A Survey of Dual Career Hiring into Engineering Faculty Positions

Dual career couples are now the norm instead of the exception in the modern workplace. Many universities encounter couples who are seeking two tenure-track faculty positions, and the success of many academic searches hinges on finding suitable employment for each member of a dual career team. Couples in these situations are often unsure of the most effective strategy for finding two suitable academic positions and often rely on anecdotal information when searching for professorial positions. With these shortcomings in mind, we designed a survey to determine the common attributes of successful dual career searches where both members of the dual career team successfully found tenure-track positions in engineering. This paper reports the findings of this survey and provides some guidelines to dual career couples seeking academic positions and to administrators and faculty seeking to work out hires involving dual career couples.