Uni Melbourne is promoting the work of its “academic specialists” – and they could blaze a productivity trail in universities now overgrown by thickets of regulation.
The role models have been on the books at Parkville for 15 years, but are still apparently unknown-enough for management to promote a greet and meet for participants next week.
And while they do not rate a mention in UoM’s voluminous Enterprise Agreement, the intent for the “scholarly-based” roles as set out in the academic appointment policy is to have a “transformative impact” on research, student experience and research training, without always teaching/researching themselves.
They include “employees involved in community engagement, academic policy development, research service and leadership.”
Which makes them sound like jobs that are not easily jammed into the HEW categories used in the workforce model designed in the 1990s, that requires everybody to be either an academic or professional staff person.
The tech-times have changed since then. Directors of National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Facilities have long called for a job family for staff with science knowledge and the know-how to run complex kit. The COVID-pivot to remote teaching would not have happened without ed-tech practitioners whose discipline is learning, rather than an academic subject.
Liz Baré (Uni Melbourne) has long warned the existing HEW job classifications for professional staff are way out of date and the same applies for academics who need teaching, discipline and media production skills. And then there is AI.