The Harvard Business Review recommends three strategies for business professionals to position themselves for an adjunct professorship, either as a part-time side project, or a potential career to step into post-retirement.

Strategy 1:

Identifying connections at the universities you’re interested in approaching. The article’s author Dorie Clark, a marketing strategist and professional speaker who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, recommends LinkedIn but says that even tenuous connections can be useful.

Strategy 2:

Preparing a short pitch that doesn’t overwhelm with information. Clark recommends two paragraphs: One that includes a short bio – no Ph.D. is necessary according to the expert – but proof why the university needs you – academic credentials, previous teaching experience as well as professional expertise plus ideas about what sort of classes or programmes you could teach.

A good advice is to find a hole in the course catalogue that you could fill. “One way to do this is to compare and contrast between the offerings of different schools. If University A has a course in change management but University B doesn’t – and this is your area of expertise – then you may want to propose it, because similar schools obviously value the topic,” Clark writes.

Strategy 3:

Preparing a CV and syllabus of the course you propose to teach in case you receive a positive response to your inquiry. A syllabus should contain the course topics as well as the order in which they will be taught. The Chronicle of Higher Education shares a detailed guide on crafting a syllabus according to Clark who says that the process – which is essentially distilling your entire concept for the course – can take anywhere from five hours to dozens of hours, depending on the amount of research you feel you need to do.

Read more on www.hbr.org