Higher Education is at a crossroads, shaped by financial pressures, evolving student needs, and rapid technological changes. A key challenge lies in the disconnect between Academic and Professional Services teams, often seen as merely supporting academic work.
For institutions to excel in teaching, research, and innovation, strong cooperation between academics and professional services is essential. Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) plays a crucial role here, ensuring the right talent aligns with institutional goals. However, achieving this alignment is complex, with varying measures of value across teams. SWP addresses this by providing a structured approach to workforce planning, beyond simply filling vacancies.
This thought piece explores those elements and provides recommendations about how greater alignment can be achieved.
The Professional Services landscape
According to HESA data returns over the past decade, there has been a steady increase in the number of non-academic (i.e., Professional Services) staff in Higher Education[1].
Table 1: HE Staff FPE by academic employment marker and academic year (2014/15 to 2022/23) for those institutions submitting non-academic staff data in all eligible years (HESA Staff Return extracted via Heidi Plus 2024)
According to the latest figures, the average ratio of Professional Services to Academic staff across the sector is just shy of 55:45[2] and this doesn’t reflect any “third space” professionals working across both camps who aren’t captured in the data.
So, what’s going on? Seemingly, greater numbers of non-academics are ‘required’ to successfully operate universities than ever before. Is that the reality? Or are we instead seeing a combination of additional people resources being hired to work around process inefficiencies and systems underperformance – rather than tackling the root causes? Or, hard to believe given the straightened financial circumstances the sector finds itself in, is this the result of hiring creep – poor budget management and staff approval processes enabling localised hiring decisions? In all likelihood, it’s a combination of all of these and more. Is it sustainable? Absolutely not? Does it provide value-for-money to students and funders? A hard argument to justify.
Why do we need to workforce plan differently for Professional Services?
Firstly, professional services staff experience different challenges and experiences, which should be considered in the overall plan. These can include:
Managing costs:
‘Administrative’-related resource is often one of the first areas to be targeted when looking at staffing budgets and areas of efficiencies. However, these areas are often where there is the greatest single source of reliance, and where staff are deliberately supporting Academic colleagues who do not engage with institution-wide systems and processes.
Growth in ‘student-facing’ services:
To offer a more enhanced student experience, Universities are seeking to enhance support and guidance offered within student-facing services (i.e., Careers). This could include bespoke support for different demographics, increased mental health and wellbeing support and employability and network services.
A need to invest in staff development:
This can help to ensure that staff have the skills and expertise to deliver high-quality teaching and learning. It could include the delivery of professional development opportunities for staff across academic and professional services departments.
Navigating talent scarcity and expertise:
The current market faces talent shortages in areas such as data analytics, cybersecurity, and AI. Professionals with deep expertise in these areas are highly sought after. Recruiting and retaining Professional Services talent can be complex as there are fewer clear career pathways and it’s more like that Professional Services staff will need to change their role to achieve career progression. However, while this drives some institutions to “grow their own”, this can be a risky strategy which erodes diversity of skills and reduces the institutional benefit of recruiting staff with wider experience and expertise from other institutions.
Preparing for technological disruption:
The rise of automation, AI, and machine learning has already begun to reshape the sector, resulting in increased automation and changing nature of work, skills gaps and a need to reassess where value can be added.
Secondly, while there is so much relevant data that gives a picture of ‘performance’ for academic areas, quantitative data for Professional Services tends to be limited.
Understanding performance in Professional Services means asking a different set of questions to create a more nuanced view of current performance and future institutional need from the service. Asking questions like those below gets to the heart of Professional Services workforce requirements:
- What functional area(s) are people accountable for? What services are delivered within the function? Where does line control reside? How frequently are the services delivered? Are spans of control appropriate?
- What are the technology enablers for the services I am accountable for? (Systems, platforms etc) What technologies do my services currently use?
- What processes are necessary to deliver these services? Which of these processes am I accountable for currently?
- What essential skills are required to deliver these services? What is their cost? What skills gaps exist? Where does each service have a dependency on another function to succeed?
- How can the current culture and sub-cultures of my service areas be described? What services/aspects of services are performing effectively? Can that be evidenced? What is falling below expectations?
- What is the cost of delivering each service? Is it justified and proportionate?
Considering the above factors, it is crucial to recognise that SWP for Professional Services needs to be different to, and complementary to SWP for academic units.
We recommend you take a more discursive approach to SWP in Professional Services, which starts with recognising business needs, capabilities and current resource levels but uses wider qualitative insights on quality of service and performance to shape the plan further.
Professional Services plans may also come after an Academic plan where there is a more strategic drive for effective academic delivery and increased student numbers. A phase 2 workforce plan therefore ensures that Professional Services truly enable those areas to work effectively. As such, we advise empowering Professional Services Directors to set out what they will need to deliver their service based on a solid understanding of what the institution needs i.e. one which considers the academic endeavour and support for other Professional Services as a cohesive whole.
With expertise covering almost all areas involved in Human Resources, policy and employment law, the team at SUMS Consulting would be happy to help in supporting conversations further.
If you wish to discuss further or need any further information, please contact Emma on e.l.ogden@sums.ac.uk. You can see Emma in action at the SUMS Annual Conference 2024! Members can register here.
[1] From 2019/20, it is not mandatory for HE providers in England and Northern Ireland to return information about non-academic staff. Of the 223 providers returning staff data to HESA in 2022/23, 97 opted-out.
[2] HESA are still investigating whether they can produce useful SSRs given changes to the 2022/23 student data model.
