Job outlook for french lecturers in the United States

What general advice would you give to a French Lecturer?

Juan de la Puente Herrero: - As precarious as things are looking for people from my generation, the fields of Romance Languages and Linguistics have an advantage that has gotten me out of more than one financial distress: they are incredibly versatile. If you acquire the necessary skills for it (and don't skip the step of actually learning them, please), you can quickly pick up different 'side hustles' that require minimal infrastructure. However, the idea of turning them into your main source of income could quickly become flimsy and unstable. You don't want to be the person who relies solely on occasional students to tutor, translations to complete, or texts to proofread.

If you do want to maximize your salary potential in this field with a single source of income, you are going to have to deal with a tremendous amount of bureaucracy, technical requirements, and elitism. If your dream profession in this field involves teaching and being financially stable, you probably want to look into getting a PhD. In order to get there, you need to carefully study how willing you are to remain broke for a few years, even though there isn't a tenured job assured at the other end of the tunnel. On a brighter note, I have met lots of lecturers in higher education who enjoy a comfortable salary and a peaceful work life, but in order to get there, most of them had to suffer through multiple precarious contracts and on-and-off appointments, which are very stressful situations to be on, specially for non-citizens like me.

I hope that my answers don't discourage anyone from getting into this field. I just described the ugliest parts of working in it, but I would be more than happy to dedicate double the words to explaining the things that I enjoy about working with languages and Linguistics.