Currently, the education industry is not being kind to educators because the faculty budgets are disappearing at a very rapid rate. On the post-secondary level of the academy the situation is no better because over the last ten or fifteen years the vast majority of college and university faculty members have been employed as low paid adjunct teachers hired semester to semester with no benefits. While this is a difficult situation for an individual with a graduate degree, a master’s degree or Ph.D., it can be turned around by learning as much as possible about distance education technology. It will take some real work for the traditional secondary or post-secondary academic to master the dynamics of online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs, but once a clear strategy is outlined it will be relatively easy to start collecting an income, and a nice income, with multiple online adjunct jobs.

The reason for this dislocation in the academic labor market is the rising cost of maintaining the physical plant knows as the college or university campus. Also, the operating funds for a post-secondary academic institution, which come from the state treasury for the most part, are being cut to the very bone as a result of rising costs for practically everything else. The educator is in a corner in terms of career progress if the decision is made to remain in the physical classroom, and the chances of a traditional adjunct faculty member on a physical college, community college or state university campus ever making a real living are practically zero that this point. The alternative is to confront the academic situation and become an academic entrepreneur instead of merely a public education employee wholly dependent on state funds for an income.

The search strategy that best discloses possible online adjunct instructor positions is the one that includes a daily visit to several of the thousands of state colleges, four-year universities, for-profit colleges and community colleges with websites on the Internet. That is, every school now has a fully functional presence on the Internet that can be easily navigated by any educator willing to learn how to use a personal computer to access the academic institutions digital manifestation. These academic websites will reveal if the school offers an online degree in business management, an electrical engineering bachelor degree online or an online pharmacy degree to its student population. There will be a wealth of information about the presence of distance degree learning available to the prospective online adjunct instructor just by moving around within the college’s website, and once it can be determined that the university or community college is serious about distance education it is time to locate the link on the front page of the site that leads to the faculty application section, which is constructed to accept the required academic credentials for consideration of online adjunct jobs. Further, it is important to continue submitting online teaching applications even after acquiring a full time online teaching portfolio because the academic labor market is changing so quickly and so thoroughly that only academics that change with it will still be engaged in online teaching years from now.