How do you perceive professionals who are adjunct professors?

I have been in the design industry for over 20 years and about a decade ago, I found myself with opportunities to start teaching. At the time since design was new, one of the best ways for me to do business development for freelancing was to teach design classes at boot camp style schools, where professionals came to learn more about design, but didn’t necessarily have the capabilities to do it themselves so they hired me.

Since then, I’ve been invited to be an adjunct professor and I teach one or two evening classes each semester at local universities. As much as I absolutely love this job, I am 100% certain that there is no path for me to leave industry entirely and be a full-time academic.

I even tried by taking one year to teach exclusively and see if I can create a path for myself. I realized that based on the way the education systems work, the trajectory would leave me in poverty for an unknown amount of time. This is due to how rare full-time jobs are and my low likelihood of getting them because I don’t have a standard academic background. It would just destroy any financial future that I would hope to have because it would be the world‘s biggest gamble that I’m not sure I can take. Even if I get the job, it would pay about a third of the salary that I could be making on the open market at my seniority.

I’ve been able to adjunct at nights because I freelanced for a number of years but now that work is also dried up. So I’ve been trying to go back to corporate but now I have this awkward story where I have this really significant and valuable teaching and mentoring experience, but I am terrified to put it on my résumé because I think it will disqualify me or make companies think I’m not serious.

I would love to continue to adjunct teach, but only in conjunction with significant contract jobs or a full-time job. It’s a significant part of my design practice because I think that our industry has made better by nurturing the education landscape and I like putting my time where my values are.

So how do I display anything about my adjunct teaching on resume or linked in? I do think it’s an important part of my design practice because I am contributing to the field and interestingly also learning a ton about design as an educator.

I always thought it was perceived as a negative, but a for my colleague of mine told me that in some spaces, it might be considered a high status thing.

How do you perceive someone who is also an adjunct professor? Would it prevent you from taking them seriously as a contractor or applicant? What’s a good way to tell this story?