News & Views item - June 2010

 

 

President of the National Tertiary Education Union on the Impending Workforce Crisis for Australian Higher Education. (June 23, 2010)

Carolyn Allport, President, National Tertiary Education Union, in a letter to The Australian writes: "In the Australian University Review in 2005 [Graeme] Hugo stated: 'Australian universities over the next decade will be faced by their largest recruitment task for three decades... This task will have to be addressed in a context of the most competitive international labour market for the skilled academics, scientists and technologists and researchers that has ever existed.'"

 

This situation has not changed in the past five years.

 

In his most recent research, Investigating the Ageing Academic Workforce (2010), conducted in conjunction with Universities Australia, Hugo returns to this theme. While he acknowledges that the core business of universities is education and research, Hugo argues that workforce planning is vital if the sector is to identify risks to the delivery of its education and research programs.

 

He argues that initiatives must be put in place to support strategic directions taken by institutions or in the least to warn of risks caused by a lack of resources.

 

He asserts that the patchwork approach to workforce planning and development to date is insufficient to ensure there will be sufficient qualified academics to train the next generation of professionals.

 

Hugo claims it is imperative that a more strategic approach to the management of the higher education workforce is adopted, and that "while the injection of federal funds into the sector will help, a long-term perspective is required to prepare for a sustainable academic future".

 

Are we on the cusp of a real higher education revolution? The first stage of investment saw $5.7 billion in the 2009-10 budget improving the capacity of universities to build the infrastructure and support that increased participation in higher education demands. All this, however, may come to very little if we fail to address the issue of making the pursuit of an academic or research career at Australian universities an attractive proposition to young Australians, as well as international scholars. [our emphasis]

 

A good starting point would be to provide financial incentives to our universities to develop early career development opportunities for the increasing number of recent PhD graduates who are relying on casual and brief, fixed-term employment and who are becoming disillusioned with the prospect of pursuing an academic or research career.

 

Losing the present generation of PhD students from academe will make the task of overcoming the impending shortages in the academic workforce all the more problematic.