Opinion
Why bother calling staff ‘professional’ if they are going to be ignored anyway?
Over the past couple of decades, a grudging acceptance that the majority of employees in the higher education sector added some value resulted in a move from describing non-academic employees as ‘professional’ rather than ‘general’.
However, a recent slump in visibility and recognition of the expertise and insights of professional stuff raises the question of whether it is better to call a spade a spade. If 57% of the staff have just 1% of the voice, do they feel any better holding on to their ‘professional’ status, or is it better to revert to the language of utility.
So what’s brought this on, you ask?
This week’s address by UA Chair Carolyn Evans has called out the potential for bureaucratic overreach and made a strong argument for the incapacity of government to pick winners amidst the complexity of the course and job market raises a clear issue that has been festering for some time.
As a nation, we have had a problem of supply-side group think. Our national policy and many institutional strategies are predicated on the interests and perspectives of what we wish to offer and what courses and jobs we wish to fill, with scant regard for the interests, perspectives and free will of the community we purport to serve.
One remedy would be start including professional staff as equal actors in the discussion – bringing people into the tent whose jobs depend on listening to, understanding and persuasively engaging the wider public. We could even start to acknowledge that they have skills and knowledge flagged not by their qualifications or organisational chart standing, but rather by their demonstrated effectiveness and achievements in their fields.
We could do that. But we rarely do.
There is no evidence to suggest that if we build it (or ‘open the door’ as Minister Clare would describe it), they will come. By ‘they’ we of course mean the less educated masses outside the ivory walls who we presume are clamoring to come into our campuses as soon as there is a chink in a door or a window wide enough. The extra million or so people who will stampede into tertiary classrooms over the next 23 years as we confidently stride towards the target of the Accord, to have 80% of the workforce enlightened by a VET or HE qualification.
There is no evidence to suggest they will come, but no evidence to suggest they won’t either, because the will of the populace and the extensive skills of our professional staff in engaging and attracting them are not of sufficient interest or focus in the planning of many of our institutions or our system.
We have become so enraptured by our academic procession fancy dress and steep organisational charts we have assumed that the othered masses huddling around dank kitchen tables in the lands beyond campus are simply waiting around til they get their opportunity to sign up for enlightenment.
Put another way, the testimonials of people who made it in life after going to uni 20 or 30 years ago are expected to translate effectively to 20 somethings staring down the barrel of housing and food insecurity and the prospect of epic debt right now.
Just because the public knows something is beneficial doesn’t mean they will do it.
Exercise is good for us. Individually, we can extend our lives and increase our wellbeing through exercise. As a community, we can have lower health bills and no doubt better productivity if more of us exercised. But the majority of us choose not to exercise enough and 67% of Australian adults are overweight or obese.
Saving money is good for us. Moderation in use of screens is good for us. Work-life balance is good for us. Eating daily serves of fruit and veg is good for us. But we aren’t exactly starring on any of these metrics, even though pathways to improved societal outcomes are regularly reinvigorated and funded – because free will and personal choice trumps most attempts at behaviour modification and/or centralised control.
And of course, most people realise that Education is good for us. But just because we provide more access to it doesn’t mean Australians will choose to flock to it in greater numbers.
The conceit of the current tertiary sector growth model is to presume that it offers something so intrinsically irresistible and worthy that if you remove a few barriers, the grateful masses will flood in.
The presumption that we know best for those poor souls who haven’t a degree or a certificate to their name and that they will recognise their follies and sign up to study en masse as soon as the nearest door is flung open for them is a fundamental flaw in our planning.
We need to engage and listen to Australia to understand whether the policies we are rapidly entrenching will work.
The goal of increasing under-represented cohorts and participation is laudable and widely beloved, as it should be. But it also has to be achievable. It is easy to be a cheerleader for change if you can blame someone else when system-wide results are not achieved.
Which is perhaps why experts in domestic marketing and recruitment are so rarely heard from or consulted by parliamentary committees, sector overlords or ministerial advisers. Why listen to experts who do the work? In a painfully hierarchical system, people with more qualifications or a higher place on the organisation chart too often ignore or drown out the expertise of those at the coal face.
For those unfamiliar with the inside of a marketing/admissions office, allow me to explain a little. Firstly, student don’t just walk into the open door of their nearest ivory tower, just because it’s open. They may prefer to study elsewhere based on family connection, parent or partner perception, perceived value and/or values, awareness – or increasingly, they may not choose to study at all.
Correcting misconceptions and address information deficits and guide each individual to a course and institution doesn’t just happen. There is more information than ever about study options for students, but misconceptions and misinformation and a feeling from many students that they just can’t find a simple explanation they can trust is an increasing issue.
To attract more student from under-represented cohorts, you actually need professional communications and engagement to dispel myths, target information to specific cohorts effectively and engage key audiences in an integrated way. This isn’t just a sophisticated broadcast – it requires listening, aggregated insights and analysis.
You can’t get this out of laggy publicly-available data or peer-reviewed publications. Reports on the 2024 market (the latest public data available) are useful for discussion about the past, but not for recruiting a new group of students effectively and efficiently for 2027.
To drive a cost-effective recruitment approach, you need insights from the current cohort of prospective students. You need to look at rejector analysis (why did people not accept their offer from institution A) competitor analysis (why do they elect to enrol in institution B instead of A), insights into perspectives of NEETs (people Not in Employment Education or Training) and key influencers on enrolment decisions (parents / partners/ careers practitioners) relevant to your institution / system and the audiences you are seeking to engage. Understanding perceptions, misperceptions and drivers of choice right now is critical if you want to avoid wasting a whole lot of money and time and have some success recruiting people for your next intake. This is relevant not just an institutional level, but also at a system-wide level.
How are we going to achieve the Accord’s goals if we don’t have data on whether it is possible, or what would make it so? When is this work going to be commissioned, so we can start to address some of the hard questions and deflate some of the specious assumptions that the future of our national workforce are currently being built upon?
We need to hear from professional staff.
As a side note, that is the reason we started HE FEST, a conference we are running again next month. It is one of the few opportunities to showcase the best insights, campaigns and fresh perspectives from professional staff involved in marketing, recruitment, fundraising and strategy. The reason we continue to invite not just professional staff, but staff and thought leaders from across the country, is that these insights should be heard and valued by all staff – it’s the data and the inspiration that could save your job, or change it forever.
Entries to this year’s Future Campus Awards demonstrate that some extraordinary work has been done in this space, with new approaches and insights in identifying and reaching specific cohorts of students in an effective and cost-efficient way.
But in the meantime, where else are expert professional staff being seen and heard – and how long until they are taken seriously by the stewards of our national system?
Supply-side thinking (the build it and they will come/ open the door and the great unwashed will walk through approach), without the rigour of understanding and responding to factors constraining and shaping demand is a lazy and potentially deeply flawed approach. However, this organisation-centric and system-cenric thinking has prevailed in many areas of the sector for a long time, because it preserves the interests and does not challenge the perspectives of those who rule it.
While these issues have suppressed the perspectives and expertise of staff in many professional areas, there is one notable exception. International recruitment teams have used their resourcing and leveraged their revenue significance over decades to have a better conduit to ministerial ears via Phil Honeywood and the IEAA. The IEAA conference is an annual celebration of international office expertise. There is very little sign of equivalent consultation or respect accorded to those stewarding domestic enrolments, or managing the HE workforce, or balancing the books. That’s a big gap right now in national policy.
If we actually care about the rights and personal choices of the under-represented folks we want to lure into tertiary education and we want policies for the future to actually work for them, as well as for us, we need demand-side insights.
We need marketing and recruitment professionals to have a voice. It’s time to restore professional-level respect to the majority of staff working in the nation’s tertiary sector. In the meantime, look at the excellence on display at HE FEST. You could be surprised at what we already know.
About the author
Tim Winkler is a higher education consultant and Editor-In-Chief of Future Campus. He has worked with 35 institutions in the tertiary sector on marketing, strategy, recruitment and/or fundraising. He has been commissioned to review more marketing and recruitment teams than anyone else in the country (16 teams over the past 16 years). He has led, reformed, advised and worked within teams that have recruited hundreds of thousands of students over the past 20 years across the country, including targeted programs to recruit a range of under-represented cohorts within Australia. He has also worked extensively in international recruitment, organisational strategy and staff recruitment.