The material in this chapter is drawn principally from a research project that I conducted with William Locke and Giulio Marini for the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) on the changing nature of the workforce in UK higher education between 2017 and 2020.1,2 In this research, we sought to capture the lived experience of staff having both academic and professional contracts, reviewing these in the context of trends in workforce patterns shown by the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency’s (HESA) annual staff datasets.
Although the trends represented in numerical datasets provide a neat summary, they do not depict the whole story in terms of the day-to-day lives and aspirations of individuals as they develop their roles and careers. By adding a qualitative dimension through interviews, we were able to understand better the working lives and career aspirations of the individuals who are included in those figures. Findings included an increased fluidity in academic careers and approaches to them, and ways in which individuals negotiated their roles.
HESA datasets record shifts in the balance of the academic profession over the last decade or so. The number of academic staff in UK higher education institutions increased by 29% in just 12 years, as the table shows. However, the proportion on teaching and research contracts fell from 52.3% to 42.8% during the same period.
