There are thousands of university staff doing skilled work that did not exist 30 years ago. They don’t always fit the long in-place job classifications used by universities, based on generic skills descriptions for pay-scales in the HE industrial award – especially the divide between academic and professional staff.
The techs who keep the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure System ticking over get this. Their scientific skills mean they work on both sides of the staff divide. NCRIS directors accordingly make the case for a job classification, with KPIs, for these specialist roles (Campus Morning Mail, November 8 2022).
And there are plenty more people in the same situation, skilled specialists in a “third space” with ambiguous boundaries that vary across work descriptions and institutions – for example, education content creators, learning tech developers, and work integrated learning entrepreneurs, for starters.The University of Melbourne’s Data Analytics team demonstrates why the divide is now spurious. Defined as “academic specialists,” they work “with researchers and partners at all stages of the research lifecycle – from research design and data collection to data analysis, visualisation, and interpretation.” These could be called support roles – except this tea bring adaptable knowledge to collaborate on projects, ranging from using AI in breast-cancer imaging to a text-analysis of a medieval commentary on Livy.
So do Matthew Clemson, Minh Huynh and Alice Huang, Uni Sydney academics who created Dr MattTabolism, a text-based AI that interacts with biochemistry undergraduates.
“There is an inconsistency of roles across the sector,” says Ruth Jelley, a contract learning designer and the National Tertiary Education Union’s assistant state secretary for Victoria.
“The very overlapping nature of this third space work can actually create conflict between workers who essentially are trying to achieve the same outcome,” she told a recent NTEU webinar.
And like NCRIS specialists, learning developers can be caught in a no-persons land,
“in many cases, too many cases, across our sector professional staff are restricted from engaging in research to further their expertise.” The same, she says, can apply to academics “who have issues with the recognition of their work.”
Plus there’s an equity issue with university managements allocating curriculum design to professional staff, who are paid less than academics.
That’s when the third space is noticed at all. As ANU education designer Sue Sharpe, told the NTEU, the Accord did not mention third space staff. “If this is a road map for our potential future I find it really problematic that there is a visibility issue, visibility has a flow on effect for career progression.”
The union is on to this -conducting a comprehensive survey for third-space workers what they do, where they are based and their employment conditions.
However these are part of a bigger issue – the relevance of existing job classifications for both academic and professional staff, created in cyber pre-history, back in the 1990s.
Elizabeth Baré and colleagues (from Melbourne U’s higher education research centre) argued during the transformation of working conditions caused by the pandemic, that both academic and professional job classification levels need reviewing, “particularly with the rise of ‘third space’ staff. They suggested this needed a system-wide approach and proposed using the enterprise bargaining round now concluded.
Which did not happen – but it needs to.
