Professional staff carve out a new space

Abstract

A 2004 paper, ‘The invisible workers’ by Szekeres, lamented the ‘invisibility’ of professional staff in Australian higher education. Even then, professional staff constituted more than half the university workforce, but they were defined by what they were not (non-academic) and they experienced a high level of frustration in their relationships with academic staff and with their institutions. This paper examines whether the situation for professional staff has changed in the intervening period. It would seem that by 2009, professionals had carved out a more critical space in the sector than they had been able to do by 2004. At senior levels, professionals are no longer restricted to specialist roles such as human resources or information technology or building services but have moved into the Pro- and Deputy-Vice-Chancellor space, roles previously reserved for senior academics. However, has there been much change in the junior or middle management roles? This paper considers the literature over the last six years as it relates to professional staff, look at the changing statistics in Australia around employment of professional staff, and consider what changes have taken place for professional staff at all levels.

Keywords:

• administration
• professional staff
• roles
• culture

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all those people who provided comment on the early draft of this paper. Many of the comments were insightful and very helpful in providing some ideas of what issues to explore further. This paper was among those accepted as part of the TEM Conference 2011 refereed stream.