http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-college-london-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/ Truly worth reading for anyone considering an academic career in the UK.

All new lecturers have to do this, usually as a condition of passing their probation period. It's not called HEA but usually something like PG Cert in academic practice, which gives you the admission to the HEA fellowship. It's quite practice-based so to enrol on the course, you normally need to be doing a certain number of hours of teaching, so may not be viable at the moment. I also don't think it's something universities expect you to have before starting a post. It is only a qualification for universities, so for schools you'd need to do a PGCE or school-based training instead,

Yuk. The thing that really takes the biscuit is the insistence that the person is also research active and does all the things a lecturer would. If it was a true teaching only post, it would be low pay but better than hourly paid teaching, but it's clearly not. I wonder if the Salford UCU branch are aware?

Regarding Thailand in particular, I think it might be very subject-dependent. I think it would be very hard to teach Politics for example, but Business or Chemistry would be less of an issue. As I understand it academics have been visible in protesting against the military coup, so I doubt it would be something that you could ignore. How much it would actually bother you, I think though would depend on your own views. Some academics enjoy working in various not very democratic places. With Thailand you've also got to factor in how stable you think it would be.
In terms of your wider question about would it help you get a job in the UK. For academia I don't think it would really help but also wouldn't really hinder (everyone knows what the job market is like). As you lack teaching experience it may even help a bit but the deciding factor will remain how strong your publication record is compared to other candidates. Outside academia, I think it would depend on whether you were able to network in the non-academic world there, make useful contacts etc.

I've been on a training course for new PhD supervisors recently, and apparently calling the supervisor(s) in to hear the result with the candidate is considered good practice. The idea is to ensure that the candidate has instant pastoral support if the result isn't what they hoped for, and to try to make sure the message regarding the corrections is heard by someone who is less emotionally invested (which is probably why your supervisor was writing it all down). As quite a lot of posts here recently show, candidates tend to feel like revisions are a catastrophe, so someone else hearing it and being able to point out that it's nothing like as bad as all that, is useful. So all it means is that your supervisor and examiners are up-to-date in viva good practice.

I think you're being given some poor advice here and so want to suggest that you might want to rethink a bit.
1) If you are a social scientist then getting 6-12 months corrections is a pretty normal outcome. I'm quite surprised that you see it as so bad because it really isn't. No corrections is unusual in our field.
2) Assuming you and your supervisors are in the UK: one article a year in good journals is perfectly respectable. Publishing is fairly straightforward, publishing in the type of journals that count for the REF is not. You might not rate your supervisors but others clearly do - are you being wise to burn bridges if you are hoping for an academic career?
3) Not having one of your supervisors as a reference sends out a signal that you are on very poor terms. On the whole that's not a good signal to send. Is your relationship really that poor or are you just angry about the viva outcome? I think if you haven't got any other references who you have directly worked with as your OP seems to suggest, then you risk getting very generic and so not very helpful references, which given how few social science postdocs are out there and how many people are chasing them, might be more damaging.

Used to be ok-ish, now seems to be largely publishing unrevised PhD theses without much if any quality control. If it's a question of getting a book from a thesis,and you want an academic career, it's worth putting the work in to place it somewhere better. Peter Lang seems to be regarded in the US as a vanity press, in Europe it's not seen that badly, but still in my social science field at least, it would be near the bottom of the list of presses to try. But still better than VDM/ LAP and its multiple offspring based in Saarbrucken, so everything is relative.

I just wanted to emphasise something treeoflife hinted at: your first post makes it sound as if you think progression to a lectureship is inevitable. It really isn't. The majority of people who successfully complete a PhD and even those who manage to get a postdoc, will not get a permanent academic post as a lecturer. Most of those who can't get any further will be people with excellent academic credentials - there just are not enough jobs for all those doing PhDs. This might be something you want to take into account when deciding whether or not to borrow money.

If my own contract is anything to go by, then the vagueness works massively in the employer's favour. It reads something like perform duties in teaching, research and administration as required by the head of department. So if the OP's university management has decided that they want to increase the number of staff with PhDs, then that might well become a research performance expectation. I'd imagine if they've made it an expectation for new staff to be employed, then it would be reasonable to extend the expectation to existing staff. Performance management university-style means we will set a variety of constantly moving targets and reserve the right to get rid of you if you ever fall short of any measure (even if it's one we hadn't told you about). For recent examples, see KCL and their current efforts to fire a lot of their medical school staff, or Leicester on consequences for not being submitted to the REF, or Surrey on teaching evaluations. To be honest, given what some universities are getting away with otherwise, an expectation that those staff who don't have a PhD gain one, is at the milder end of the spectrum.

Hi toggle,

I've heard a few places are doing this and sadly you probably do need to take the vague threats seriously, as performance management seems to be the new university HR term for bullying until you resign. Particularly so if you are anywhere where there's any threat to the viability of your subject area, as the PhD seems to be the basic entry qualification for any full-time academic post these days. And let's face it, universities are not renowned for treating their staff well these days.
I think it is possible but unlikely to be particularly pleasant. Can you give us a sense of what sort of subject area you are in? Would you need to do experimental work or field research for example? Or visit archives? Those are the more difficult things to schedule around a full-time job. The type of PhD that is most appropriate might flow anyway from that sort of consideration, but otherwise what are the normal research expectations for your post? Are you in a department that is returned to the REF and so expected to be producing REFable publications as well? If so, find somewhere that will let you do it by publication. If you're regularly turning out 3* work then that's the best route to go. If your university doesn't offer that option then one of the Scottish ones (Stirling??) does. You still have to register there for the standard period, but you may as well kill two 'research output' birds with one stone. If you've not published much and / or feel less confident about your research then maybe doing the standard PhD might be better. If you are going to have a supervisor though, I'd suggest registering at another university even if it means paying fees, as a supervisor from your own department, especially if it's someone you normally outrank has the potential to be horribly awkward.

Penpen remember upgrade is not about the quality of your proposal. It's about whether the work you've done since suggests that there is a viable PhD there and that you have the skills to do it. You will probably have had a report from the original failed upgrade - what did they identify as the main weaknesses? Was it primarily the lack of work or was it more about quality? I think you need to be clear what their main concern is. If it's that they doubt you will finish the thesis to the required standard within the time limits, then I think you need to push on and produce as much material as you can (working under time pressures is part of a PhD and unfortunately even if you don't like it, you've got to live with it) and also think about producing a detailed timetable for finishing on time. If it's more about the quality of what you submitted last time, then have another look at your literature review - have you clearly identified the gaps in the literature i.e. showed what the potential your thesis has for making an original contribution? Were there things they thought were missing?
I'd also ask yourself whether the MPhil option might be the best thing for you right now. Are you in the right place emotionally / physically to put yourself through a few more years of this? I'm just worried by the statement that you found returning from the suspension of studies so stressful. Finishing with an MPhil now doesn't preclude a PhD in the future when things are going better for you, don't risk your health for a piece of paper.

I don't know of any website, but generally speaking what you need to do is join the mailing list for your main disciplinary organisation in the UK (I'm pretty sure you are in the UK). This organisation will have an annual conference, and maybe a postgrad one too (which can be a nice way to start out) and depending on field, there may be expectations that you present there at some point. Through the mailing list, you will get sent adverts for smaller conferences and workshops. I doubt you'd get a full conference on your method, more likely there might be a specialist workshop. This is the safest way of regulating for quality as they will screen for the dodgy stuff. Basically conference adverts arriving in your in-box as unsolicited mail with titles like the international conference on the humanities and social sciences are the dodgy ones.

Hi fallenonion,

I have a friend who did an EdD. My sense from what she said was that this was the route to go if you wanted to stay in the school / college sector, but perhaps looking at moving into management. Hers had quite a lot of fairly applied coursework, and then a fairly short thesis (more MPhil length), that she was able to tie into her teaching practice. It seems well-recognised and respected as a professional qualification and she thinks led fairly directly to her getting a much better and more senior job in a very nice independent school. What she said at the time was, that she thought it wouldn't have been great preparation for a traditional academic career, because she felt she had a less solid theoretical and methodological basis than those doing the PhD. That might have been her particular course though.
One thing to think about is about what's happening to education departments in universities. As Gove moves ITT away from universities, from what I've seen there's been quite a lot of job losses, and I don't know how sustainable some of them will be (obviously the next minister might change everything back, who knows). You might want to have a talk with your MSc dissertation supervisor about what they think would be strategically more sensible.

Like the others, I think an MPhil requires quite a bit more work that you will have done thus far. I have one alternative suggestion on that front: if you are ESRC funded and have been doing the coursework requirements, is there anyway of exiting with an MRes or an MA/MSc in social science research? I teach in a social science department, and here that would be a way out with a qualification if you were prepared to write a dissertation (10-12,000 words).
My other thought is to ask yourself why did you want to do a PhD and what used to excite you about your topic. This is rescueable if you still feel some spark. Some thoughts:
1) everyone is more qualified than you - well you got the funding didn't you? It's not easy to get ESRC funding so there must be something going for you. When I look back to my PhD I was thoroughly intimidated by many of my pretty arrogant peers. But looking back the boastful ones weren't that good really, indeed some never completed. It might help to google imposter syndrome and see if you relate to it.
2) Destructive criticism - this does sound very much like year 1 of a social science PhD. Up until now I am pretty certain that you were a great student; probably getting coursework feedback was a process of almost all praise. Suddenly you start a PhD, and your writing style gets picked apart, you don't understand most of the theoretical material and your supervisor instead of saying nice things to you, just rips things apart. It is a transition stage that everyone goes through, because it's about lifting your writing to a higher level. Not nice but you will come out the other side. I promise.
3) How about changing supervisor? It does happen and regular absences are a good excuse to ask for a switch. Is there anyone else who you could work with who might be nearer to your original idea?