What Courses Can I Teach? The Three-Course Answer

The Chair Is Not Hiring a Person. They Are Covering a Section.

When a university or college advertises a tenure-track position, the decision unit is a person. A committee builds a shortlist, argues about fit, and hires someone they expect to be there in fifteen years.

Part-time and sessional teaching does not work that way at all.

The decision unit is a section on a timetable. Somewhere in the department there is a spreadsheet, or a document a program coordinator maintains, with every section that has to run next term and a name beside each one. Some of those cells are empty. The empty cells are the entire problem.

A chair looking at three unstaffed sections is not asking "who is the best-qualified person available to us." They are asking "who can stand in front of Section 003 on Tuesday at 6pm."

That reframing changes everything about how you present yourself. You are not applying to be a professor. You are offering to make an empty cell go away.

Which means the operative currency is not your résumé. It is a short list of named courses that exist in that institution's academic calendar.

The Ten-Second Triage Every Chair Runs

When an unsolicited email arrives from an industry professional, I skim it in roughly the time it takes to decide whether to keep reading. So does every chair I know. Here is the order:

1. Can I tell what they want to teach? If the answer is a subject area rather than courses, I am already losing interest.
2. Do any of those courses map to something I actually need staffed? If not, the file goes into a folder I may or may not open again.
3. Is there anything obviously disqualifying? Wrong sector, wrong credential for that specific course, no evidence they have ever explained anything to anyone.
4. Is this person going to be a problem? Length, tone and self-regard all signal here.

The most common reason I close a file without replying is not that the person is unqualified. It is that I could not convert what they wrote into a course code. If I have to do the matching work myself, across a long calendar, while three other things are on fire, I will not do it.

That conversion failure is quiet and it is fatal. Nobody tells you it happened.

The Topic-to-Course-Code Conversion, and How It Fails

A management consultant emails offering to teach "digital transformation" or "AI strategy." I believe them. The work is real, the client list is impressive, the slides are probably better than mine.

But there is no unstaffed section in my building called Digital Transformation. So there is no gap for that offer to fill.

The teachable version of that consultant is the existing course their topic lives inside. Operations Management. Management Information Systems. Strategic Management. The consulting work is not the course title. It is the evidence base, the case material, and the reason students will believe them in week three.

Same failure, different flavour: the fifteen-year controller who writes "I could teach accounting." Accounting is not one staffing problem. It is at least five. Introductory financial accounting, managerial accounting, intermediate financial reporting, audit, and tax are separate courses with separate instructors and separate shortages.

Saying "accounting" makes me guess. Saying "Introductory Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, and Auditing I" makes me check a spreadsheet.

Same person. Same experience. Completely different outcome.

What Courses Can I Teach? A Three-Step Exercise

This is a repeatable exercise. It takes about ninety minutes and you only have to do it once per institution.

Step 1: Inventory functions, not job titles

Write down what you actually did, in verbs, not what your business card said. "Director of Finance" tells me nothing. "Built the monthly close, ran the audit relationship, priced three product lines, prepared the board deck" tells me four things, and each one lands somewhere different in a curriculum.

Do this for every substantial role. You will end up with fifteen to thirty functions.

Step 2: Translate each function into academic calendar language

Now go to the actual academic calendar. Canadian public universities and colleges publish one, with course codes, titles, credit values and catalogue descriptions. Universities Canada is the membership organization for Canada's universities, and Colleges and Institutes Canada represents publicly supported colleges, institutes, cégeps and polytechnics across the country. Their members post this material publicly.

Read the calendar for the specific programs you might fit, not just the one department you assume is right. Then match your functions to course descriptions, using their words. For how a chair actually reads that document, see how to read a Canadian course calendar like a chair.

This step is where most candidates cheat by skipping it. Do not skip it. The calendar is the artifact the chair thinks in. Speaking any other language forces a translation the chair will not perform for you.

Step 3: Apply the 13-week test

For each candidate course, ask one question: could I build a defensible 13-week outline, deliver every week of it, and grade the work fairly?

Not "do I know this material." Not "have I done this professionally." Could I fill week nine, when the novelty has worn off and the interesting war stories are used up, and then mark a full section's worth of assignments to a standard I could defend to an appeals committee.

Most people find this cuts their list roughly in half. Good. That is the list you can actually stand behind.

Why Three Courses, Not One and Not Six

Three is a range signal and a scheduling gift at the same time.

One course reads as narrow, and if that one section is already covered, the conversation ends. Five or six reads as unfocused.

Here is what happens internally when someone names six areas: nobody thinks "wow, versatile." One of us says some version of "which of these do they actually know," and now the burden is on the candidate to prove depth in all six, which they cannot do in an email. A long list does not expand your surface area. It invites doubt across the whole thing.

Three also matches how part-time teaching loads are actually sized. Under the Ontario college academic collective agreement, part-time academic staff teach up to 6 contact hours per week and partial-load staff teach more than 6 and up to 12. That is a small, countable number of sections. Confirm the current thresholds against the CAAT Academic collective agreement and the partial-load band. A chair is not imagining a full workload for you. They are imagining one section, maybe two, possibly a third if the term goes sideways in August.

Three named courses give a chair options across a timetable without asking them to evaluate a career.

Which Courses Get Handed to a Practitioner, and Which Do Not

There is an informal internal logic here that nobody publishes.

Courses that move easily to practitioners tend to be high-enrolment, required, and stable in content. First-year and second-year service courses. Introductory sections that run several times a term. Applied and professional courses where students explicitly expect someone who has done the job.

Courses that move less easily tend to be senior seminars tied to a specific faculty member's research, methods courses in the discipline's core, and anything where a program's accreditation or a full-time member's workload claim is attached.

So the strongest pick is not the boutique senior elective closest to your passion. It is the intersection of what you can defend and what the department is chronically short of. That is disproportionately the introductory and required end of the calendar. Less glamorous. Far more likely to run.

One category is badly underused: lab sections, clinical or practicum supervision, and capstone or design-project supervision. A P.Eng. with twelve years in structural design can credibly claim a first-year statics or materials course and a second-year design course, but the third item on their list should be capstone supervision. Those roles are often hard to staff and frequently open to practitioners, and almost nobody names them because supervision does not feel like "teaching a course." It is often the door industry people actually walk through.

Similar blind spot for lawyers. A commercial litigator assumes the only fit is a law school. The more realistic openings are Business Law, Employment Law and Real Estate Law sections sitting inside business, HR and real estate diploma programs at colleges. Those sections exist in large numbers and they are frequently taught by practitioners rather than by full-time faculty with doctorates.

Do You Need a PhD to Teach at a Canadian College or University?

Requirements are set institution by institution, and often program by program. There is no single national rule, and anyone who tells you otherwise is generalizing.

What I can tell you is where to look. The posted qualifications on the specific job ad, and the institution's academic hiring policy, are the only authoritative answers. Read them before you assume you are out.

As a practical matter, expectations differ meaningfully between sectors, and professional programs frequently weigh a relevant credential plus substantial industry experience differently than a research-intensive department weighs it. Whether a CPA, P.Eng. or LLB is sufficient for a given section is a question about that section, not about you. Check the posting. For the pathway question behind this one, see university teaching jobs with a CPA or P.Eng. and no PhD.

The vocabulary also varies. "Sessional instructor," "adjunct," "contract academic staff" and "professor of practice" do not mean the same thing everywhere, and titles do not transfer between institutions. In the Ontario college system the collective agreement language is precise: part-time is up to 6 contact hours per week, partial-load is more than 6 and up to 12. Elsewhere you have to read the local agreement.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers has long documented that contract academic staff make up a large share of university teaching, while noting there is no reliable national dataset counting them. Statistics Canada's UCASS survey collects data on full-time teaching staff only, which is exactly why no authoritative Canadian percentage exists.

So be skeptical of any number you see quoted about contingent faculty in Canada. Including from people selling you something.

Timing: When the Three-Course Statement Lands

A statement that is ignorable in one month is urgent in another.

The useful window opens when the chair is building the timetable and can still see empty cells, and it opens again in the panic weeks right before a term starts, when someone withdraws, an enrolment surge splits a section, or a full-time member gets a course release. Those late gaps get filled from whoever is already in the folder, reachable, and specific.

That last part matters more than people realize. The reason to send a clean three-course statement in a quiet month is not that the chair will act on it that week. It is that when a section falls over in the third week of August, you are already a named, scoped, one-line answer instead of a file someone has to decode.

The Budget Environment, Honestly

You have read the headlines. On January 22, 2024, IRCC announced a national intake cap on international study permit applications, expected to result in approximately 360,000 approved study permits for 2024, a decrease of about 35% from 2023. On September 18, 2024, IRCC set a target of 437,000 study permits for 2025, roughly 10% below the 2024 target, and extended the cap to master's and doctoral students. Ontario's Blue-Ribbon Panel on Postsecondary Education Financial Sustainability, reporting in November 2023, found a large share of Ontario universities and colleges projecting operating deficits.

There has also been widespread reporting of program suspensions and staff reductions in the Ontario college sector. OPSEU and an arbitrated faculty contract put the figure at more than 600 programs cancelled or suspended. The specific counts move month to month, so I am not going to quote you a number I cannot stand behind today.

What I will not do is tell you this is all good news for adjuncts, or all bad. Both stories are being told and neither has clean national evidence behind it. Enrolment-driven contraction removes sections in some programs. Budget pressure increases reliance on lower-cost contingent staffing in others. The honest position is that the direction varies by institution, sector and program, and you should assess the specific department you are approaching rather than the sector as a whole.

What has clearly changed is the constraint set a chair operates under. Fewer chairs are in a position to offer more than they can immediately justify. That makes specificity more valuable, not less. A candidate who names exactly what they can cover is easy to approve. A candidate who requires exploration is easy to defer.

The Literal Sentence to Send a Department Chair

Weak:

"I have over fifteen years of experience in finance and accounting and would be interested in any teaching opportunities in your business programs."

Stronger:

"I am a CPA with fifteen years as a controller in manufacturing. Based on your calendar, I could teach ACC 101 Introductory Financial Accounting, ACC 210 Managerial Accounting, and AUD 300 Auditing I. I have run the audit relationship for a mid-sized manufacturer for eight years and can supply a sample 13-week outline for any of the three."

The second version takes ten seconds to triage and can be checked against a spreadsheet immediately. That is the whole game. Put it in the cover letter, not buried on page four of the CV.

Two things to avoid. Do not name a topic you love instead of a course that exists in the calendar. And do not open by proposing a brand new course. New courses go through curriculum committee approval cycles measured in terms or years, so a new-course pitch answers a question the chair is not currently asking. Propose it in year two, once you are already teaching for them.

Where to Start

Pull up the academic calendar of one institution near you. Run the three steps. Write your three course codes on a sticky note.

If you cannot get past step two, that is usually a signal that you are matching to the wrong programs rather than that you are unqualified. It is the part I spend most of my time on with people at Professor Town, because it is the part where the whole thing quietly succeeds or fails.

Where to Go From Here

If you have three course codes and a clause of evidence under each, the next bottleneck is whether a chair can defend those three without doing research: designation, currency, and the deliverable that maps to the calendar description. That is the file we read in an application audit, not a generic "are you faculty material" conversation.

Bring the calendar page you were working from. We will go through whether the three you named are three a chair can actually staff.

Get a Free Audit of Your Three-Course Statement

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