After receiving his PhD, he was a lecturer at Harvard, before joining the sociology department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There he moved from assistant professor to full professor by 1996, before moving to Columbia University in 1997. At Columbia, Bearman was chair of the department of sociology from 2001-2005 and chair of the department of statistics from 2007-2008. Between 2002 and 2003, he was a visiting professor at the University of Genoa, Italy, the University of Munich. He has chaired 50 doctoral dissertations.