Shivani, Thank you for your question. Usually, the measure is what did you achieve during your work as a part-time lecturer or guest lecture and what did you add to the program? How the students and other staff in the organisation see your work? Have you succeeded in publishing an article or a research paper in a peer-review journal? Have you helped in solving problems your program is facing? Have you demonstrated professional behaviour, effectiveness, commitment and creativity? These issues are important and definitely will enable you to find a permanent job either in that institute or another one.

Dear Shivani,

Whatever activity we do in our career as academics and researchers is written up in our CV as experience. For what my advice is worth, keep doing it because you will learn by doing even if this is not considered for recruitment. Now, if some universities do not consider this as experience, ask why.

Guest Lectures have a lot to gain as well:-

1. Looks great on your resume – let’s start with the most selfish  reason: Guest lecturing looks great on your resume/bio.  It creates an impression that you believe in sharing your knowledge.

2. There are health benefits of volunteering – think of all the lives  you will change and all the students you will impact and that too while  improving your health. Research shows that volunteering has health  benefits.

3. Gain self-confidence and self-esteem – Are you in a role where you  have to address multiple people regularly? If yes, then you know how  good it feels to public speak. You talk and they listen. If you don’t  get that opportunity or are not really a public speaker, guest speaking  at a higher education institute will be a great opportunity to  polish that skill. Imagine, you walk into a classroom full of curious  students as the successful, polished expert.

Sharing something from my personal experience; we were able to learn mostly through our guest lecturers as they were innovative, and tried to leave an impact within short duration of time; for example we have a guest lecturer on the topic of 'values' class in leadership and management in our graduation program. See, the topic is broader and only three credit hours are not sufficient to cover it but , lecturer made us think through interactive lectures with thought provoking questions and with slides having a rich images, and class activity; Lecturer engaged us in a way, that we forgot to remember to look for the time, as our class is used to see a lot, to the wall clock and yawns a lot, and uses smart phones a lot during lectures( sorry these are in-civil behaviors during class session but what to do when lectures make you so sleepy). Our almost all experiences with guest lecturers were great; and we learned a lot in terms of critical thinking, self reflections and searching for the meanings of ourselves ;what values are and how values affect us in our routine life, academic life and our career life?. We searched the meanings and we develop our own definitions. In essence,that is learning.

So, be A guest lecturer, it has a lot more impact on learners' minds as you think.