Vanadium 50 said:
You want a job like this? Take the entry-level jobs of part-time instructor and work your way up like everybody else.
When I finished grad school in the mid 1980s, I wasn't looking for community-college positions, but rather for positions at 4-year colleges where teaching was the main focus, like the college where I had been an undergraduate. Back then (don't know about now), "visiting assistant professor" positions were fairly common, usually for one year, filling in for faculty who were on sabbatical. In my first job search, I focused on those. I got lucky and landed a two-year position, filling in for two consecutive sabbaticals. It was a full-time position, with health insurance and a retirement plan, which you don't usually get with adjunct positions.
In my next job search, I focused on tenure-track positions, with visiting positions as a fallback, and got lucky again, at the college where I ended up retiring from.
In both searches, the competition was stiff, on the order of 100 applications per position. (The same was true for a search that I supervised as department chairman, in the mid 1990s, at my non-elite college). So I took it for granted that I would need to move, and I wouldn't have much control over where to. I ended up moving from Michigan to upstate New York to South Carolina.
So I wouldn't expect to be able to stay in California for a tenure-track position, even though California is big enough to be almost a separate country.
