Professional Services/Support Department people – feeling the squeeze?

[sortaottery]

Is this something you recognise from your experience?

I started working in low-level roles in university professional service departments about eleven years ago. I've moved through several different areas at different institutions, and am now in a low-level but permanent job at a low-tariff uni.

In that time, it's seemed as if the workplaces have gone from being fairly relaxed environments with money to spend on staff training and development (which encouraged me to stay in HE) to pressure cookers, where many of the more experienced staff have retired or left, and everyone is fighting fires all the time.

The financial pressure results in managers/senior staff saying 'yes' to things without calculating the impact on the employees trying to hold things together – perhaps not feeling 'no' is ever an option, because of turnover. Every university, it seems, wants to increase the number of students without increasing the wage bill.

Some staff don't even seem to realise this is happening – like the myth of frogs in boiling water, not noticing the problem until too late. They get stressed and angry, but complain about people, not about the wider structure and pressures.

I know the places I've worked in haven't always been directly comparable. They've ranged from the grand and prestigious to the small and concrete. Plus when I started I was in my twenties, a lot more hopeful, and it was the pre-Brexit, pre-Trump era still. But I left the office at 8pm tonight, and I'd just really like to know what other digital quasi-colleagues impressions are.

If you still work in a laid-back idyll, let me know where it is so I can apply for a job there.

Academic here - I feel the pressure of our PS staff being cut to the bone. We’ve lost the people who knew the systems, the degree programmes, the staff, and the students. Academics are having to do a lot of admin work that used to be done by PS staff and there are also just big gaps. Things take a lot longer to process or get done.

Academics have to deal with student discontent over this as we’re the ones dealing with students in day to day teaching and we can’t just blame PS staff because know they are doing their best in the face of cuts and unreasonable demands from senior management.

Good people are leaving and they’re not being replaced. Commiserations.

Thank you for sharing that!

I don't know what the end point is for HE. At the moment, I can't see anything that will stop the squeeze unless international recruitment dries up, the financial underpinnings of the sector go from shaky to impossible, and the subsequent remodelling gets rid of some of the pressure towards marketisation (but also, in that case, gets rid of some of the jobs, perhaps including my own).

Agree with @ParmaVioletTea
I’m a head of division and managed a team of academics and have to deal with daily issues relating to professional support. Our P/S staff are trying their best but they’ve been cut to the bone and things are being missed.
It’s an absolute car crash.

The difficulty I find is that both PS and academic staff are being cut to the bone - but the direction of the work undone tends to travel towards the academic teams. I’m increasingly becoming a fairly well paid (but not very good) data entry clerk at the expense of being the teacher/researcher I was employed to be.

Hi, I can relate to OP’s and subsequent posts entirely. I left a PS role last year as the institution was running a VR scheme and I couldn’t see things improving.

My old institution has essentially cut up to half the PS posts in some areas but failed to streamline any of the tasks with the result that the remaining half of the staff are now doing twice the work. There is no proper investment in systems or training and they have lost tons of know-how and experience, so many of the people left are not up to speed. They are also stressed and overworked so keep going off sick leaving anyone left to take on even more work, without knowing the ropes, leading to stress and sickness … it’s a horrible downward spiral and I don’t see them getting out of it any time soon.

The academics of course also end up taking on some admin work but I’d say the PS staff working in departments have it bad too as the central teams are pretty good at saying they can’t do things and it just gets passed along the line. The staff who are at the pointy end of actually dealing with real students, researchers and academics have nowhere left to hand their work to. Management simply doesn’t seem to care. It’s tough making the books balance in HE but as ever there’s plenty spent on higher salaries whilst the lower orders are cut to the bone.

Yep it's pretty horrific where I am too. Massive swathes of experienced staff leaving under VS and not replaced.

My service has been carved up and spread across different departments making it twice as hard to work efficiently. All to 'save' money but none of it makes any sense on the ground. It's just less time we have to spend actually doing the job and working with students.

I still love what I do and care deeply about supporting students but have to reign in my feelings on how badly everything is being managed. They don't want to hear any criticism or complaints, even if sensible or justified - we're just told to put up with things or leave.

Head of a PS team here. It’s the most difficult time I’ve seen in my 10 years in the sector. We’re constantly promised innovative systems as part of big transformation projects, systems that are supposed to reduce staffing needs. They never work. We give feedback during consultation, but it’s rarely reflected in the final product.

When we raise the issue with senior committees and say we need more staff, we’re told to “work more agile.” Honestly, it’s a naïve response. Agility isn’t a magic fix, it needs time, capacity, and proper support.

We’re constantly promised innovative systems as part of big transformation projects, systems that are supposed to reduce staffing needs. They never work. We give feedback during consultation, but it’s rarely reflected in the final product.

Totally feel your pain here @SapphOhNo My university keeps rolling out huge changes eg. To our VLE with no testing or trying out, or at least keeping the old system in parallel as a back up. Result: first week of term was a disaster and one of our lovely PS education team resigned in tears because she felt such a failure. It wasn’t her, it was the stupidity of the way the new VLE was implemented.

Problem is, the senior leadership - both academic and PS - have either never taught or engaged with undergrads, or if they did, it was 20 years ago. Those of us who do deal with undergrads every day pay the price instead.

I think there maybe needs to be a shake up in how PS works. There are several weeks of the year where I and many others have hardly any tasks because it's summer vacation or it's just a lull while other teams are busy. However when we are busy we are so stretched and so many things have to go by the wayside as we just don't have the resource.

I am also at a university who seems to think we don't need more people we just need AI 🙄 co-pilot cannot do simple things like create a spreadsheet template pre populated with formulas so I'm still making all these manually. It's a waste of time. New systems implemented take months to resolve the teething issues and creates more work. It is a shambles and we provide such a poor service as a whole. I do my best with what I've got as I genuinely want to do a good job but I'm very restricted by the capacity and the attitudes of other teams most of the time.

I left my PS role not long ago but went back recently (long story).

The admin staff are stretched beyond belief. When I first joined PS my colleagues said there would be quiet periods but there haven’t actually been any.

I find the main obstacles are the absolute frustrating shitshow of systems that do not talk to each other or are not fit for purpose. The grey areas on how marks are worked out - sometimes needing human interpretation which of course can go wrong. deadlines ignored by academics when we request important information from them- we are constantly chasing our tails.

Then there is the mixed messaging on certain topics and I feel for the students as I don’t think the messaging is always consistent. We flag it higher up and nothing changes.

the university also has its fingers in far too many pies, students on some courses can take modules from other courses and it all ends up a bit of a crap show in how it is arranged.

what also grinds me is that we will give students a deadline for information we need from them,(I give clear instructions) they miss it by a few weeks despite being chased and then kick off and we end up having to bend to their wants so as not to get crap student survey results.

just realised this has turned into a rant so I will stop now.

From an academic: I feel your pain. Especially the systems that don’t join up.

Thanks for all you do.

I manage a medium sized central professional services area. We had a voluntary severance scheme earlier this year and I increasingly regret not going for it. My team are unhappier and unhappier and more and more stressed and I have absolutely no ability to change anything. I used to have quite a bit of informal sway at more senior levels but just as you describe that has disappeared as the institution desperately tries one new half-baked thing after another, no one wanting to ever question going ahead with anything that could possibly make money. It's dire. It also feels like the divide/resentment between academics and central PS staff that has always been there to an extent has deepened as everyone gets more stressed and more stretched, which makes a really horrible working environment for everyone.

I have to say we are on good terms with most of our academics and they really do appreciate what we do. Their workloads are ridiculous as well so I do give them a lot of leeway with things. Also worth noting they are being forced into a lot more pastoral care than previous, long gone are the days where they could just focus on teaching.
i do feel sorry for them as well as the burden is heavy and no end in sight.

This is EVERYWHERE right now though. All fields.

So you might as well be a happy boiling frog because there's nowhere to jump to but other boiling pots right now, and that's if you're lucky enough to find a pot to jump to!

Re. jumping: I've always assumed that PS staff have very transferable skills and can move out of the HE sector (in a way that I, as an Humanities academic probably can't) to other jobs in other sectors - maybe for higher pay, but less pleasant conditions or lesser pension options. Is this no longer the case?

I think that poster meant that all sectors are like this, not just HE. I think you are right that it is easier for PS staff to find new jobs, in general. We saw that in our VS round, where far, far more applications came from PS, I think because they were much more confident they could take the money and get a new job. I do think the general state of things makes it harder than it would once have been - in my experience a lot of senior PS staff leaving HE go into public sector organisations not private, and they aren't hiring either.

I'm actually a former academic, and have lots of sympathy for the pressures on academics. I do think some of it isn't always obvious to PS staff - in the case of my team, we're education focused and I do think many of the team don't quite realise the weight of the research pressure. I'm not saying the divide is all the fault of academics. But we are just encountering more and more actual hostility, which is really sad. I understand where it is coming from - people who are desperately stressed - but it's still not ok and it's so misplaced and unprofessional to lash out at really junior staff because you think they somehow represent 'the machine'.

Sadly not for all of us. I'm professionally trained in my area and there are no jobs outside HE. We increasingly work in the same way as academics but without any of the benefits and pay/conditions. There's literally nowhere else to go without taking a huge pay cut or retraining.

Re professional services and ease of finding jobs.

I suspect this varies hugely. A confident IT project manager isn't going to have any problems. An autistic library assistant, on the other hand, quite possibly would. Plus, there are issues such as whether someone's job involves working with very HE-focused systems and procedures (SITS on the data entry side, Moodle, Academic Quality etc.) or something used across lots of non-HE business and organisations (Microsoft Active Directory, Adobe Creative Cloud, HR).

A Grade 5 officer in Academic Quality certainly has transferable skills, but maybe not enough to transfer them into a role with equal pay to their current one outside HE. A step out could successfully mean a step up into something like the QAA, but, for the majority of people, I reckon a step down into a less specialised role would be the more probable outcome.

However, my impression is that most professional services staff haven't built their identity to the same extent on working for a university. I've never worked on the academic side, but I've had the impression that you have to be mind-bogglingly focused and tough to survive, going through the whole course of honours, then maybe emerging post-PhD to find that there are no jobs. And keeping going. And keeping going. Through the research pressure and the teaching prep and the marking and the student feedback questionnaires. After sacrificing so much to be an academic, it must be very hard to distentangle oneself from the role. Plus the 'sunk costs' fallacy starts to apply.

spot on on the point of identity, OP.
academia has deconstructed me as a person, to the point that i don't know who i am without it. I wished i had not pushed so hard now.

I can’t believe the poor quality and antiquated business systems we have to deal with. Our uni has been trying to do HR transformation for about 3 years but has completely failed to implement a new system.

As a result our HR systems don’t talk to our finance systems, so we have offered jobs to people for contracts longer than the grant is for etc. The PS teams do their best but they’re hamstrung by infrastructure that does everything by email.

I have worked in HE for 28 years I'm senior PS in a hybrid role so also have academic responsibilities as do my team. I have never seen it like it is now - the gulf between PS and academics is huge and I hear lots of comments from academics about how we have too many PS staff (I don't hear that from PS staff about academics by the way).

I can't get teaching staff to understand that we have a lot of PS staff because our systems are so shit they require huge amounts of staff time to get things done. And when those PS staff are made redundant those tasks will still need to be done so the academic staff will end up with them.

One of my team is on long term sick leave and rather than being allowed to temporarily replace her (as would previously happen) I have been told I need to just cover her full time role myself. So now instead of my time being spent teaching or on practical work on student experience I am trying to learn how to use four different IT systems to do admin tasks. It's insane but as PS staff I have no workload model so more and more crap just keeps being added.

I can't afford to take VS as I have a disabled child so I'm just keeping my head down, but I genuinely hate it here. And the lack of compassion for staff from the senior leadership is astonishing. All we get are badly written emails absolving them of blame while stirring up panic about redundancies

I don't know who exactly was to blame for the mess my institution is in, but I do know it's not the people who will be losing their jobs

Are you in a union? Wanted to check that you are in receipt of DLA as well. If you have parental responsibilities particularly of a disabled child I wonder what employment rights you have, could be worth looking into.

@sortaottery @Marasme I made the transition (from being an academic) but did have to take a pay and seniority cut.

It took about 6 months to learn all the skills I need in my new job to the point of feeling on top of it. It also took a year of therapy, though it was the right decision.

For people reading: if you can take a VS payment, the cash might help to smooth the pay cut. I wish I'd been able to do this. The problem is you might also need it to live on while looking for a new job!

Taking a pay cut to be able to move on and up elsewhere is just the reality. But it might still be worth doing, for some, rather than trying to hold on as things get worse. You don't actually know the devil you know as well as you think you do. Things might change for the worse in ways you don't expect. And even if they start to get better overall, they might not get better for you in your role.

@Chrysanthemum5 I've also heard people at my place say we have too many PS staff. Including those v active in UCU, which is lovely as they're supposed to also represent the PS staff at grades which means they have USS pensions. Shockingly, I don't feel that represented by a union that would happily shed mine and my colleague's jobs.

I also think some of the academic staff imagine the more senior/managerial end of PS are much better paid than is the reality.

I work in cybersecurity, companies like talking about being secure and using it as a selling point on bids but hate spending money on ‘just in case’, not considering that spending that money is what stops ‘just in case’ becoming ‘M&S taken out by cyber criminals’.

I have to fight and justify every penny of budget and cling onto it with my fingernails to keep it from being re-allocated, resource, training/CPD, and improvement work is tight at the moment. I am having to be very creative and proactive in finding ways to incorporate it into revenue generating activity. The key is definitely to find ways to illustrate very very clearly how what we do enables the business to make sales.