The relationship between government and the higher education system has changed over the past decades, creating a wide range of novel, ancillary duties within universities.
With university employment practices once more in the spotlight, the challenges of academic staffing have been well-examined. But there has been comparatively little reflection on the obligations composition and skills of the professional university workforce.
Despite occasional accusations of “bloat” in university administration, a 2021 longitudinal analysis of data, sourced from the Department of Education, Skills and Employment and published in Higher Education, compared the growth over time in numbers of administrative staff employed at Australian universities to that of academic staff. It reported that, as universities have grown, these cohorts have expanded, but the proportion of both as part of the university has remained roughly constant.
More interestingly, the data between 1997 and 2017 shows that the composition of administrative staff cohorts across Australian universities has contracted at a junior level but expanded around the middle tier of experience levels.
The last 30 years have seen big changes in the requirements of the university sector in Australia, many of which demand technical know-how from administrators. A few examples might include:
- The pace of research and publication has, itself, accelerated globally. In Australia, research outputs tripled over the three decades leading up to 2019.
- The implementation of Australia’s quality assurance exercise, ERA, in 2010 demanded robust administrative support.
- Reporting expectations have skyrocketed. In 2013, Universities Australia estimated that universities were spending approximately $280 million a year on regulatory compliance and reporting.
- The rapid pivot to online course delivery during Covid-19 lockdowns certainly encouraged more of the same shift in priorities for supporting university operations.
- Digitisation — and the associated digital transformation priorities — has gone from “nice to have” to “mandatory,” bringing with it new responsibilities for internal technical teams.
- Accordingly, cybersecurity obligations have increased over the past decades.
Even though these obligations occur across a range of professional areas, from research coordination to course delivery to reporting to security, the demand for more information to be delivered faster is ubiquitous. These demands can only be met by ensuring administrative staff have data skills and the assistance of robust data management tools.
Data management and efficient access to aggregated and analysed data has become a core requirement for Australian universities in order for them to discharge their obligations in a timely way. The shift that has occurred in the composition of the cohort of non-academic workforce includes an expansion of data skills to support growing obligations. There has been a concomitant decline in support staff, for where extensive data entry and slow manual processes were once the norm, industry-specific tools now streamline and automate work that was once done universally by hand.
ResearchMaster is an industry-leading research management system, designed to help streamline research administration. For more information, contact us.
