The problem most traditional educators are having right now, and will apparently have far into the future, is the career uncertainty resulting from budget shortfalls. One distinctly positive solution to this problem is to apply for online adjunct faculty employment. Distance education technology is the vehicle that will carry postsecondary education into the future, and there is no reason that it should not also serve as a means of economic population for anyone with an earned graduate degree regardless of whether or not they have they prior college teaching experience. The happy fact of the matter is that community colleges, state colleges, four year universities and for profit academic institutions all have a need for academically qualified online adjunct instructor to place in their online college classes.

New and returning college students, many of them non-traditional students with serious scheduling conflicts resulting from obligations to multiple employment situations and families that must be met on a daily basis, are flocking back to school in order to earn an online pharmacy degree, an electrical engineering bachelor degree online or an online business management degree online as a way to improve their career chances once the economy recovers it vigor.

With an earned graduate degree in hand, a master’s degree or a Ph.D. it is possible to teach a host of online adjunct jobs at the same time. Of course, it is a wise marketing decision to search for first semester online college classes to teach because that is the location of the majority of college students. It is also worth searching for developmental online college courses in math and English since many new college students need remedial instruction in the areas of study in order to be successful in the upper level courses.

This search strategy, applying for online courses that offer the largest numbers of students, is quite effective since there seems to be an endless of supply of them and they are a little more difficult to facilitate since the students need a little more instruction than more accomplished first year college students.

This means that online adjunct faculty employment is more about academic entrepreneurism that it is a job. The faculty labor landscape has changed radically in the last then to fifteen years, and colleges and universities seem determined to not hire anymore tenure-track faculty members than absolutely necessary to satisfy the accreditation boards. Ultimately, the vast majority of the faculty at any post-secondary institution will be composed of adjunct instructors, which is a code term for temporary, part-time employees hired and dismissed according to the rise and fall of student enrollments at any given time, but there is a way to maximize one’s income from online teaching employment if the online adjunct instructor makes the effort to understand how distance education opens the distinct possibility of teaching for multiple online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs with schools that are far distant from the physical location of the online college instructor. The key to making a decent living by teaching online college courses from a personal computer accessing the Internet is learning how to apply for online university jobs every day.