Are there any good job directories for academic work?

It would depend on what your field of work is. But heres a nifty little list that I keep an eye on (I am looking for a postdoctoral position in academia / research and these websites are quite helpful to me)

• www.phds.org
• www.postdocjobs.com
• http://www.cfd-online.com/Jobs/
• http://www.aps.org/careers/
• http://www.academickeys.com

There are a few websites suggested in the answers below/above my response to this question and they are quite nice too!

Besides that you probably have a general idea as to what you'd want to work as / work for. You could perhaps target a bunch of universities and faculty members for prospective positions?

Good luck!

It's almost impossible to give a general answer to this question, since different fields handle things in very different ways. Your profile says you're a cognitive scientist and philosopher, which is beyond my competence, but for other readers here's an answer for mathematics jobs in the US:

The largest number of job ads for US academic jobs in math, especially at but not limited to reseach-oriented schools, are found at http://www.ams.org/profession/employment-services/eims/eims-home. In particular, most math departments do not advertise on generic websites (not field specific) unless there are university requirements to do so, and you cannot find most math jobs without going to math-specific sites. I have no idea whether this is typical for academic fields, or unique to mathematics.

One unusual feature of mathematics (compared with computer science, for example) is that there's a centralized application site, http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs, which covers a surprisingly large fraction of jobs and makes handling letters of recommendation very easy. It's still important to look at ads on math society websites, since some schools do not allow departments to use mathjobs.

For industrial or government employment, it's a real mess, and different subfields advertise in rather different places (or sometimes hardly advertise at all). I don't think there's anything valuable to say there without narrowing things down quite a bit.

http://www.higheredjobs.com

They have jobs broken down by Job Category, Region, and Institution Type. They also do a great job of keeping you informed of opportunities when they are added to the their database. You provide your CV and potential employers can search for applicants by credentials.