LH Martin Institute

The New Zealand Universities’ Academic Workforce Planning Project

23 January 2012, by Kevin Seales

Kevin Seales is the Director of Human Resources for the University of Otago. He is a member of Universities New Zealand’s HR Committee and Chair of the Academic Workforce Planning Project’s Steering Group.

For a number of years, the eight New Zealand universities have shared concerns about the future viability of the sector’s academic workforce. Like other countries, as New Zealand moves towards 2020 there will be significant pressures on universities in maintaining an effective and efficient academic workforce. The international competition for top academics is on the rise and New Zealand staff are being attracted both out of the sector and out of New Zealand. During this same period members of the existing academic workforce will be retiring at a higher rate than ever before experienced. In addition, due to the changing ethnic mix in New Zealand, it is expected that this workforce will need to include a significantly greater proportion of Māori and Pacific peoples than at present.

In late 2009, the universities recognised the need to develop a strategic and encompassing workforce plan to identify initiatives to address the ‘supply/demand’ issues facing the academic staffing of New Zealand’s universities. The universities also recognised that demographic information about academic staffing was difficult to obtain with no single body accountable for its collective integrity. With these realisations, the university HR Directors, though Universities New Zealand’s HR Committee, established the Academic Workforce Planning–Towards 2020 (AWP-2020) Project. As a collaborative effort across the eight universities AWP-2020 received initial funding from the New Zealand government’s Tertiary Education Commission.

The first step of the project was to collect baseline information on the university academic workforce, analyse the extent of the problem and evaluate ways to proceed. Business and Economic Research Limited (BERL) was commissioned to do this initial work for the universities. Their report was released in January 2011.

BERL’s analysis of the academic workforce found that:

• 43% of the academic workforce is over 50 and 15% is over 60
• the number of older academic staff is growing and the inflow of younger academics is not keeping pace
• the academic workforce is ageing like other professions but is an older workforce to begin with
• an ageing academic workforce is a global trend
• the academic workforce operates within a global labour market that is becoming increasingly competitive
• studies show that New Zealand academic salaries are lower than in Australia, Canada and the US and are similar to those in the UK
• there are larger amounts of research funding and facilities available to academics in Europe and North America.

These findings, in combination with the outlook for continued high numbers of students due to a combination of demographics and government tertiary education policy including increasing the number of international, post graduate and Māori and Pacific students, make addressing the effects of an ageing academic workforce more pressing than in the greater New Zealand workforce.

Having established the makeup of the academic workforce, BERL compared a number of scenarios for the period to 2020. To ensure the scenarios were realistic BERL identified variables that influence the supply and demand of academic staff, which included:

• the growth of student numbers (both domestic and international)
• the mix of disciplines taught
• the participation rates of different student age groups.

Then they applied Statistics New Zealand projections for low, medium and high population growth to the different scenarios to assess the population for each age range in order to determine student numbers. These student numbers were applied to staff: student ratios for different disciplines in order to derive the number of academic staff needed for each discipline in the future.

Based on these scenarios BERL concluded that New Zealand’s universities will need to attract between 560 and 920 new academic staff each year between now and 2020. This range is higher than the 500 new academic staff attracted per year in recent years. Across the scenarios, the need to consistently attract academic staff is dominated by the rate of staff exits, which includes academics retiring during this period.

The BERL report included a number of recommended actions that could be taken collectively by the universities as part of AWP-2020 to address the findings of their report. As a priority, the universities plan to collect robust and consistent workforce data and create a sector-wide database to enable the production of an annual academic workforce report for Universities New Zealand. In addition, the project team is looking at initiatives including qualitative research to better understand the positive and negative perceptions of an academic career and the possible creation of a recruitment portal for the New Zealand universities.

What is clear is that the outflow will not be replaced and future academic staff requirements will not be met unless the New Zealand universities begin to take some strategic and collective action.