and if so, how much experience did you have? What do you think helped you experience-wise to get the job?

I have recently started some teaching at my university in my second year, and hope to continue with this until the end of my third and final year. However, I am unsure if a couple of years experience is even enough? I had to turn down a couple of further teaching jobs I was offerred recently as it would have left me with one free day per week and I am currently in my field work phase of my research (social science) which is quite intensive and involves a lot of travelling and therefore would have negatively impacted on my PhD progress. This has got me thinking a lot about the whole 'how much teaching experience is enough' question!

Teaching experience is important, but your ability to attract grants and funding, and your publication record will be more highly regarded than teaching if applying for academic roles.

You don't need to have heaps of teaching experience; rather, just enough to demonstrate that you can teach at a tertiary level. So don't feel too bad about turning down those roles, while they can be CV builders, they also drain your energy and time. Once the marking comes in, your PhD is put on hold, especially in social science where its essays (social science here myself).

I took on one-two units per semester and have done both teaching associate and unit coordinator/lecturing roles. If you can get a mixture (so TAing, Unit Coordinating/Lecturing) that would be ideal to demonstrate that you can handle tutorial facilitation, and running an entire unit.

You want to avoid (if you can) the trap of sessional teaching, where so much time and energy is put into running units while your research is left neglected. A lot of universities are going this route, using sessionals while their tenured professors work on their research/don't teach. So don't go overboard with the teaching if you want to stay in academia. You need to develop your publication/conference/grant portfolio as well.

Thank you Awsoci, your reply is very helpful.

It is undergraduate level that I am currently teaching, and I turned down a lecturing offer at another university for this semester as there was no way I could commit (unless I cloned myself so that I could be in two places at once!) Hopefully, these opportunities will arise again when I can be a bit more flexible.

I agree with your view RE publication record, attracting funding etc. I have a couple of publications and I decided to use this time to submit an article to a journal which I have done, plan ideas for future papers and make a plan of action for conferences over the next year. I have seen that this is an important part and often champions the teaching experience from some views on this forum, yet the views of other students at my institution seems to be teaching is of prime importance. Your reply makes a lot more sense, so thank you :)