Early career researchers: the difficulty of saying ‘no’ as a newbie

I concur with this. I currently work across two faculties, neither of whom speak to each other. It has ended up with me being stretched over three different contracts and doing so much more than one FT Lecturer. I am only just going into my third year and still have not had time to complete my FHEA despite management pushing academic staff to do it- my question is 'when will you give me time to do it?' And to that I am usually greeted with silence.

"I have a bit less teaching than the other new staff, but it’s not like I’ve had the “soft landing” that you get with some lecturing jobs; I have three hours of small group tutorials every Monday morning, and so far I’m delivering about nine lectures or other teaching sessions over the year. " Is this a wind-up? You teach for three hours a week and what amounts to another 45 minutes a week over two semsters and you think you are hard done by? Seriously if this is the typical workload at Liverpool Hope - have you got any jobs going?

To put things into perspective, although 3 hours of tutorials per week sounds like little teaching, supervising 32 dissertations is a lot of work. Even if you just have a very conservative 1 hour per month of supervision/feedback time per student, this would add 7-8 hours per week for this number of students and even more towards the deadline.

Nine lectures in a year. Nine! Try 18.5-hours per week of teaching, programme leadership and all of the administrative responsibilities you've described.

This is a ridiculously light teaching load, even for a new lecturer. The idea that the author is struggling is hard to credit. He doesn't have nine hours of supervision contact - he has four hours, he says it in the piece, plus three hours of small-group teaching. And supervisions do not require anywhere near the level of preparation that actual large group, normal teaching needs. God, we all need a job at Liverpool Hope.