Putting The Planning Back Into An Academic Staff Plan

The emphasis on quality in all the roles of a university (teaching, research and community engagement) is a high priority for the sector. Achieving this depends to a large extent on the availability of adequate numbers of capable staff at universities. It is equally important that the staff capacity grows at the same pace as the growth in student numbers and other resource intensive activities at the university. Whilst student enrolment patterns can be accurately planned and monitored, the long term planning of staff poses a bigger challenge. Staff retention and retirements, scarcity of experienced academics, budget restrictions are but a few of the challenges experienced. This problem is not unique to South Africa. The New Zealand university sector also faces changing and challenging times due to two decades of growth in course offerings and student numbers, creating the need to attract a growing number of recruits into the academic workforce over the next decade.National growth projections in South Africa indicate that over the next five years, 1 232 new academics will need to be recruited each year in order to address challenges relating to the planned expansion of student enrolments, the improvement of staff: student ratios, and the loss of academic staff due to retirement. The development pathway leading to an academic career is long and complex. From the point of view of higher education ? that is, from the end of schooling ? the pathway typically includes the following stages: undergraduate, Honours, Masters, Doctorate and Post Doctorate. Henceforth, succession planning and building a new generation of academics should be well planned.To assist with long term staff planning, the researcher developed a model, which considers a range of staff performance indicators and parameters to assist senior management with long term staff planning. The magic trick here is to find real data on the actual staff complement and predicted growth, to better compute the long term academic labour side of the equation. The proposed model has been well received by management and is being refined on an on-going basis as more predictive variables are added to simulate scenarios. The model has already been used to successfully create various scenarios for senior management and has the potential to develop an adequate response to the challenges relating to the size, composition and capacity of academic staff in the higher education staff planning process.