There are many wonderful things to be said about technical careers but having a clear progression pathway isn’t generally one of them. Within The University of Edinburgh, there is a pathway for academic staff. There are problems with it, but there are forms to fill out, courses to go on and titles associated with different grades. However, for those in technical roles, to move up, you must move out. The career can also lack the recognition, both financially and in terms of esteem, that allows us to feel like valued professionals and this can be compounded by contracts that lack security. This can give those of us with management responsibility (and the University) two major challenges; 1) how do we get people into the career and 2) how do we keep them there? These are bigger issues and ones that the Technical Support Steering Group (TSSG) are well aware of, but not ones that are likely to be resolved any time soon. So what can be done in the meantime to help address them? In this blog, I try to share my experiences of trying to tackle the second part of this, hanging onto people as they develop.

As a bit of background, I have been in my current position for six years now and when I started, I was the only technician within the Institute. I’ve managed to get that increased now with one additional full-time post and two on guaranteed hours. However, the issue that we have struggled with is staff retention. In those six years, we have had six different people in post. We’ve had some really good people in the role, they’ve learned and developed within the position and this has facilitated them moving on to other opportunities; one to another university, the others to posts outside of academia. Whilst these posts are unfilled, it leaves the rest of the team over-stretched, with elevated feelings of stress and impacting the level of service we can provide. Additionally, once we got someone into post, a lot of my time was spent training them, meaning less time to do the rest of my job or to develop myself. So how have I tried to tackle this problem? Firstly, by changing the way we recruit people and secondly, by creating a little bit of progression pathway by the back door.

Recruitment, especially in academia, often emphasises qualifications, but with today’s job market, that often means people taking jobs which they are ‘over-qualified’ for. We have advertised grade 4 posts on guaranteed hours with a minimum qualification requirement of an HND but the vast majority of applications have been from people with at least one undergraduate degree and often post-graduate qualifications. If qualifications are emphasised in the selection criteria, we are obligated to offer interviews to people who, for example, have a Masters over those with lower level qualifications. Our experience is that higher academic qualifications do not necessarily mean higher levels in the competencies required for the job and often means recruiting people who are looking for a stop gap rather than a longer-term prospect. I therefore, changed the person specifications in the job adverts, emphasising the competencies required for the job rather than a particular path for having gained them. I also included a willingness to work towards Professional Registration as an essential criterion in the person specification. We also changed where we advertised, not using jobs.ac.uk but using local press and general recruitment websites. With these changes, we were still successful in getting a strong pool of applicants but the profile of these candidates changed from being dominated by those with academic pathways towards more with technical associated routes. I also changed the selection process at interview to include practical demonstration of role relevant competencies. In addition to the normal interviews, candidates were given a piece of apparatus that none of them would be familiar with (a set of scales made from Meccano) and a set of instructions on how to calibrate the device and take a measurement. The instructions were deliberately vague in parts so that, in addition to testing their ability to familiarise themselves with new equipment, they would need to be able to problem solve. They were then asked in the interview, to explain the process as if they were explaining it to a group of undergraduate students. This selection process meant we were favouring candidates who could demonstrate role relevant competencies irrespective of the path they had travelled to develop these. This has given us some excellent people in post and ones who are (hopefully) keen to stay and develop in their role.

By the nature of the area the we work in (Sport Science), there is a very limited pool of candidates who have previous experience within technical roles so the expectation when we recruit is that we will either recruit someone with a Sport Science background, but with limited technical experience or someone with technical experience from another discipline. In either case, we expect newly appointed people to develop and learn rapidly in the first few years in post. This means that they are likely to rapidly outgrow the role that they are initially appointed to. So, with no formal progression pathway, how do we get them the recognition (not least financially) for their increasing capability and capacity within the role? With recent recruitments, I adopted a model often seen for appointments to Lecture/ Senior Lecturer posts by having the post graded at both grade 4 and 5 and stating that we would appoint at the grade appropriate to the candidate’s experience. We really need someone operating at grade 5 in the post but the expectation would be that we would be more likely to initially appoint at grade 4. However, the appointee then has a checklist of what they need to be able to demonstrate in order to operate at grade 5 and we already have agreement that someone meeting those criteria and thus the requirements for a grade 5 appointment, which really strengthens an application for regrading. This process has been successfully used for one member of the team so far.

Another challenge we have faced is the difficulty in retaining staff on precarious contracts. When additional posts were created within my team, these were initially as zero-hour contracts, later replaced with guaranteed hours contracts. The issues around such contracts is a discussion for another time and place, but I know from experience that people will only stay on such contracts whilst it fits other demands in their lives or until something more secure comes along. I have tried to ameliorate this affect by making the hours people have on these contracts act as much like fixed hour contracts as possible, i.e. by trying to ensure people have close to the same hours each month. This gives them a consistent income and allows them to better fit the role around the rest of their lives. This also strengths the case for these being turned into more secure contracts which we have successfully done with what is now a full-time, permanent contract. As with most teams, the nature of our workload fluctuates throughout the year, so this takes a lot of planning to ensure that their work programmes fit within a reasonably consistent number of hours at both quiet and busy times. It can also be challenging to build in the capacity to develop people in these positions to have the competencies to handle a broader range of tasks and to give them the flexibility to be able to accommodate this.

These practices have not made the issues of staff retention and career progression go away. There are much bigger discussions to be had there, but perhaps adopting these kinds of approaches can at least help a little. Our strengths as technicians often include strong problem-solving skills and a willingness to share ideas. These are some of the solutions, or at least work-arounds that I have come up with. If you have other suggestions or experiences please do share them, perhaps by contributing your own blog post to this site.

Dr Jon Kelly is a Technical Manager based in The Institute for Sport, Physical Education and Health Sciences (SPEHS) at The Moray House School of Education.