual time spent: 481 hours. 

This means that the actual time spent was ~43% higher than allocated in the workload model. A workload model is produced to try and create an even workload between staff members and to make sure that we are not given too much work. Whilst an underestimation of the model does still allow the head of department/lead academics to see workload split and who may have a low or high workload, there are still, however, several issues, particularly for early career academics:

1. There doesn't appear to be any differentiation between writing new lectures and delivering existing lectures.
2. A lecture may take an early career academic longer to write than a tenured professor who has been doing it for >20 years.
3. An underestimation in allocated time means that your workforce may be busier than you realise.

So there we go, a snapshot look at life as a University Teaching Associate.