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UKRI/Research England TALENT Commission report: Technical skills, roles and careers in UK higher education and research

Published: 03 February 2022

The TALENT Commission was launched in July 2020 to look at technical skills, roles and careers across UK higher education and research and is part of wider work by Research England to advance the status and opportunities of the technical community. The report is the result of 20 months of research and stakeholder engagement, including the largest survey of UK technical staff working in higher education and research ever undertaken, a range of focus groups and additional commissioned research projects on topics including funding and future technologies. The report outlines a set of principles and 16 recommendations, with further specifics to target stakeholder groups.

The full report can be found here.

At-a-glance:

  • Employers of technical higher education staff, funders, and government departments should take measures to ensure the sustainability and appropriateness of technical skills and careers. This includes succession planning in individual organisations, investment in a new pipeline of technical talent and horizon scanning new and emerging technologies and skills. Universities should appoint a strategic lead for technical staff and skills. Funders should provide resource to ensure the development and training of technical professionals (p18)
  • Technical staff should sit on appropriate institution- and sector level decision-making committees and boards to ensure these groups reflect the community they represent and to provide diversity of views and expertise (p18)
  • Funders and employers of technical staff in HE and research should recognise the blurring of boundaries between technical and academic roles. They should provide opportunities and mechanisms to move between career pathways and across sectors (p18)
  • Employers of technical staff should collect, report and analyse data on their technical workforce. A new, simple classification for technical roles should be developed, eg this could be part of the recently proposed BEIS annual R&D workforce survey. HESA and HE regulators should then ensure such data are mandated, collected, and made available (p18)
  • Target action should be taken to address the equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) challenges facing the technical community. Along with the inclusion of technical staff in broader EDI initiatives, interventions are needed at a sector and institutional level, to address the low numbers of technicians from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds, and the lack of women in technical leadership roles (p18)
  • Research funding bodies should give guidelines about how grant applications can include the cost/time of technicians involved in the research (as they would for academics) (p18)
  • Employers of technical staff, funders, and the sector should support outreach and public engagement activities regarding technical careers in local schools and colleges to increase the visibility of technical career opportunities to young people (p18)
  • Employers of technical staff should expand entry routes to include both vocational and academic pathways. Employers should invest in apprenticeship and trainee technician programmes and host work placement schemes.  Funders should encourage applicants to include new apprenticeship positions on bids for major infrastructure investments. The Apprenticeship Levy should be better used to train technicians (p18)
  • Employers of technical staff should ensure visibility of clearly defined career pathways and progression routes. They should also ensure provision and access to a range of professional development opportunities tailored to technical roles and careers (p18)
  • More and better recognition of the role technicians play in research is needed. Publishers should include a required step in the submission process that specifically asks authors to state how they have recognised the contributions of technical colleagues in their manuscript. Universities should ensure technical staff can be formally recognised as supervisors on student projects where appropriate. Institution-wide showcase events should be held (p18)

Implications for governance:

The report provides governors with important information about a layer of university staff of which they may have little knowledge. It demonstrates how technicians underpin the primary activities of universities and research institutes, providing the technical excellence essential for research, teaching and knowledge transfer. Alongside this, many technicians are researchers and teachers in their own right. They also play a fundamental role in the development of the technical skills students require to pursue a career in research, academia and/or industry.

Current data suggest there are over 30,000 technical staff working in UK universities across a range of job roles and subject disciplines, encompassing medicine, science, IT, engineering and the creative arts, while the Gatsby Charitable Foundation suggests there are between 1.5 and 2.2 million people working in the UK as technicians across a wide variety of sectors and industries.

Despite their importance to HE, technicians generally wrestle with a lack of status in comparison with academic colleagues.

When organisations were asked how many technicians they employed, many institutions were unable to identify how they defined the role of ‘technician’ – for instance there was confusion about whether IT specialists were classed as “technicians” - and therefore how many they employed. The Commission said this suggested that the technical community was often overlooked and/ or poorly understood by non-technical staff within their own institutions and sectors. While HESA collects data on the HE technical workforce (22,925 full-time equivalents), the decision to allow institutions to opt-out of data submission for non-academic staff means the figures are unlikely to be complete.

The Talent Commission’s report attempts to address this deficit with a full exploration of the role of technicians and concrete recommendations for the future. Importantly for governors, it calls for technical staff to sit on appropriate institution as well as sector-level decision-making committees and boards, to ensure their voice is heard and their expertise can be tapped into.

Governors might want to note examples of good practice in the report which have fed into the recommendations, such as the appointment of strategic leads for technical staff and skills at King’s College London, the University of Bristol and the University of Nottingham.

Other areas that might require consideration are the existence of clear pathways and careers for technical staff, CPD, data collection and analysis, EDI challenges, WP outreach, visibility and representation on department, faculty and institutional-level decision-making bodies.

Including technician roles in grant applications and bids for investment is aimed at securing specific funding for the work they do, raising their status and acknowledging their contribution. The report cites the example of York University Bioscience Technology Facility which uses TRAC (transparent approach to costing) to build the real costs of technical support into research pricing, including the time it takes to prepare and maintain equipment and to train users. This has enabled systematic cost recovery – at a high rate of over 80% – to support its technical community. According to the university, the approach has been critical to retaining and expanding technician roles, ensuring expertise continues to develop.

The Commission is also encouraging HE investment to expand technician apprenticeships and host T-level industry placements, arguing that by recruiting through these technical routes, higher education and research institutions can futureproof the next generation of technicians.

Survey findings which reveal that almost a third of the technical workforce is aged over 50, with nearly a fifth over 55, mean that ensuring a pipeline of talent may become increasingly important.

Access the full report

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