TECHNICIANS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: A STUDY OF THE SKILLS AND TRAINING
OF UNIVERSITY LABORATORY AND ENGINEERING WORKSHOP TECHNICIANS
P.A. LEWIS AND H. GOSPEL
DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON
e-mail: paul.lewis@kcl.ac.uk
Final version: April 2011
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND DATA SOURCES
3. THE TECHNICIAN WORKFORCE: DEFINITION, NUMBERS, TYPES OF TECHNICIAN AND
THE ORGANISATION OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT
3.1 Definitions
3.2. The Size of the Technician Workforce
3.3. Types of Technicians and the Nature of Technical Support
3.3.1 General support technicians
3.3.2 Electronics and mechanical workshop technicians
3.3.3 Facilities technicians
3.3.4 Research laboratory technicians
3.3.5 Teaching technicians
3.3.6 Technical officers
3.4 The Organisation of Technical Support
4. THE TECHNICIAN WORKFORCE: ORIGINS, TENURE, CONTRACT, AGE, AND
QUALIFICATIONS
4.1 Origins
4.2 Contract type
4.3 Labour turnover and length of service
4.4. Age profile
3
4.5 Qualifications
5. WORKFORCE PLANNING: RECRUITMENT VERSUS TRAINING
5.1 Recruitment
5.2 Apprenticeships
6. ONGOING TRAINING, APPRAISALS, CAREER PROGRESSION AND TECHNICIAN
REGISTRATION
6.1 Ongoing training
6.2 Appraisals and career progression
6.3 Technician registration
7. CONCLUSIONS
REFERENCES
APPENDICES
Appendix 1: Summary of findings in the case of bioscience departments
Appendix 2: Summary of findings in the case of chemistry departments
4
Appendix 3: Summary of findings in the case of engineering departments
Appendix 4: Summary of findings in the case of physics departments
TABLES
Table 2.1: Number of different kinds of case study departments and interviews
Table 3.1: Summary of the attributes of the departments visited for this study, by discipline
Table 4.1: Average age, and percentage of the technician workforce aged over 50, by discipline
Table 4.2: Qualifications typically associated with particular technician roles in pre-1992
universities (by discipline)
Table A1: Summary of the attributes of the sample of biological science departments
Table A2: Summary of the attributes of the sample of chemistry departments
Table A3: Summary of the attributes of the sample of engineering departments
Table A4: Summary of the attributes of the sample of physics departments
5
FIGURES
Figure 3.1: Total number of technicians in bioscience, chemistry, engineering, and physics in UK
Higher education, 2003/04-2009/10
Figure 3.2: Number of academics per technician in bioscience, chemistry, engineering and
physics in UK Higher education, 2003/04-2009/10
Figure 4.1: The age profile of the technical workforce, by discipline, in 2009-10
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research upon which this report is based was funded by the Gatsby Foundation. We thank the
Foundation and, in particular, Daniel Sandford Smith, for their support. We are also extremely grateful to
all of the interviewees, who generously gave up their time to speak to us and were unfailingly patient and
helpful in answering our questions. Stephen Bach, Cathy Barlow, Peta Blevins, William Brown, Geoff
Mason, Scott McIndoe, Andrew Shaw, Julie Tam, and Philip Toner provided very useful advice and
assistance, for which we are also most grateful. Any errors are solely the responsibility of the authors.
7
1. INTRODUCTION
The UK’s universities are amongst the country’s most valuable and productive assets. They make a
significant contribution to the growth of the British economy, most notably through the discovery and
transfer of new scientific knowledge and through the education of students. Indeed, UK universities are
internationally renowned for their research, lying second only to the USA in world rankings (Sainsbury of
Turville 2007: 35-37, 43-45; DBIS 2009a: 5-9).
A vital, but neglected, part in such research is played by laboratory and engineering workshop
technicians. Such technicians’ duties include: the construction, maintenance and operation of the
equipment involved in laboratory research; the preparation of the samples that constitute the raw material
for experiments; the running of those experiments; and the recording, presentation and – on occasions –
some of the analysis and interpretation of the data that is produced. In undertaking these tasks, technicians
work closely with academic researchers and – as we shall see - make an indispensable contribution to the
production of scientific knowledge. We will also see that, through formal and, in particular, informal
contributions to the teaching of practicals skills, they help to educate students.
Notwithstanding the importance of technicians’ contribution to research and teaching, studies of
their skills and training are conspicuous by their absence both from the academic literature and from
government documents. For, while there exist a handful of ethnographic studies of technicians, they focus
mostly on questions of occupational identity, authority, and hierarchy, paying only limited attention to the
issues of skills, training, and recruitment (Barley and Bechky 1994; Barley 1996; Barley and Orr [eds.]
1997; Toner et al. 2010). Similarly, recent policy documents outlining the government’s science and
innovation policy neglect the importance of skilled laboratory technicians (Sainsbury of Turville 2007:
95-116; DIUS 2009).1 The omission is significant because recent reports from universities suggest that a
shortage of technicians is hampering the work of UK-based researchers in university science and
engineering departments (THES 2008, 2009; Unite 2008).
It is the lack of detailed research on the topic of technicians that this project seeks to remedy, by
addressing three sets of key questions with new empirical data. First, what tasks do university technicians
typically undertake and how are they organised? The issues that fall under this first broad include:
whether there are different kinds of technician, distinguished by the different duties that they are required
to fulfil; how intimately technicians are involved in research and teaching (i.e. do they simply facilitate
research and teaching that is carried out by other people, or are do they make a more substantive
contribution to those activities); and the way in which technicians are managed (in particular, whether the
locus of managerial control lies primarily at the level of individual research groups or departments, or
whether they have been efforts to pool technicians from a number of departments and manage them at a
more centrally, for example at the level of the School).
The second set of issues concerns the type and level of skills that are required successfully to
carry out the kind of tasks that technicians typically undertake, and the type/level of skills and
qualifications they actually possess. Three possibilities will be explored under this broad heading. First,
as the term laboratory technician suggests, people occupying such roles may undertake tasks that require
them to possess intermediate, and more specifically technician-level skills, pitched at around Levels 3-5
of the current National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and acquired through vocational training
programmes such as apprenticeships. Second, it may be that – especially in relatively new fields of
1
For older attempts to remedy this omission, see The Royal Society (1998) and Evidence Ltd (2004).
8
research – the type of tasks carried out by technicians now demand that such positions be filled by people
whose skills lie at Level 6 or above in the NQF (i.e. by graduates, who have acquired their skills through
academic rather than vocational training programmes). A third possibility is that, even when the difficulty
of the tasks carried out by technicians requires them to possess skills pitched no higher than Level 5 in the
NQF, they might nevertheless be more highly qualified (as for example would be the case if departments
are hiring graduates to fill even relatively low-level technician positions) (cf. Mason 2001). One
important objective of this project is to shed some light on these issues by ascertaining for each of the
scientific disciplines under investigation the nature of the tasks they expect their technicians to undertake,
and the type and level of skills technicians are both expected to possess and which they also typically
possess in practice. Any discrepancies between the actual and ideal level of skills will be highlighted.
The third and final set of questions concerns how university science and engineering departments
go about satisfying their need for suitably skilled technicians. Two main sources of skilled labour will be
considered. First, departments might rely primarily on the external labour market, by recruiting workers
who have acquired most if not all of the skills they need to be a university technician before taking up a
position of that kind. For example, to consider two scenarios that the project will explore, engineering
departments in universities situated in industrial areas may well find that their local external labour
market offers a ready supply of experienced workers who already have the skills required to be a
university workshop technician, while departments in the biological sciences whose research laboratory
technicians need an undergraduate degree might rely on external labour markets for graduates that are
national in scope. The second possible source of skilled labour involves universities meeting their need
for skilled technicians via their own in-house training programmes. In particular, where universities
require technicians to have craft or technician-level skills, they might make use of apprenticeship training
schemes. These we define as training programmes for recent school-leavers that combine work-based
learning, off-the-job training and technical education, are aimed at Levels 3–4 skills, are usually
externally accredited, and are now often partially publicly funded (Ryan et al. 2007). Of course, these two
sources of skills are not mutually exclusive, and universities may adopt a combination of recruitment and
training in order to satisfy their need for skilled technicians. The project will investigate how departments
strike a balance between recruitment and training and will highlight the key factors – such as the
availability of suitably skilled workers on the external labour market - that shape their decisions.
The structure of the remainder of this report is as follows. Section 2 briefly considers the research
methods and data sources used in the study. Section 3 examines in more detail the meaning of the term
‘technician’, before going on to consider the different types of technician that are found in university
science and engineering departments, the size of the technician workforce, the kinds of tasks technicians
normally undertake, and the way in which the provision of technical support is normally organised.
Various key attributes of the technician workforce are explored in Section 4, most notably the ‘origins’ of
the technicians (by which is meant whether they came to the university that currently employs them
straight from school or from some other employer), their tenure, whether they have fixed-term or openended contracts of employment, and the age and qualifications profile of the technician workforce.
Section 5 addresses the question of workforce planning, focusing in particular on how university
departments rely on different sources of skilled labour in order to maintain the technical workforce they
need to support research and teaching. Section 7 considers the provision of ongoing training for more
established technicians, as distinct from apprentices and recent recruits, before going on to raise the
broader issues of career progression for technicians and the possible impact of technician registration
schemes. Section 8 summarises and draws conclusions. The main Sections just outlined focus on general
9
issues and naturally abstract from some of the discipline-specific detail. More of the latter can be found in
the Appendices, each of which provides a summary of the findings for one of the 4 disciplines considered
in this study.
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2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND DATA SOURCES
In the absence of a large dataset covering the training and skills practices of university science and
engineering departments, our chosen research strategy was to rely on case studies, which provide an
opportunity to explore employers’ assessments of their situation and prospects in contextualised detail.
As far as was possible, the case study organisations were chosen so as to represent different
combinations of the factors that are likely to be important influences on employers’ decisions about
whether to rely primarily on recruitment or training, including: the duties that technicians are required to
perform, and the skills they need to do so, in different fields of scientific endeavour and in different kinds
of university; the nature of the relevant labour markets, as indicated both by whether they are primarily
local or national in scope, and also by whether they are for workers with very general skills (and so might
be expected to be populated by a large number of employers) or for highly specialised skills (of the kind
that only a small handful of employers demand); and the scope for recruitment (reflecting the availability
of workers with the requisite skills on the external labour market).
The goal was to select what were, as far as possible, closely matched case studies that were
similar in most ways but which differed in particular attributes of interest (e.g. same discipline, same type
of university, but different local labour market conditions), and to use comparisons between them to
highlight key influences on the skills and training strategies adopted by universities in the case of their
technicians. So, for example, cases were selected: to include both engineering and biological sciences (on
the basis that the former might be more likely to recruit workers from local industry, while the latter
might rely on national markets for graduates), to include both pre- and post-1992 universities (because of
the potentially different duties and therefore skills required of technicians in those universities); and also
to include different locations (and, therefore, potentially different local labour market conditions).
Interviews took place in two stages. The first stage involved 31 interviews with various ‘sectorlevel’ organisations that have an interest in science and engineering, higher education, and vocational
education and training. These included: government departments (e.g. Department of Business,
Innovation and Skills); sector skills councils (e.g. SEMTA, Life Long Learning UK); various learned
societies (e.g. the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Physics, the Royal
Academy of Engineering, and the Society of Biology); the technicians’ organisation, HEaTED; funding
bodies (e.g. the Science and Technology Facilities Council); the National Apprenticeship Service; the
Engineering Professors Council; the New Engineering Foundation; the UK Deans of Science; the Science
Council; and Universities HR. Interviews conducted at this stage of the project were used both to obtain
background information on the key issues that confront universities in their efforts to provide high quality
technical support, and also to inform the choice of case study universities and departments.
The second round of interviews centered on the case studies themselves. Studies were carried out
at 45 university departments, drawn from 4 disciplines, namely chemistry, engineering, physics and the
biological sciences (the latter broadly understood to involve a range of sub-disciplines including
biochemistry, pharmacology, plant sciences and zoology). The university cases were drawn from 18
different universities (14 pre-1992, 4 post-1992), situated in the following regions of England: the south;
the midlands; the north; and north-west. The university cases were supplemented by studies of two large,
non-university physics research laboratories. Information was collected through semi-structured
interviews with academics, technicians and technical service managers at each of the case study
organisations, using an interview schedule that was piloted in the early cases. A summary of the types of
departments, and the number of interviews, can be found in Table 2.1.
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Table 2.1: Number of different kinds of case study departments and interviews
Biological
sciences
Chemistry
Engineering
Physicsa
Number of pre1992 cases
Number of post1992 cases
Total number of
interviews
Number of
academics
interviewed
9
4
28
11
Number of
technicians /
technical
services
managers
interviewedb
18
10
8
8
1
4
1
17
26
13
8
14
7
14
20
13
a: In addition, there are two interviews, involving one academic and 5 technicians/technical services managers at the two non-university physics
research laboratories
b: 10 interviews were also carried out with human resource management and staff development personnel from 5 universities
A total of 96 interviews were carried out at the 47 case study organisations. A majority of the interviews
took place face-to-face, at the case study department, with just 7 interviews taking place by telephone.
Interviews averaged around 90 minutes in length. As far as possible, interviews notes were written up on
the same day as the interview took place and responses were coded to assist in the discovery of patterns.
Where coding revealed any gaps in the data that had been collected, these were filled by posing questions
using telephone or e-mail follow-up.
The information collected from interviews was supplemented by some primary data, obtained
from internal university reports and planning documents and also by secondary data, obtained from
websites and documents deriving both from universities and from sector-level bodies (e.g. HEFCE).
Background statistical data was obtained from the Higher Education Statistics Agency staff records and is
used – in Section 3.2 in particular - to set the case studies in their broader context and also to provide a
‘check’ on the conclusions drawn from the cases.
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3. THE TECHNICIAN WORKFORCE: DEFINITION, NUMBERS, TYPES OF TECHNICIAN
AND THE ORGANISATION OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT
3.1 DEFINITION
A technician is a person who is skilled in the use of particular techniques and procedures to solve
practical problems, often in ways that require considerable ingenuity and creativity. Technicians typically
work with complex instruments and equipment, and require specialised training, as well as considerable
practical experience, in order to do their job effectively (Barley and Orr 1997: 12-15; OECD 2002: 92-94;
Technician Council 2011).
In the case of university laboratory and engineering workshop technicians, the practical problems
in question typically arise when research projects reach the stage at which empirical data are required in
order to help build or test the theories and models that are being developed. At that point, it is typically
the technician, rather than the academic scientist or engineer, who actually interacts with the material
world (where the latter is defined broadly so that it encompasses both physical and biological
phenomena). Rather than directly encountering the material world themselves, academic scientists and
engineers tend to remain confined to a symbolic world of theories, models, numbers and hypotheses that
represent the material world, leaving it to their technicians to preside over the interaction with material
reality through which empirical evidence is gathered. As we shall discuss in more detail below, by
preparing materials and samples, operating instruments, designing and building experimental apparatus
and rigs, conducting experiments, and helping to collate and sometimes also to interpret results,
technicians translate aspects of the material world into symbolic forms such as numbers, spectra, images,
etc., thereby providing the raw data that scientists and engineers use to develop and test their theories,
models, and designs. Viewed thus, technicians can be seen to work at the interface between the material
world and the symbolic world inhabited by academic scientists and engineers, serving in effect as the
bridge that connects the two. In doing so, technicians facilitate the work of the scientists and engineers
whom they support (Barley and Bechky 1994: 88-92, 115-16; Whalley and Barley 1997: 47-50).
In universities, as we shall see in Section 3.3 below, the term ‘technician’ is used to refer to a
variety of different roles, only some of which involve the provision of specialised support for research
along the lines just described. Other technicians support teaching, a task that may also demand that they
possess significant practical knowledge of the experimental techniques and instruments upon which
students are being trained. A third set of technicians provide more general support for research and
teaching by helping to sustain the infrastructure within which those activities take place. Before
elaborating on these categories, however, we shall first of all consider the overall size of the technician
workforce in the case study departments visited for this project.2
3.2. THE SIZE OF THE TECHNICIAN WORKFORCE
A summary of the mean numbers of academic staff, postdoctoral researchers, various kinds of student,
technicians and technical officers3 found in departments from each of the 4 disciplines included in this
study can be found in Table 3.1, along with an indication of the average ratio of academics to technical
staff for each discipline.
2
3
This study does not include the ICT technicians who provide personal or network computer support in universities.
The role of ‘technical officer’ is discussed in Section 3.3.6 below.
13
Table 3.1: Summary of the attributes of the departments visited for this study, by discipline
Mean number of:
Academics
Postdocs
Undergraduates
PhD
Technicians
Technical
Officers
Average ratio of
academics to
techniciansa
52
67
552
92
37
3
1.3 (pre-1992)b
1.9 (post 1992)
42
60
470
145
20
5
133
121
1340
367
53
4
57
87
364
150
32
2
1.8 (pre-1992)
1.4 (post-1992)
2.7 (pre-1992)
2.0 (post-1992)
2.8 (pre-1992)
14 (post-1992)
Discipline
Biological
sciences
(13 departments)
Chemistry
(11 departments)
Engineering
(12 departments)
Physics
(9 departments)
a: In calculating the average ratios of technicians to academics across the departments in the sample, (i) ‘technicians’ includes ‘technical officers’
and (ii) departments are weighted according to the number of academics they contain. The unweighted averages are as follows: bioscience - 1.5;
chemistry – 1.8; engineering – 2.3; and physics – 3.3.
b: Given that technicians in post-1992 universities tend to concentrate almost exclusively upon teaching support rather than research support,
ratios for pre- and post-1992 universities are presented separately
Almost all of the departments from all four disciplines visited said that cuts in funding had led to
significant reductions in the number of technical staff over the past 10-15 years, either in absolute terms
or relative to the number of academics and students for whom support is required.
Support for such claims is provided by Figures 3.1 and 3.2, which present HESA time series data
on the absolute numbers of technical staff, and on ratio of academic staff to technical staff, in each of the
four disciplines considered in this study for all UK universities between 2003/04 and 2009/10. While the
data provided by HESA are not strictly comparable with those collected from the case studies, because
the HESA data include ICT, building support and medical technicians as well as the laboratory and
workshop technicians upon which the case studies reported here concentrate, they do corroborate the
picture painted by interviews of falling technician numbers, both in absolute terms and relative to the
numbers of academics for whom support is required.
As Figure 3.1 shows, the absolute number of technicians employed in UK universities has
declined in all four disciplines over the period 2003/04 to 2009/10. The decline has been most
pronounced in engineering, where the number of technical staff fell from just under 3200 in 2003/04 to
around 2750 in 2009/10, a reduction of around 14%. The number of technical staff in chemistry
departments declined by around 11% over the same period, falling from around 930 in 2003/04 to about
830 in 2009/10. Physics displays a similar pattern to chemistry, with the number of technical staff falling
by around 8% over the period in question, from about 960 in 2003/04 to around 880 in 2009/10. The
smallest decline came in biosciences, where technician numbers fell between 2003/04 and 2007/08 but
recovered thereafter, so that they declined by just 1% over the period as a whole (from 3560 in 2003/04 to
around 3520 in 2009/10). The data presented in Figure 3.2 reveal that the unweighted ratio of academics
to technicians increased in all four disciplines between 2003/04 and 2009/10, from around 2.9 to 3.4 in
the case of biosciences, from about 3.6 to 4.4 in the case of chemistry, from roughly 4.3 to 5.2 in the case
of engineering, and from approximately 3.7 to 4.8 in the case of physics.
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Number of technicians
Figure 3.1: Total number of technicians in
bioscience, chemistry, engineering, and physics in UK Higher
education, 2003/04-2009/10a
3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
Chemistry
Physics
Bioscience
Engineering
a: Source: HESA Staff Record 2003/04-2009/10. The figures refer to the full time equivalent number of laboratory, engineering workshop,
building, ICT and medical (including nursing) (SOC Code 3A) technicians in each of the following cost centres: bioscience (cost centre 10);
chemistry (cost centre 11); physics (cost centre 12); and engineering (including general engineering [cost centre 16], chemical engineering [cost
centre 17], mineral, metallurgy and materials engineering [cost centre 18], civil engineering [cost centre 19], electrical, electronics and computer
engineering [cost centre 20], and mechanical, aero and production engineering [cost centre 21]). Comparable data are unavailable before 2003/04.
5.5
Figure 3.2: Number of academics per technician in
bioscience, chemistry, engineering and physics in UK Higher
education 2003/04-2009/10a
Engineering
5
Physics
Ratio
4.5
4
Chemistry
3.5
3
Bioscience
2.5
2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10
a: Source: HESA Staff Record 2003/04-2009/10. The data are the unweighted average of the total full time equivalent number of academic
professional staff (SOC Code 2A) in each of the disciplines to the total full time equivalent number of laboratory, engineering workshop,
building, ICT and medical (including nursing) (SOC Code 3A) technicians that discipline. The ratios were calculated from HESA data for the
following cost centres: bioscience (cost centre 10); chemistry (cost centre 11); physics (cost centre 12); and engineering (including general
engineering [cost centre 16], chemical engineering [cost centre 17], mineral, metallurgy and materials engineering [cost centre 18], civil
engineering [cost centre 19], electrical, electronics and computer engineering [cost centre 20], and mechanical, aero and production engineering
[cost centre 21]). Comparable data are unavailable before 2003/04.
15
Interviews suggested that the deterioration in the ratio of academic staff to technicians reported by
interviewees, and corroborated by the HESA data, has led to some difficulties with providing adequate
support for teaching and research. In particular, around one quarter of the departments visited for this
study stated that, because their technical staff are now working at full capacity, they struggle to cover
when staff are absent either for training or due to illness.4 One interviewee elaborated on the nature of the
problem as follows:
We’re skating on thin ice – if people are away ill, or on a conference, or on training ...
it’s a nightmare ... If the academic department is an engine, then technicians are the
engine oil that keeps the department running smoothly. Low technician numbers now
mean that the department is in danger of seizing up.
Despite this, most interviewees stated that the decline in the size of the technical staff had not had a
significant impact either on their ability to conduct research, or on the amount of practical work
undertaken by their students. There were, however, two notable exceptions to this broad finding. First,
representatives of 4 biological sciences departments said that the volume of practical work undertaken by
students had suffered somewhat because of limited technical support, with students carrying out fewer
practicals than before. Second, academics in 5 of the post-1992 universities also reported concern about
the level of research support they received. This reflects the fact that while technical support in post-1992
universities has until recently been devoted mostly to teaching, they now require additional technical
support in order to meet the increasingly demanding targets they are being set for research and external
consultancy, as well as to support the increasing amount of support required for their burgeoning
undergraduate and – in particular - MSc programmes.
3.3. TYPES OF TECHNICIAN AND THE NATURE OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT
A number of different types of technician may be distinguished. It should be noted at the outset that the
descriptions outlined below are meant to portray ‘ideal types’ that indicate the broad features of different
kinds of technician rather than provide an exhaustive account of all the nuances and variations that arise
in the case of real technicians’ jobs. As a result, there will inevitably be cases where particular technicians
do not fall neatly into one of the categories just outlined. To take just three examples: in some cases,
teaching support is provided, not by dedicated teaching technicians, but by technicians who occupy
‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ roles that involve them supporting both teaching and research; second, it may be
unclear whether technicians who specialise in the use of instruments that are used by a relatively small
number of groups should count as research laboratory or analytical services technicians; and, especially in
smaller departments, some of the duties that elsewhere might be undertaken by specialist infrastructure
technicians may be carried out by research laboratory technicians. Notwithstanding these limitations, it is
hoped that the broad categories listed here provide a reasonably accurate approximation to the kinds of
technicians found in universities. It is also worth noting at this juncture that the different types of
technician distinguished below are not all present in every university, let alone every department. In
particular, most of the technicians who work in post-1992 universities tend to support teaching, with only
a relatively small fraction of their time being allocated to research support, so that the majority of
4
The paucity of spare technical capacity may have consequences for the kind of technician training that departments provide, for reasons that will
be discussed in Sections 5.2 and 6.1 below.
16
technician posts in those universities will tend to occupy roles that most closely resemble the teaching
support positions described below.5
3.3.1 General support technicians
General support technicians – also variously referred to as ‘infrastructure’, ‘stores’ or ‘floor’ technicians
- provide general support for teaching and research by carrying out basic duties such as warehousing,
waste disposal, washing glassware, sterilising instruments, dealing with gas and liquid nitrogen cylinders,
and preparing basic solutions and chemicals. By doing so, such technicians help to provide the conditions
in which teaching and research take place. Given the generic nature of the tasks they carry out, such
technicians tend to be found in departments from all four of the disciplines considered here, though in
post-1992 departments such roles may be combined with teaching support.
3.3.2 Electronics and mechanical workshop technicians
These technicians tend to be involved in the repair, maintenance, modification, design, construction,
testing and operation of the instruments and experimental apparatus used in research and teaching.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, workshop technicians tend to be more numerous, as a percentage of the total
technician workforce, in engineering and physics departments than in chemistry and – in particular –
biological science departments.6
When they are working with researchers in particular, such technicians usually do not work from
detailed technical drawings of the kind of instrument or apparatus required to bring the experimental part
of the projects they are supporting to a successful conclusion. On the contrary, academics often provide
technicians with no more than a rough sketch of the kind of instrument or apparatus required to solve the
technical problems that arise in the course of their research. It is then up to the technicians to draw on
their knowledge and practical expertise of electronics and mechanical engineering – their knowledge of
the properties of different kinds of material and their understanding of what particular tools can be used to
achieve – along with their general problem-solving skills in order to design and build the requisite
instrument, electronic component, or experimental rig. As one interviewee from a physics department put
it, when it comes to the practical task of building and operating scientific equipment, ‘technicians are a
repository of deep, long-standing knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work’.7 One technical
services manager described the contribution made by workshop technicians as follows:
Academics don’t know precisely what [experimental rig or piece of apparatus] they want
and the design changes as they talk about it with the technicians ... Academics have the
conceptual ideas and technicians translate them into practical solutions, perhaps even
modifying the original idea a bit within the broad constraints of the research project.
5
Detailed accounts of the kind of technicians found in departments from different disciplines can be found in the sector summaries provided in
the Appendices to this report.
6
As we shall see, many biological science departments in particular no longer have their own mechanical and electronics workshops.
7
In keeping with the definition of a ‘technician’ given in the Introduction, which mentioned ingenuity and creativity as common attributes
possessed by technicians, this reference to ‘problem-solving skills’ indicates that in the case of university technicians the notion of ‘skill’ is often
thought to involve an ability to improvise – by modifying existing instruments and apparatus, as well as by developing new pieces of equipment
– in order to meet the novel challenges that arise in the course of research projects (cf. Scarselletta 1997: 187, 207; Evidence Ltd 2004: 17).
17
As this quotation suggests, the process through which the final design of the experimental apparatus or
instrument emerges is perhaps best described as a dialogue or iterative process in which academics and
technicians work as a team in order to develop the instrument or experimental apparatus required to give
practical effect to researchers’ ideas. Through such informal interaction with academics, workshop
technicians – like the analytical services technicians mentioned earlier - make an invaluable, if all-toooften unheralded, contribution to scientific research.8
To put this point slightly differently, far from it being the case that the academics’ knowledge
subsumes that of the technicians, with academics having all the knowledge possessed by the technicians
and more besides, there is a genuine division of labour and knowledge between the two groups, with the
skills and knowledge possessed by each group complementing that of the other: the technicians have
more of the hands-on, technical knowledge required to bring the project to a successful conclusion; while
the academics possess more of the relevant abstract, theoretical scientific knowledge (with neither party
being entirely ignorant of the other’s speciality); and the knowledge of the two groups is pooled in order
to bring the research project at hand to a successful conclusion. Because the knowledge of both groups is
required to accomplish that goal, the technicians and academics tended to think of themselves as engaging
in what one academic described as ‘professional collaboration’, on reasonably equal terms, in order to get
the job done. In other words, the dialogue or interaction through which the final design emerges requires
genuine teamwork that sees both parties bring their own knowledge and expertise to bear on the project,
thereby making their own distinctive contribution to bringing it to fruition (cf. Barley and Bechky 1994:
91, 116-120; Barley and Orr 1997: 44-45, 51-52).9
3.3.3 Facilities technicians
Facilities technicians primarily support research. However, rather than being associated with one specific
research group, facilities technicians tend to provide services that are drawn on by a number of different
groups. Two different categories of facilities technician may be distinguished.
First, analytical services technicians specialise in the use of scientific instruments or experimental
techniques that generate the data that used by researchers. Examples include NMR spectroscopy, mass
spectrometry, electron microscopy, and X-ray crystallography. Over the years, such technicians’ have
often developed considerable practical expertise in the use of such instruments and techniques, on the
basis of which they are able to provide scientists with important advice about how to prepare their
samples for analysis, about how to ‘optimise’ the instruments so that they are appropriately set up for the
piece of analysis being undertaken, and also about how to interpret the data that are generated (cf. Barley
and Bechky 1994: 89). One technical services manager described the contribution of her analytical
services technicians as follows:
‘They will know the instrument inside and out, they will know its foibles, how to push it
to its maximum performance ... That comes through experience, not formal training.’
8
9
For similar findings in an Australian context, see Toner at al. (2010).
Interviewees from around half of the departments visited indicated that there are occasions when – if technicians have made a substantial
contribution to a research project – they may be included on the list authors of research papers. This practice seemed to be especially prevalent in
the following cases: analytical facilities and research laboratory technicians in the biological sciences and chemistry; workshop technicians in
physics when papers focused on the properties of novel instruments to whose design and construction the technicians had contributed; and
technical and experimental officers in general.
18
This quote indicates that, as in the case of the workshop technicians, the division of labour between the
analytical services technicians and the academics they support is based on a corresponding a division of
knowledge, with the technicians possessing more of the tacit, context-dependent, practical know-how
required to use the instruments to get the results the academics need. In this way, as one interviewee put
it, the analytical services technicians ‘give the academics real insight into how the kit should be used to
get the results they want’.
A second kind of facilities technician specialises in providing what might be best described as the
raw materials used by researchers in their experiments, including technicians who work in clean rooms,
greenhouses and animal houses. One or both types of facilities technician are found departments drawn
from all four of the disciplines considered in this study.
3.3.4 Research laboratory technicians
As their names suggests, these technicians support the research that takes place in the research groups to
which they have been allocated. Typical duties include preparing the equipment and materials used in
experiments, carrying out the relevant experimental procedures, and compiling and – especially in the
case of more senior research technicians – analysing the data yielded by those experiments. In this way,
as noted earlier, research laboratory technicians constitute the bridge between the material world and the
scientists and engineers who are investigating it, drawing on their specialist contextual knowledge of how
to apply the relevant experimental techniques to the samples on which they work to furnish scientists with
the data they require to carry out their research.
In addition, research laboratory technicians often take responsibility for health and safety issues,
for inducting new PhD and postdoctoral students into their laboratory and teaching them how to use
instruments and carry out experimental procedures, and for various administrative duties such as
budgeting, ordering supplies, keeping accounts, and organising rotas of tasks to be carried out by research
group members. Although technicians of this kind are found in all 4 of the disciplines considered in this
study, they tend to be especially numerous in chemistry and the biological sciences.
3.3.5 Teaching technicians
In every department, across all four of the disciplines covered in this project, technicians support teaching
by preparing the materials, experimental apparatus and instruments required for student practical classes.
In addition, they usually remain in the laboratories while practical classes are under way both in order to
deal with any technical problems that might arise and also to help ensure that there are no breaches of
health and safety regulations. There is, however, considerable variation when it comes to the issue of
whether technicians merely support teaching in the ways just described or whether they also actually
teach the students by demonstrating how to carry out experimental procedures and use scientific
instruments and by supervising student projects. This variation arises both between departments in
different universities and disciplines, and also between what technicians’ formal job descriptions say they
do and what they do in practice.
In most of the pre-1992 physics, chemistry and biological science departments visited for this
study, technicians’ formal duties are confined to providing support for teaching, with the teaching itself
being carried out by academics and PhD student demonstrators. By way of contrast, in most of the
engineering departments considered here, whether they are located in pre-1992 or post-1992 universities,
19
at least some of the technicians are formally involved in teaching students, either through demonstrating
how to use various pieces of equipment or by assisting with projects. The same is true of the departments
of chemistry, physics, and biological science that are situated in post-1992 universities, where the
majority of technician time is devoted to supporting teaching rather than research and where technicians’
formal duties extend beyond simply facilitating practical classes to carrying out some of that practical
teaching themselves. Even in those pre-1992 departments where technicians’ are not formally involved in
teaching, they often do so unofficially, either by providing informal assistance to students in laboratory
classes (in the case of teaching technicians) or by helping students who are working on projects to learn
how to use scientific instruments and carry out experimental procedures (in the case of research and
analytical facilities technicians).
The findings reported here provide only limited support for the claim, aired in a recent report
commissioned by HEFCE, that ‘the technician role is increasingly growing to include the demonstration
of concepts and theory, and is ultimately moving towards an active teaching role, away from “pure
technicians” roles’ (PA Consulting 2010: 29). While, as we have seen, technicians certainly are involved,
both formally and informally, in teaching, in the vast majority of cases their role tends to be confined to
the demonstration of various practical skills rather than involving - as the passage just quoted seems to
suggest - the teaching of ‘concepts and theory.’ This ought not to be surprising, because (as will be
discussed in Section 4.5 below) many of the technicians who are involved in teaching – and, indeed, a
majority of those occupying specialist teaching technician positions in pre-1992 universities – have only
vocational qualifications and are therefore unlikely to possess the knowledge of scientific principles
required to teach students about the theoretical concepts that underpin their practical work. Moreover,
even in those (mostly post-1992) universities where technicians are intimately involved in teaching and
may – because they often possess undergraduate degrees – have sufficient theoretical knowledge to be
able to discuss the conceptual foundations of the practical work being undertaken by students, such
teaching is not the only claim on their time. On the contrary, the evidence gathered for this project
suggests that the technical resources available to post-1992 departments of science and engineering are
being stretched increasingly thinly, both because of rising staff-student ratios and also because technical
staff are increasingly being required to support research and consultancy as well as teaching. In that
context, it is not immediately obvious that there is scope for technicians to take on a larger role in
teaching.
3.3.6 Technical officers
Technical officers – also known as ‘scientific officers’ or ‘experimental officers’ – occupy intermediate
positions in university departments, lying above technicians in the academic hierarchy but below
academics. Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this is the fact that, prior to the move to a common
pay spine for all university staff in 2005, technical officers posts were to be found on ‘academic-related’
pay scales, whereas technician posts were situated on the pay scales for ‘non-academic’ staff. The
intermediate position of technical officers is also reflected in their skills and duties, which resemble those
of technicians in some ways whilst being more like those carried out by academics in others. Technical
officers tend to specialise in the use of particular instruments and experimental techniques, such as NMR
spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography, electron microscopes and mass spectrometry, and they resemble
technicians in providing a service to researchers, drawing on their expertise in the use of those techniques
and instruments to provide academics with advice on how to conduct their experiments. In doing so,
20
technical officers – like analytical facilities technicians – have an important input into research projects.
However, in other respects technical officers are more like academics than technicians: like academics,
they are often involved both in the design and management of research projects and also in the analysis
and interpretation of the data that emerge from them; and, in virtue of both the important contribution
they make to both practical and analytical sides of research projects, technical officers are also like
academics in often being listed amongst the authors of scientific papers.
The intermediate position occupied by technical officers also manifests itself both in the attributes
of the people who occupy such roles, and also in the variety of routes that the incumbents of such
positions have followed in order to reach them. The ability to offer high quality research support of the
kind that technical officers are expected to provide usually requires a mixture of technical and academic
skills: it presupposes considerable expertise in the use of the relevant instruments and techniques, often
honed over many years of experience, and in that respect demands the kind of practical know-hope
possessed by technicians; but it also demands a sound knowledge of the relevant physical, chemical or
biological principles, of a kind usually acquired through an academic rather than a vocational
qualification. Hence, technical officers tend to possess at least an undergraduate degree, whilst many have
an MSc or PhD. It is important to note that older technical officers in particular may have been promoted
up through the technician ranks in recognition of their technical skills, acquiring an undergraduate degree
en route via day release and any advanced degrees they possess in virtue of the work they have done as a
technical officer. More recently, however, technical officers have tended to follow an academic rather
than a vocational path, assuming their position after completing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.
Technical officers are found only in pre-1992 universities. They appear to be more common in
chemistry and engineering than in biological sciences and physics. All 10 pre-1992 departments of
chemistry visited for this study, along with all 8 pre-1992 departments of engineering, have at least one
technical officer. In contrast, technical officers are to be found in only 4 of the 8 pre-1992 departments of
physics and in 3 of the 9 pre-1992 departments of biological science. Whilst some departments are
phasing out technical officer positions, allowing the term – and its equivalents - to be used for people who
currently bear it but not making new appointments to such positions, other departments are continuing to
appoint technical officers.
3.4 THE ORGANISATION OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT
In most of the pre-1992 universities considered here, technical support tends to be organised at the
departmental level. The vast majority of the departments of biological science, chemistry, engineering and
physics in the pre-1992 university visited have their own research, facilities, teaching and general support
technicians, who are managed within the relevant department.10 More specifically, teaching and general
support technicians are typically pooled and controlled at the department level, as they support the work
of the department as a whole. Those technicians who are allocated to particular facilities or pieces of
equipment that are used by a number of research groups - such as NMR, mass spectrometry, clean rooms,
animal houses and horticultural facilities - also tend to be managed at the departmental level. On the other
hand, day-to-day control of technicians who provide more specialised forms of technical support may be
devolved to the relevant research groups, especially if those technicians are funded via external grants.
10
The one exception to this finding is a small department situated within a larger faculty of biological science. While the department has a few of
its own general support and research laboratory technicians, the technicians who provide analytical services such as DNA sequencing,
proteomics, and electron microscopy, as well as the mechanical and electronics workshop technicians, have been pooled in central, faculty-level
facilities.
21
However, the days when HECFE-funded technicians would be allocated to provide direct research
support for specific academics appear to be long gone, with research laboratory technicians who are
HEFCE-funded usually being allocated to one or more groups rather than to individual academics.
Matters are a little more complicated when it comes to the electronics and mechanical workshop
technicians. All but one of the pre-1992 departments of physics considered here has retained their own
mechanical and electronics workshops, albeit with rather fewer technicians than in the past. The same is
true of all the pre-1992 departments of engineering visited, save for those situated within large, multidepartment faculties of engineering, where some of the individual departmental workshops have been
amalgamated. Centralisation of workshops has been rather more extensive in the case of chemistry, where
3 of the 10 pre-1992 departments visited now share a workshop with neighbouring departments of physics
or biological science. The largest changes appear to have come in the biological sciences: 4 of the 9
departments visited no longer have their own workshops, relying instead either on the services provided
by other departments or on outsourcing; while 2 of the other 5 departments have been reduced in size to
the point where they have just one workshop technician. The moves towards centralising workshop
facilities, and reducing the number of technicians employed in those that remain, have been driven by a
variety of factors, most notably: a desire on the part of universities to avoid duplication and exploit the
benefits of economies of scale; the need to reduce salary and space costs; and changes in technology
which in at least some instances have made it easier and more economical to outsource work than do it in
house.11
The topic of the centralisation of workshops elicited much comment from interviewees, many of
whom emphasised that, as well as facilitating cost savings and the exploitation of scale economies, it may
also give rise to significant problems. In particular, interviewees argued that the importance of the
informal interaction between academics and technicians who have a common language and share an
understanding of the nature of the technical problems that arise within their discipline militates against
attempts to centralise workshops. The reason, interviewees argued, is to be found in issues of expertise
and control. Consider first the issue of expertise. The point here is that technicians who specialise in
providing support for a particular discipline are more able to develop the relevant expertise – the
specialised knowledge and practical skills required to solve the kind of technical problems that arise in
that discipline – than those who service other disciplines. So centralisation may be problematic if it leads
to a dilution of the pool of technical expertise available to departments. Of course, it is not inevitable that
such expertise will be lost if workshops are centralised, so long as those central workshops still contain
technicians who are dedicated to supporting the relevant discipline.
This, though, raises a further set of issues, namely those concerning the control of the technicians
in shared workshops. Many interviewees argued that, if a department has a dedicated mechanical
workshop, then its academics are likely to enjoy more scope to re-prioritise and re-specify jobs, as the
iterative nature of much research support demands, than if they have to rely on a shared workshop. Even
if, say, a physics department has a dedicated ‘physics’ technician working within a shared workshop, the
question arises of what will happen if that technician is working on a task from some other department
when a new job from physics arises. Who will have the final word in how that technician’s time will be
allocated? And, if the physics job is not prioritised, will it be allocated to a some other technician who
might not understand the physicists’ requirements so well, or will there be a delay until the ‘physics’
technician is free? Moreover, who will be held accountable for such decisions? The danger, which some
11
Also see Evidence Ltd (2004: 11).
22
interviewees argue is amply illustrated by their experience of the centralisation of other support functions,
is that the centralisation of technical support will lead to a blurring of the lines of accountability and,
consequently, a decrease in the quality of technical support. The kind of difficulties that can arise were
vividly described by one interviewee who had experience of a shared workshop:
People don’t like the shared workshop ... It gives rise to blurred lines of reporting and
accountability, with technicians not knowing who they report to or where they fit in, and also
causes communication problems ... Nobody ‘owns’ them [the technicians], talks to them,
knows where their priorities lie in terms of workload ... [and] the person who shouts loudest
gets to use them.
The point is that if shared workshops are to work well, then it is imperative that they are managed so as to
ensure that tasks are allocated, and jobs prioritised, in a way that sustains high quality, responsive
technical support for all of the relevant departments (an imperative that is likely to become even more
important as competition for research grants and consultancy income increases in the future). What is
required, therefore, are clear lines of responsibility that make it obvious who establishes the order in
which jobs are carried out and who is accountable for ensuring the delivery of high quality support to the
appropriate deadlines. Given that it is likely to be harder to achieve the requisite managerial structure
within a large, shared facility than within a single department, there is likely to be a trade-off between
exploiting the undoubted benefits of centralisation (e.g., ensuring that technicians are fully utilised and
exploiting the benefits of economies of scale), on the one hand, and giving departments access to high
quality support that is tailored and responsive to their needs, on the other. It is beyond the scope of this
study to identify precisely how the balance between these competing concerns ought to be struck.
However, given that – according to at least some interviewees - workshop technicians’ contribution to
research in particular is not always well understood or appreciated by senior management, it is important
to highlight the existence of these issues.12
Unsurprisingly, given the financial circumstances currently confronting universities, a number of
departments and faculties visited are either in the midst of, or are about to embark upon, reviews of
technical services. Typically, the aim of the reviews is to identify situations where technical resources are
under-utilised or where there are unexploited economies of scale. Such opportunities may be found within
departments, where exploiting them might for example involve taking technicians out of one research
group and pooling them at the departmental level. They might also arise within larger, multi-department
faculties. For example, one university is considering whether the duties of the general support technicians
employed in its science and engineering departments are sufficiently similar for that aspect of technical
support to be taken out of departments and provided them by a central, faculty-level pool of technicians.
Centralised approaches to the provision of technical support are more common amongst the post1992 universities visited for this study. Each of the 10 post-1992 departments visited for this study is
embedded within a larger, multi-departmental faculty. In every case, technicians were pooled and
managed at the faculty level, being available to provide technical support for a number of departments
within that faculty. The aim of such an approach is of course to exploit the benefits of economies of scale
and to make it easier for technical services managers to reallocate technicians to where they are most
needed, thereby – it is hoped - facilitating a more flexible, responsive, and efficient use of scarce technical
12
For a similar point, see Toner et al. (2010: 32-33).
23
resources. The creation of such common pools of technicians is, of course, facilitated by the fact that there
is a smaller diversity of technician roles in post-1992 departments than in their pre-1992 counterparts, the
reason being that most of the technicians in post-1992 departments currently spend the majority of their
time supporting teaching rather than more specialised research activities. However, differences in the kind
of technical support required by different disciplines remain and, as a result, the common pool of
technicians is often divided into teams that support particular disciplines within the faculty. Because those
disciplines are usually associated with particular departments, there often remain relatively strong links
between particular groups of technicians and specific departments. As things currently stand, therefore,
the management of technical services in post-1992 universities is not as centralised as it might first
appear, with departments in practice departments often retaining a significant measure of day-to-day
control over ‘their’ technicians.
24
4. THE TECHNICIAN WORKFORCE: ORIGINS, TENURE, CONTRACT, AGE, AND
QUALIFICATIONS
In this section of the report we consider various attributes of the technician workforce, most notably: their
origins, in the sense of where they were before they become technicians in higher education; whether they
are on open-ended (‘permanent’) or fixed-term contracts; the length of time they have worked in their
department; their age; and their qualifications.
4.1 ORIGINS
There is considerable uncertainty about the route through which the current member of the technician
workforce came into the sector (that is, about the ‘origins’ of those technicians) (see, for example, PA
Consulting 2010: 50). While it proved to be difficult to gain accurate data on this issue, most departments
were able to offer rough estimates of the proportions of their current technician workforce who came to
the department straight from school and were developed in-house via some kind of
traineeship/apprenticeship scheme and the proportion who were recruited from the external labour
market.13
A majority of the technical workforce in all 4 disciplines has been recruited from industry rather
than trained in-house. All 12 of the engineering departments visited for this study estimated that at least
70% of their technicians were recruited from the external labour market, mostly from industry, with 6 of
those departments putting that figure at over 90%. In a similar vein, 7 of the 9 physics departments
visited for this study indicated that over 60% of their current technicians had been recruited, again mostly
from industry. The picture is similar in bioscience and chemistry. All 10 of the bioscience departments
that returned usable data indicated that at least 70% of their current technicians had been recruited
externally, while a majority of the chemistry departments suggested that at least 60% of their technicians
had been hired after having received their initial training elsewhere rather than come to the department
straight from school. The sources from which such external recruits were drawn were slightly more
varied in bioscience and chemistry than in the case of physics and engineering: while industry was a
prominent source of recruits for bioscience and chemistry departments, they also drew – to a greater
extent than their counterparts in physics and engineering – on technicians who had previously worked in
other university departments (accounting for 20-30% of the current workforce in some departments);
while 6 out of the 10 bioscience departments who were able to provide data estimated that 20-30% of the
current workforce were recent graduates, having been recruited soon after completing an undergraduate
degree.14
Those members of the technician workforce in all four disciplines who were not recruited
externally tend to be more mature workers who were trained via old university apprenticeship training
schemes. The latter typically involved on–the-job training in the university, with trainees being rotated
through a number of laboratories or workshops, combined with off-the-job training via day release at a
local college (leading to vocational qualifications such as an HNC or City and Guilds). However, by the
1990s most of these traineeship schemes had been closed down (also see Royal Society 1998: 6 and
13
People were classified by being recruited from the external labour market if they received their basic grounding in the skills required for their
role as a technician somewhere other than in the department for which they currently work. Thus, for example, workshop technicians are counted
as externally recruits if they obtained their basic training in electronics and/or mechanical engineering via an apprenticeship taken in industry or
in another university rather than in their current department.
14
A notable exception to this general reliance on recruitment is to be found in one of the non-university physics research laboratories, which has
long run its own high-quality apprenticeship scheme. As a result, it estimates that around half of its current (comparatively large) technician
workforce was trained in-house.
25
Evidence Ltd 2004: 14). The reductions in the technician workforce that were taking place in many
departments in the 1980s and 1990s militated against taking on trainees, as also did the propensity for
apprentices to leave the university in search of higher pay once they had completed their training.
However, as we shall see in Section 5.2 below, recent years have seen a revival of interest in
apprenticeship training schemes in two of the four disciplines, namely physics and engineering, as
concerns about an ageing workforce, coupled with the limited availability of suitably qualified recruits on
the external labour market, have prompted some departments to take on apprentices once again.
4.2 CONTRACT TYPE
The vast majority of the technicians in the departments visited here are on open-ended (‘permanent’)
rather than fixed term contracts. The precise proportion varies from a low of around 80% in bioscience
departments to a high of about 90% in the physics departments visited for this study. It is important to
note that the positions occupied by some of the technicians who are on open-ended contracts are financed
at least in part via income obtained through external research grants. This is an approach that many
universities are encouraging departments to adopt as they attempt to reduce their reliance on diminishing
HEFCE funding.
4.3 LABOUR TURNOVER AND LENGTH OF SERVICE
Labour turnover is universally reported as being very low, with many departments reporting turnover
rates of less than 5% and almost all rates under 10% per annum.15 Tenures of over 20 years are common
amongst technical staff. In the words of one technical services manager, once technicians have arrived in
a department ‘hardly any leave until retirement.’16
Interviews indicated that low labour turnover and the presence of long-serving members of
technical staff was a mixed blessing. The benefits are clear: over their many years of service, such staff
often have very substantial reserves of expertise and practical know-how, and are therefore able to make
vital contributions to overcoming the technical challenges that arise in the course of scientific research.
One interviewee expressed this point by saying that technicians ‘provide much of the “institutional
memory” in departments, by saying [when faced with a particular technical problem], “Don’t try that, it
didn’t work, try this”.’ Given especially that much of this knowledge is tacit – it is practical knowledge
about how to do things, which it may be very hard to articulate explicitly in the way required for it to be
rapidly transferred to new recruits – the presence of experienced technicians is extremely valuable
resource to departments (Royal Society 1998: 9-10; Evidence Ltd 2004: 52). However, representatives
from a number of departments of biological science and engineering in particular indicated that the
presence of a large cohort of older technicians may have drawbacks. In particular, if the skills possessed
by those staff are no longer so relevant to the discipline they are meant to be supporting, having been
marginalised by changes either in the kind of science that is being done or in the technology that is being
used, then low turnover and long tenure may be problematic, because it can lead to the technicians in
question being less and less useful to the department, especially if they are either unwilling or unable to
retrain.
15
A recent survey found that the turnover rate for technical staff, including IT staff, in UK universities was 7% (HECFE 2010: 80).
A 2009 survey of technicians found that around 50% had worked for their current institution for over 10 years, with around 25% having done
so for over 20 years (HEaTED 2009: 4, 8).
16
26
This issue was mentioned by the representatives of some engineering departments, who lamented
the fact that older technicians in particular do not have enough mechatronic skills (that is, with the ability
to integrate mechanical and electronic components so as to be able to measure and control the
performance of the systems in which they are embedded). But the problem appears to be most acute in the
case of the biological sciences, where some interviewees argued that the rapid pace of change in the
techniques used in biological research over the past 20 years has left a number of technicians with skills
that are peripheral to their departments’ needs (cf. Barley and Bechky 1994: 120-21). The challenge
involved in finding something useful for such technicians to so, and the additional burden that their
presence places on technical services that are working at or near full capacity, is a source of concern for
technical service managers and academics alike. While the early retirement and voluntary severance
schemes that have been employed in many universities in the past few years have helped to alleviate the
problem to some extent, higher rates of turnover might help departments to prevent such situations from
developing, with new recruits usually having up-to-date skills and a greater willingness to learn. In the
words of one academic: ‘It’s useful to have some continuity, but a bit of healthy turnover is good too.’
We shall return to this issue in Section 6.2 below.
4.4. AGE PROFILE
Notwithstanding the fact that many of the universities visited for this project have implemented early
retirement and voluntary severance schemes over the past few years, the average age of the technicians in
the chemistry, engineering, and physics departments visited for this study is around 50 years of age (see
Table 4.1). Put another way, roughly half of the technicians in the departments in those three disciplines
visited for this study are due to retire within the next 15 years. Matters are slightly different in the
biological sciences departments considered here, where a tendency to recruit relatively young graduates
for research technician posts in particular has led to a younger demographic profile, with an average age
of around 40 and somewhere in the region of 40-45% of the workforce likely to retire within the next 15
years.
Table 4.1: Average age, and percentage of the technician workforce aged over 50 in the case study
departments, by discipline
Biological sciences
Chemistry
Engineering
Physics
Average age
Fraction aged over
50
41
48
51
48
43%
46%
48%
55%
Support for such claims is provided by Figure 4.1, which presents HESA staff record data on the age
profile of the technical workforce in each of the four disciplines considered in this study for all UK
universities in the year 2009/10.
27
Percentasge of total technical
workforce
Figure 4.1: The age profile of the technical workforce, by
discipline, in 2009-10a
35
30
25
20
Bioscience
15
Chemistry
10
5
Engineering
0
Physics
Less
21-30
than 20
31-40
41-50
50-60
61+
Age
a: Source: HESA Staff Record 2003/04-2009/10. The data cover the following cost centres: bioscience (cost centre 10); chemistry
(cost centre 11); physics (cost centre 12); and engineering (including general engineering [cost centre 16], chemical engineering [cost
centre 17], mineral, metallurgy and materials engineering [cost centre 18], civil engineering [cost centre 19], electrical, electronics and
computer engineering [cost centre 20], and mechanical, aero and production engineering [cost centre 21]). The data includes building,
ICT and medical (including nursing) technicians as well as laboratory and engineering workshop technicians (SOC Code 3A).
While the data collected from the case studies carried out for this project, and that available from HESA,
are not strictly comparable – because the HESA data includes building, ICT and medical technicians, who
were excluded from the current study – on the whole the broad pattern is similar, with biosciences having
a younger workforce (with significantly more technical staff in their 20s in particular). The HESA data
indicate that the fraction of the total technician workforce that is aged over 50 and due to retire within the
next 15 years is in the region of 30% in the biosciences, 40% in chemistry, 45% in engineering, and 40%
in physics.17
Age profiles of the kind described for the chemistry, physics, and engineering departments in
particular have been the cause of much concern, voiced both interviewees and also by other commentators
on the sector (Evidence Ltd 2004: 14-15; THES 2008, 2009). While some of the more apocalyptic talk
about a ‘demographic time bomb’ might be exaggerated, it is undoubtedly true a succession planning
issue is emerging that must be addressed if the future of technical support in the sector is to be assured.
Quite how serious the problem is depends, of course, not only upon the age profile of the current
technician workforce but also upon how easily suitably skilled replacements for retirees can be found.
That in turn raises two additional issues: the kind of skills that departments need their technicians to have;
and the ease with which workers possessing the requisite level of skills can be obtained from the external
labour market. We shall examine the first of those issues immediately below. The second issue will be
considered in Section 5. Having examined both issues, we shall then be in a position to consider the scale
of the succession planning problem and the appropriateness of the strategies through which departments
are attempting to deal with it.
17
The discrepancies between the estimates of the percentage of technical staff who are due to retire over the next 15 years derived from the case
studies and from HESA data may well reflect the fact that the latter includes some types of technician, most notably ICT technicians, who were
excluded from the current project and who are likely to be younger than the laboratory and engineering workshop technicians upon whom the
case studies focused.
28
4.5 QUALIFICATIONS
A broad-brush summary of the qualifications possessed by people occupying various kinds of technician
role in each of the 4 disciplines considered in this study can be found in Table 4.2:
Table 4.2: Qualifications typically associated with particular technician roles in pre-1992
universities (by discipline)
Biological sciences
Chemistry
Engineering
Physics
General
support
Research
Facilities
Workshop
Teaching
Technical
officer
Vocational/GCSEs
Vocational/GCSEs
Vocational/GCSEs Vocational/GCSEs
Vocational/BSc
Vocational/BSc
Vocational
GCSEs/vocational/BSc
PhD/BSc
Vocational/BSc
Vocational/BSc
Vocational
GCSEs/vocational/BSc
PhD/BSc
Vocational
Vocational
Vocational
Vocational
PhD/BSc
Vocational
Vocational
Vocational
Vocational
PhD/BSc
In the case of pre-1992 universities, the clearest and most straightforward picture arises in the case of
general support technicians, mechanical and electronics workshop technicians, facilities technicians, and
technical officers. The qualifications typically possessed by people occupying such roles tend to be very
similar across all the 4 disciplines considered for this study. General support technicians, who are
typically found only in pre-1992 universities - typically have no more than vocational qualifications, such
as BTECs, ONCs and HNCs, and they may well have no formal qualifications beyond those acquired at
school (though they may, of course, have considerable experience in their role). The vast majority of
mechanical and electronics workshop technicians – whether they work in pre-1992 or post-1992
universities - have vocational qualifications in electronics and mechanical engineering, usually HNCs,
HNDs, and City and Guilds, with just a very small minority having an undergraduate degree. Analytical
facilities technicians tend either to have vocational qualifications such as HNCs or undergraduate degrees.
Those analytical facilities technicians who are vocationally qualified tend to be the older ones, while
those who have degrees are more likely to be relatively young. Those technicians who work in facilities
such as clean rooms, greenhouses, and animal houses usually have vocational qualifications. As noted
earlier, technical officers in all 4 disciplines tend to have at least an undergraduate degree, with most
possessing PhDs.
Matters become slightly more complicated when it comes to research laboratory technicians. In
physics and engineering most of the incumbents of research laboratory technician roles are vocationally
qualified.18 In departments of chemistry and biological science, however, while older research laboratory
technicians tend to be vocationally qualified, usually possessing HNCs in the relevant discipline, younger
technicians tend to have undergraduate degrees. This tendency was attributed both to technological
changes and also to differences in the availability of workers with different educational backgrounds.
Many interviewees in pre-1992 biological science and chemistry departments argued that the
development of high throughput sampling and other types of automated experimental procedure have
reduced the need for technicians to carry out experimental procedures manually. The paradigm is DNA
18
Two possible exceptions to this general finding are worth noting. First, some physics departments indicate that the nature of the work
undertaken by their electronics technicians requires them to have an undergraduate degree. Second, those engineering departments whose
research involves the application of traditional engineering principles to subject-matter usually studied by one of the other sciences, as for
example occurs in bio-engineering and chemical engineering, seem often to employ technicians who are qualified to at least degree level BSc in
the relevant science in order to provide subject-specific input into the design of experiments and the analysis of data.
29
sequencing, which twenty years ago could not be done at all, then for a period could be done only with
considerable manual input from technicians, but which has now been automated, considerably reducing
the amount of technician support required. The premium is increasingly on technicians who can
contribute to the design of experiments, write the relevant software, and then help to analyse the data that
are produced. Since the requisite programming, data-handling, and analytical skills are most likely to be
acquired in the course of a university education, rather than via vocational training, it is unsurprising that
chemistry and biological science are increasingly relying on graduates to fill research technician posts.
Graduates are also said to have a better grasp of the scientific principles underlying the research they are
supporting than their vocationally educated counterparts and, a result, they are said to be more
autonomous – to need less supervision and less detailed experimental protocols – to be less likely to make
mistakes, and to be more able to deal with emergent problems.19
Many interviewees in biological science departments in particular also argued that the rapid pace
of change in the biological sciences makes it especially desirable to recruit graduates for research support
roles. The reason is that, thanks both to their grasp of underlying scientific principles and also to the
general intellectual skills developed during the course of their degree, (good) graduates are said to be
more able to familiarise themselves with new areas of research and new experimental techniques than
people with only vocational qualifications. This is not to say that it is impossible for someone who is
vocationally qualified to display the requisite flexibility, but rather that – as the interviewees saw things people with degrees are more likely to be able to do so. Interviewees from a majority of the pre-1992
department of biological sciences indicated that an undergraduate degree is now a prerequisite for
someone wishing to fill a research technician position.
The increasing use of graduates to fill research technician roles in chemistry and biological
science departments was also attributed by some interviewees simply to a decline in the number of
vocationally educated people applying for such positions. As will be discussed in more detail in Section
5.1, departments in those disciplines that advertise for technician posts of all kinds are almost invariably
inundated with applications from people who are qualified to degree level or higher, with the pool of
applicants tending to contain only a small proportion of people with vocational qualifications. The ready
availability of graduates, coupled with the changing demands of the research technician role outlined
above, makes it unsurprising that departments of chemistry and biological science nowadays tend to
appoint people with BScs to research technician positions. Given the data available here, however, it is
impossible to be sure of the relative importance of these two factors (that is, how far the increasing use of
graduates really does reflect the increasing demands of the research technician role and how much of it
stems simply from the greater availability of graduates on the external labour market).
The greatest variation in qualifications between different pre-1992 universities is to be found in
the case of teaching technicians. In those cases where technicians’ official duties are confined to
supporting teaching rather than actually undertaking that teaching themselves, teaching technicians tend
to have vocational qualifications, though there are some departments of biological science and chemistry
in particular whose teaching technicians have no qualifications beyond GCSE/O-level. Where technicians
are formally involved in teaching, helping to instruct students in how to use scientific instruments and
carry out experimental procedures, they tend to be qualified at least to vocational level and – in some
departments of chemistry in particular - to possess undergraduate degrees. This reflects the common view
amongst interviewees from those chemistry and biological science departments whose technicians were
19
For similar observations, see Royal Society (1998: vii, 6).
30
formally engaged in teaching that either an HNC plus considerable experience or a BSc was required to
do the job properly.
A similar story emerges from the post-1992 departments visited for this study. As noted earlier,
the vast majority of technicians’ time in those departments is spent supporting teaching rather than
research. Moreover, rather than simply facilitating the efforts of academics and PhD student
demonstrators, the technicians who support laboratory classes tend more often than not to be actively
involved in teaching students the relevant practical skills. In the case of the post-1992 physics and
engineering departments, most of those technicians have vocational qualifications, the one exception
being a department of engineering most of whose technicians have undergraduate degrees. A majority of
the technicians working in the post-1992 department of chemistry visited for this study were qualified to
at least BSc level, with the remainder having HNCs in chemistry. Like their counterparts in those pre1992 universities whose technicians took an active role in teaching students practical techniques,
interviewees from the department in question believed that technicians who are directly involved in
teaching students ought to have either a BSc or an HNC and substantial experience. At least two thirds of
the technical workforce in each of the four post-1992 departments of biological science visited for this
study had an undergraduate degree, with many also having either an MSc or a PhD. While representatives
of these departments indicated that they believed a person taking a teaching technician post ought to have
at least a BSc or HNC with substantial experience, they did not suggest that it was necessary for such
technicians to have an advanced degree.
Interviewees almost invariably said that, for the most part, the skills and qualifications possessed
by their technicians were a good match to their departments’ needs. There were, however, a few
exceptions to this general picture of satisfaction with the skills profile of the technical workforce.
Interviewees from around half the engineering departments visited for this study, as well as from some
the physics departments and research laboratories, said that they would like to have more technicians with
mechatronic skills. Representatives of three other engineering departments also stated that would like to
have more technicians who are well versed in 3-D design and CAM-CAD packages. More generally,
engineering departments reported that they would like to have more technicians who are multi-skilled,
and who as a result are able to respond flexibly to the varying demands of researchers they support.
Moreover, as noted above, interviewees from some biological sciences departments also indicated that the
skills of some of their older technicians were no longer relevant to the kind of worker they were supposed
to be doing. Finally, moving from cases where technicians have too low a level of skills to situations
where they are arguably over-qualified, interviewees from some post-1992 departments of biological
science argued that whose technicians have an MSc or PhD, which in two cases amounted to almost half
of the technical workforce, are over-qualified for their role and therefore do not make anything like full
use of their skills in carrying out their duties.
Having now considered both the age and qualifications profile of the technician workforce in
each of the four disciplines under consideration here, we are now ready to move on to consider the
strategies through which departments are attempting to address the workforce planning issues that
confront them. We consider first the role of recruitment, before going on to examine the potential for
apprenticeship training to contribute to the renewal of the technician workforce.
31
5. WORKFORCE PLANNING: RECRUITMENT VERSUS TRAINING
5.1 RECRUITMENT
There is a stark contrast between availability on the external labour market of the kind of workers that
biological science and chemistry departments are trying to recruit, on the one hand, and the availability of
those sought by engineering and physics departments, on the other.
There was considerable agreement amongst representatives of the biological science and
chemistry departments visited for this study about the state of the external labour market for technicians.
Interviewees from all 13 biological science departments, and from 9 of the 11 chemistry departments, said
that they currently receive very large numbers of applications for research, teaching, analytical facilities,
and general support technician positions. The abundant supply of skilled labour is attributed in part to the
fact that chemical and pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, GSK and Astra-Zeneca, as well as
university departments, have been making people redundant and thereby releasing them on to the labour
market. It is also said to reflect the large numbers of science graduates currently being produced by UK
universities. The existence of such sources of supply implies that many departments currently receive
more than 50 applications for each post, with some reporting ratios of over 100 applications per post.
Indeed, several interviewees remarked that even advertisements for relatively low level teaching support
posts attract interest not only from large numbers of graduates but also from people with advanced
degrees and postdoctoral experience.
It is of course true that not all of these applicants are appointable. For example, some graduates
lack the practical skills required successfully to fill a research or analytical facilities role. Other applicants
– especially young graduates and people with advanced degrees – may fail to appreciate either the
mundane, repetitive nature of much teaching support work, or the fact that research laboratory technicians
provide a service to scientists and support their projects rather than devising and implementing their own
research agenda. Nevertheless, even when such unsuitable applicants have been ruled out, biological
science and chemistry departments are left with many strong candidates from which to choose, so that it is
relatively easy for them to find high quality people to appoint. In the words of one academic in the
biological sciences who recently received 160 applications for a research technician post, ‘We were
overwhelmed by good applicants.’
Of course, while new recruits will have received their basic training outside of the department
that hires them, and may also have substantial work experience, they will need to be inducted into their
new surroundings. Additional ‘upgrade’ training may also be acquired in order to equip them with some
of the more specialised skills they will need in order to become fully productive in all aspects of their new
role. It is for this reason that people are who are recruited to fill research laboratory technician posts in the
chemical and biological sciences typically receive on-the-job training in the relevant experimental
techniques, and in the use of the relevant instruments, either from an academic or an experienced
technician. This reliance on informal, uncertificated training is to some extent inevitable, interviewees
said, because many of the techniques used in research laboratories are relatively new and therefore have
not been absorbed into external, formally certificated training programmes or industrial laboratories.20
20
The same is often true of recruits to physics and engineering department mechanical workshops, where technicians are required to work either
with materials or to degrees of precision that they may well not previously have encountered. Consequently, even recruits who have had a good
apprenticeship and several years of industrial experience are unlikely to have had the chance to acquire all the relevant skills before arriving in
their department and will therefore need additional ‘upgrade’ training in order to be able to carry out some of their duties. As in the case of
biology and chemistry technicians, the requisite training is usually provided informally, on the job by more experienced colleagues.
32
The abundance of skilled labour available for hire implies that when biological science and
chemistry departments are deciding how to deal with succession planning, or refresh the skills of their
technician workforce, they are able to a considerable extent to rely on external recruitment. One
consequence of this is that, as we shall elaborate in the next section, no chemistry department, and just
one department of biological science, in the sample considered here currently has an apprenticeship
programme for its research, analytical facilities, or teaching technicians.
The only kinds of technicians that chemistry departments do struggle to find are those who work
in electronics and mechanical workshops.21 Just over half of the chemistry departments visited for this
study had experienced difficulties in recruiting such technicians. Significantly, this is consistent with the
experience of the physics and engineering departments included in this study, a majority of which have
found it difficult to recruit good workshop technicians from the external labour market. More specifically,
7 of the 10 engineering departments who had recent experience of attempting to recruit technicians, and 6
of the 9 physics departments, reported only a low-to-moderate availability of suitably skilled workers on
the external labour market. The departments in question, which are to be found in all of the regions
covered in this study, had struggled to find good people to fill technician posts in the past few years,
sometimes having to re-advertise posts and even then not always filling them. In the words of one
interviewee who is involved in the recruitment of electronics and mechanical workshop technicians, ‘It’s
not easy, and it’s getting worse ... You have to be lucky to get a good one’.
Interviewees attributed the paucity of good recruits to two factors. The first is the salary paid by
universities, which is said to be low relative to that available in industry, making it hard for departments
to attract young technicians in particular, who can ill afford to take the low wages on offer.22 The second
factor is the long-term decline of many of the traditional industries that used to train engineering and
electronics technicians in the past. The closure of firms in those industries, along with the significant
scaling back of the training programmes in those companies that remain, has led in turn to a reduction in
the number of suitably qualified and experienced technicians entering the pool from which universities
attempt to draw. As one technical services manager put it, ‘The well’s run dry’ (also see Royal Society
1998: 6).
In stark contrast to their counterparts in chemistry and the biological sciences, therefore, science
and engineering departments cannot be confident of obtaining the skilled labour required to sustain a
high-calibre technical workforce simply by relying on hiring technicians from the external labour market.
Consequently, the last 3-4 years have seen something of a revival of interest on the part of physics and
engineering departments in apprentices training schemes, which – as we will see – are now beginning to
be viewed by many engineering and physics departments as an important element of their approach to
workforce planning.
5.2 APPRENTICESHIPS
The evidence gathered for this project suggests that the last 3-4 years have witnessed the beginnings of a
revival of interest in apprenticeship training schemes amongst university engineering and physics
departments. Six of the 12 engineering departments, along with 3 of the 9 physics departments, have
21
As noted earlier, most of the departments of biological science departments considered for this study are significantly reducing the size of their
mechanical and electronics workshops, so that recruiting workshop technicians is not a significant concern for them at present.
22
HEFCE reports that the median and mean technician salaries in 2008-09 were £27,410 and £28,460 respectively (HEFCE 2010: 50).
33
either recently begun – or are about to begin – running an apprenticeship scheme for their technicians.
Two other departments of engineering, and one other physics department, are formally considering
starting such a scheme. In these respects, matters appear to have changed since the late 1990s and early
2000s, when few universities were taking on apprentices (The Royal Society 1998: 6; Evidence Ltd 2004:
14-15). One of the two non-university research laboratories also has a long-standing, well-established
apprenticeship programme through which is has trained a large proportion of its current technician
workforce.
The rationale for such developments is twofold. First, apprenticeship training is viewed as a
means of succession planning that will enable hard-pressed technical service managers to continue to
provide high-quality technical support in the face of the twin problems posed by an ageing technician
workforce, many of whom are due to retire within the next 15 years, and the difficulty of obtaining
suitably skilled replacements via the external labour market. As one technical services manager from a
physics department that has recently begun to take on apprentices put it, ‘We need to grow our own;
otherwise we’ll have a skills shortage.’ Second, apprenticeships are thought of as a way for departments
to update the skills of their technical workforce so that they are well tailored to the researchers’ current
requirements. This means that apprentices may for example take a mixture of units in electronics and
mechanical engineering, so that they acquire the mechatronic skills by which so many departments now
set great store. In this way, apprenticeships provide a vehicle not merely for succession planning,
narrowly understood as involving the replacement of retirees with similarly skilled younger workers, but
also for workforce planning in a broader sense that encompasses an attempt to anticipate an organisation’s
future skills needs and then find a means of satisfying them.
The 9 departments of physics and engineering, and the non-university research laboratory, that
have decided to take on apprentices have adopted similar, though not completely identical, approaches to
running their scheme. In every case, the apprentices have been recruited under the auspices of the
government’s Advanced Apprenticeship programme. All 9 departments have delegated formal
responsibility for organising the apprenticeship to an external training provider (in 7 cases, a local further
education college, in one case a private training provider, and in one a group training association), though
in some cases departments have had to work hard to ensure that the colleges deliver the quality of support
required for the apprenticeship programme to be a success.23
It is the external training providers that hold the apprenticeship training contract with the Skills
Funding Agency and, as a result, are in direct receipt of the government training subsidy. The government
funding covers both the fees for the college courses through which the apprentices’ receive their off-thejob training and also the cost of the assessment of their practical skills required for the award of the NVQ
part of the apprenticeship training framework. That leaves the universities having to pay the apprentices’
wages, typically £12,000-£13,000 per annum, and also to cover the costs of overseeing the scheme and
providing the on-the-job training. In some cases, those costs are split between the relevant department and
the central university. In others, the department covers the entire cost.
Apprentices from both the engineering and the physics departments are usually studying for
qualifications in mechanical and electrical/electronic engineering. Apprentices typically start at level 2,
working towards an ONC and an NVQ2, before progressing to a level 3 NVQ and an HNC. The
23
In particular, some departments expressed reservations both about the quality of teaching on the college courses taken by the apprentices and
also about the effectiveness with which the provider notified the department of any problems with its apprentices (e.g. cases where apprentices
were either struggling with their college course or simply failing to attend it). For similar findings about the need to invest time and effort in
ensuring appropriate college provision, in the case of apprenticeship schemes involving private sector employers, see Unwin and Fuller (2004:
17-18).
34
departments provide the apprentices with the requisite on-the-job training and work experience by
rotating them through different workshops and laboratories, exposing them to a wide variety of tasks,
materials and equipment, and thereby developing their flexibility. The off-the-job training required for the
ONC and HNC comes from a local further education college, which apprentices attend either via day
release (in the case of 7 departments) or via block release for the first year of the apprenticeship followed
by day release thereafter (in two cases).
The number of apprentices taken on by each department is low, averaging just one or two per
annum in each university. Comparisons of apprenticeship activity between different employers and at
different times are potentially clouded by differences in skilled employment, with larger employers taking
on more apprentices simply because they have to sustain a larger technician workforce. A simple way of
allowing for such differences is to calculate the ratio of the number of apprentices currently in training to
the number of skilled employees within the relevant occupation (in this case, technicians). This indicator,
known traditionally as the apprentice–journeyman ratio, can be used to compare the rate or intensity of
training across employers. The intensity of training averages about 3% across the three physics
departments that offer apprenticeships, and is around 5% in the case of the 5 departments of engineering.
Those figures would be expected to rise over time if – and, as we shall see, it is an if - departments, most
of whom have only recently started taking on apprentices, continue to do so and therefore ultimately have
apprentices in all three or four years of their training programmes.
All of the departments of engineering and physics that have taken on apprentices are intimately
involved in the process through which apprentices are selected. The departments in question are typically
looking for young people aged between 16 and 20 who have passed 4-5 GCSEs at grades A-C, with
English and a science at grade C and mathematics at grade B. Some departments set practical tests for
shortlisted candidates. The quality of applicants appears to be mixed: while most departments stated that
they received enough good applicants to fill all the apprentice training places on offer, two departments of
engineering had struggled to do so. In all 9 cases, the apprentices were given a fixed term contract of
employment, coterminous with their apprenticeship. The departments in question hope and expect that the
apprentices will be kept on at the end of the training programme, subject to satisfactory performance.
Of the 12 departments of engineering and physics who do not take on apprentices, 5 have
seriously considered doing so. However, despite acknowledging the potential for apprenticeship to serve
as a tool for workforce planning, these departments ultimately decided against becoming involved. The
main reasons were twofold. First, two departments in particular baulked at the financial implications of
the wages they believed newly qualified apprentices would have to be paid. Those departments may
revisit their decision not to participate in apprentices in the not-too-distant future. Second, some
departments were concerned that, because their technical staff are already working at full stretch, their
experienced technicians simply do not have time required to provide the on-the-job training required by
the apprentices. As the technical services manager in one of those departments put it, ‘We don’t have the
capacity ... [and] would need to take on an extra trainer to do it’.24
Those engineering departments who have not seriously contemplated taking on apprentices tend
to be those who either still have a relatively young workforce or who find it relatively straightforward to
hire workers from the external labour market. In other words, in those cases the two main factors that
have motivated other departments’ interests in apprenticeships, namely an ageing workforce and the
difficulty of recruiting good workers from the external labour market, are not present. The absence of one
or both of factors also accounts in large measure for the fact that only one of the 24 departments of
24
For a similar point, see IoP and RSC (2010: iii).
35
chemistry and biological science visited for this study are currently running an apprenticeship programme
for their general support, research laboratory and analytical facilities technicians. As noted earlier, the
data gathered for this project indicates that the average age of technicians in the biological sciences is
only just over 40, as is the percentage of the technician workforce due to retire over the next 15 years.
Consequently, as a technical services manager from a department of biological science pointed out, ‘Age
is not a problem ... Not all university departments have a succession planning problem.’ Moreover, to the
extent that new recruits are required, it is very easy for departments of biological sciences to acquire them
from the external labour market. In the words of another interviewee from the biological sciences, ‘Given
the ready supply of graduates, we don’t need apprentice laboratory technicians.’ Much the same is true of
chemistry departments as well. While the technicians in departments do have an average age in the late
40s, and while around 45% of them are due to retire in the next 15 years, the abundance of skilled labour
on the external market means that departments feel able to address any succession planning issues that
arise simply by recruiting suitably skilled workers from the external labour market. As a result, they make
no use of apprenticeships for their general support, research laboratory, and analytical facilities
technicians, preferring to rely on external recruitment as their major vehicle for workforce planning.25
The evidence reported here provides little support for the view, mooted in some policy
documents, that what is required in order to stimulate interest in Apprenticeships amongst universities is a
new apprenticeship framework specifically tailored to the requirements of university laboratory and
engineering workshop technicians (see, for example, HEFCE 2010: 79-80). On the contrary, virtually all
of the departments who expressed an interest in apprenticeships were quite content with the existing
apprenticeship frameworks. The evidence gathered here suggests that the problem lies, not in the
apprenticeship frameworks per se, but rather in the factors noted above, such as: (i) the difficulty of
finding further education colleges that are willing to offer the courses required for the off-the-job part of
the apprenticeship; (ii) the problem of finding enough time for established technicians to provide the onthe-job training for the apprentices; and (iii) the fact that, especially in disciplines such as chemistry and
the biological sciences, the ease with which graduates can be hired discourages departments from taking
on apprentices.
25
The only exception is to pattern is to be found in pre-1992 departments of biological science whose technicians have a comparatively high
average age (in the late 40s). In anticipation of forthcoming retirements, the department has recently recruited 2 apprentice teaching technicians.
Like their counterparts in engineering and physics, the apprentices are being trained under the auspices of the government’s Advanced
Apprenticeship scheme, and are studying for a level 3 qualifications (BTECs in Applied Science). In other key respects – the use of a local FE
college to hold the training with the Skills Funding Agency, for example, and the fact that the apprentices currently have 3 year, fixed-term
contracts of employment – the training programme resembles those described for the apprentices in engineering and physics.
36
6. ONGOING TRAINING, APPRAISALS, CAREER PROGRESSION AND TECHNICIAN
REGISTRATION
6.1 ONGONING TRAINING
Having considered training for new, young staff, in the form of apprenticeships, we turn now to consider
ongoing training for more established technical staff. We shall consider first the way in which the need
for such training is identified, along with some of the impediments to the satisfaction of such needs.
Finally, we shall consider the kind of ongoing training that is actually provided for technicians.
In a majority of cases, interviewees felt that departments are currently willing to fund ongoing
training for established technicians, provided that it promotes the goals of the relevant department as well
as those of the individuals requesting it. However, while the identification of training needs is gradually
being formalised and systematised through the use of appraisals and personal development reviews,
interviewees in a significant minority of departments indicated that it remains ad hoc, in the sense of
being driven more by the short-term requirements of current or immanent research projects rather than by
a systematic appraisal of the long-term needs of technicians themselves.26 There remain a handful of
departments, especially in engineering, where appraisals have only recently been introduced. In others,
while an appraisal system is formally in place, it has not been greeted with great enthusiasm, especially
by older technicians, and appraisals are sometimes not actually carried out in practice.
Even when the need for training has been established, a number of impediments to its satisfaction
remain, of which interviewees mentioned three in particular. First, representatives from a number of
biology and chemistry departments in particular said that they sometimes find it hard to release their
technicians for off-the-job training, simply because – given the demands currently being placed on their
technical staff – they find it hard to cover for their absence. Moreover, while some academics are said to
be very good at supporting their technicians by giving them interesting work and opportunities to acquire
new skills that will help them to develop their careers, others are less helpful. In particular, faced with
considerable pressure to bring their research projects to a successful conclusion, some academics are said
to be reluctant to allow the technicians who support their groups to spend time way from the laboratory,
either for off-the-job training or for training on-the-job in other labs, so that the technicians in question
may not have the opportunity to acquire as broad a range of skills as they – and, ultimately, their
departments - might like. ‘Academics staff want technicians to be in the lab,’ one technical services
manager observed, ‘so getting day release can be a problem.’27
Second, technical services managers in a small minority of departments noted that the financial
circumstances in their universities have begun to deteriorate and that, as a result, less money is available
to support ongoing training than in the past. The danger here is that the provision of training, whether it
be ongoing training for established technicians or indeed for apprentices, is all-too-tempting a target for
hard-pressed finance managers seeking to save money. The reason is straightforward. The consequences
of certain types of cuts – such as those involving job losses - will be felt almost immediately, making it
likely that such reductions will be vigorously opposed from the outset. However, the consequences of a
failure to invest in training are likely to manifest themselves only after several years have passed, at
which point departments will find either that the skills of established workers are no longer adequate (if it
26
In total, 80% of respondents to a survey of technicians conducted in 2009 indicated that there is a systematic approach to identification of
training needs in their department, but only around a third of respondents said that the process centred on staff appraisal. In addition, 30% of staff
said that they identified their own training needs, while 40% felt that appraisal did not lead to useful training opportunities (HEaTED 2009: 11,
27).
27
A similar point was made by The Royal Society (1998: 6).
37
is funding for the training of current employees that is cut) or when retirees cannot be replaced (if it is the
funding for apprentices that is reduced). But because the full impact of lower investment in training is
likely to be felt, not immediately, but only after a number of years have passed, opposition to cuts in
training budgets is more likely to be muted at the outset, making training a more attractive target for hardpressed managers seeking to find straightforward ways of saving money. The problem, of course, is that
in the medium- to long-term such an approach may well prove to be a false economy, as departments end
up with inadequately trained technical staff.
Third, there are also cases where technicians neither seek opportunities for training nor
enthusiastically embrace those that are made available to them. Interviewees in around a quarter of the
departments suggested that there are occasions when technical service managers find it difficult to
persuade some technicians to go on training courses in order to update their skills. This has been a source
of frustration to technical services managers and academics alike, one of whom remarked that at times
some technicians have ‘devalued themselves’ by neglecting to update their skills, as true professionalism
– to which technicians ought to aspire - demands. Older technicians in particular may be reluctant to
acquire new skills, having become comfortable in their current role and grade. That may be
unproblematic if the technicians’ current portfolio of skills enables them to complete their duties to the
requisite standard. However, as a number of interviewees from engineering and especially from the
biological sciences noted, problems can arise if, perhaps because of changes in the kind of support
required, the skills possessed by those technicians have become peripheral to their department’s current
needs. For in that case it may become increasingly difficult for departments to find useful work for those
technicians to do, increasing the burden that must be borne by other technical staff. The use of early
retirement and voluntary severance schemes has helped to alleviate such problems, but it has not
eliminated them completely and several departments continue to struggle with the challenge of finding
useful work for older technicians whose skills have become increasingly irrelevant to the current
requirements of their role. It is also important to note that older technicians’ attitudes towards training are
not always set in stone, and that a more enthusiastic response is likely to be forthcoming if the reasons
why new skills are required is clearly explained to the technicians in question and if they are involved
from the outset in the specification, sourcing, and installation of any new equipment on which they are to
be trained. As one technical services manager from an engineering department put it, in words that were
echoed by his counterparts in other departments, ‘We need to get technicians to buy into training for
themselves and, if you include technicians in thinking about the future, they’ll respond more flexibly.’
Where ongoing technical training is provided, what form does it take?28 We shall begin by
considering uncertificated training, before moving on to training that yields formal qualifications.
Interviewees from all 4 disciplines made clear that one of the most important sources of
uncertificated technical training for established technicians - as for new recruits - is the other technicians
in their department, who will pass on their practical skills – for example, in welding, in particular
experimental techniques, and in how to use specific pieces of equipment – to less experienced colleagues,
usually via informal on-the-job training. On some occasions, such training may be formalised into short,
one- or two-day internal training courses (e.g. in x-ray crystallography, NMR). Training on how to deal
with the many health and safety issues that arise in science and engineering departments is also often
provided internally, via uncertificated departmental or university-based courses.
28
University staff development units usually offer a wide range of training courses in non-technical skills, including both personal developments
skills (e.g., CV writing, presentation skills), general IT skills, and managerial skills for those occupying, or seeking to occupy, laboratory and
technical service manager positions.
38
Perhaps the most important external sources of uncertificated ongoing training in technical skills
are equipment manufacturers, who are used as training providers by all of the departments visited for this
study. Training of this kind usually accompanies the purchase of new items of equipment and/or
associated software, although it can also be obtained independently of the latter. Examples include:
training for mechanical and electronics workshop technicians in how to programme and use CNC
machines and rapid prototypers (3-D printers); instruction in techniques for NMR spectroscopy, x-ray
crystallography, and mass spectrometry for analytical services technicians working in chemistry and in
the biological sciences; and training in high pressure and high vacuum technology for technicians
working in chemistry and physics departments. Interviewees were keen to emphasise that, while such
vendor-supplied training usually does not yield formal qualifications, it is often intense and of high
quality.
Only around 20% of the departments visited for this study have sent their established technicians,
as distinct from their apprentices, to local colleges for certificated vocational training (e.g. BTECs, HNCs,
HNDs). In some cases this simply reflects the fact that external recruits often already possess such
qualifications when they join departments. However, there are also cases where departments would like to
make use of such courses but, because of the limited numbers of students in the local area wishing to take
them, find it impossible to persuade local further education colleges willing to offer them. This is true
both in the case of some physics and engineering departments, who have struggled to find colleges
willing to offer HNCs in electronics, and also in the case of some biological science and chemistry
departments, who would like to have some of their teaching and general support technicians take HNCs
or BTECs in Applied Biology or Chemistry but have been unable to find a college that is willing to assist
them.
In the case of academic qualifications, a majority of the chemistry, engineering and physics
departments visited for this study indicated that they have sponsored small numbers of technicians –
typically just one or two per department – to take an undergraduate degree. Typically, the technicians take
their degrees part time, either at the local post-1992 university or via the Open University, with their
home department granting them day release, or block release for OU residential summer courses, and
paying some or all of their fees. Only one biological sciences department had supported a technician
through an undergraduate degree, though 3 more had done so for technicians wishing to take an MSc. It
should also be noted that it is quite common for those technicians and, in particular, technical officers
who have PhDs to have acquired them in virtue of their work as a technician.
While technicians sometimes obtain training in other ways – by attending courses put on either by
other universities, for example, or by the technicians’ organisation HEaTED – such sources are not
widely used, and will therefore not be commented upon further here.
6.2 APPRAISALS AND CAREER PROGRESSION
A new pay and conditions framework for all staff working in higher education was introduced in 2005.
The new framework brought all staff – whether previously classified as academic, academic-related, or
non-academic – onto a single pay spine and provided for the assessment of all posts. Interviewees from
the vast majority of the departments visited for this study reported that the process of job evaluation, role
analysis, and grading through which the move to the common pay spine had been implemented had been
viewed as fair by technical staff and, as a result, had not generated significant discontent amongst
technicians. (Only around 10% of departments suggested that outcomes had been viewed as unfair
39
because different people had received different grades for what they felt to be the same job.) Indeed,
interviewees in some departments (just under around 10% of those visited) indicated that – in the words
of one technical services manager – technical staff ‘generally did very well’ as a result of the move of the
common spine. The reason is that the process of job evaluation through which the move to the single pay
spine was accomplished led to the formal recognition of the additional responsibilities - for health and
safety, for example, and for various aspects of laboratory management - that many technicians had
accumulated over the years but which had not previously been acknowledged and remunerated. The
upshot was that the job evaluation process led to those technicians receiving higher grades, and higher
pay, than before.
However, while on the whole the transition to the common pay spine appears not to have caused
great discontent amongst technical staff, other problems have emerged over time. The most oft-remarked
difficulty stems from the fact that many technicians have now reached the top of the particular segment of
the common spine associated with their current grade. Having done so, the scope for them to secure
increases in pay beyond those agreed in national negotiations for university staff is severely
circumscribed, being limited either to the award of a small number of discretionary points, which are
increasingly difficult to gain given the current financial climate, or by augmenting their current role by
taking on extra responsibilities so that it is placed at a higher point on the pay spine. However, given the
finite set of duties that departments need their technicians to carry out, the scope for widespread regrading of this kind is of course limited. One human resources manager elaborated on this point by noting
that the common spine ‘seems a bit inflexible now, because people can’t get higher grades for volume of
work or qualifications but only on the basis of the range and nature of tasks they undertake.’ If neither the
nature nor the range of tasks associated with their role changes, then people who remain in that role and
have reached the top of the relevant spine segment ‘have nowhere to go.’ Interviewees from around one
quarter of departments remarked that problems of this kind had led to unhappiness within the ranks of
their technicians (cf. HEaTED 2009: 48).
The other way for technical staff to deal with this problem is, of course, to seek promotion.
However, while - as already noted - some technicians have found their niche or comfort zone in middleranking roles, and so do not seek further advancement, many interviewees said that technicians sometimes
express frustration at their lack of opportunities for promotion. The principal cause of the problem is to be
found in the relatively small size and ‘flat’ organisational structure of most university science
departments, which typically leaves room for a small handful of senior laboratory manager roles and just
one technical services manager or laboratory superintendant position in any one department. The upshot,
as one technician put it, is that the career structure for technicians is ‘pretty truncated’. Moreover, the
paucity of senior roles, coupled with the low turnover rate amongst technical staff, implies that once they
are filled these more senior positions are likely to remain occupied for many years, severely
circumscribing the scope for other technicians to be promoted into them. As another technical services
manager succinctly put it, ‘We can’t just create another job so someone can get promoted.’ A large
number of interviewees used the same phrase to describe this problem, saying that people could enjoy
career advancement only by filling ‘dead men’s shoes.’ The limited opportunities for career progression
that are open to technicians have long been lamented (The Royal Society 1998: 7, 10; Evidence Ltd 2004:
4-5, 19).
If the scope for promotion within one’s department is limited, then technicians might be expected
to look outside their department in order to advance their career. Inter-departmental moves of the requisite
kind certainly do happen, but they do not appear to be especially common. Both technical services
40
managers and academics often described technicians as being ‘rather parochial’, in the sense of being
reluctant to move to a new laboratory within their current department, let alone to a different department,
in order to further their career. Moreover, as noted in Section 6.1 above, their ability to make such moves
may be hindered by their having acquired only the relatively narrow range of skills required for their
current role, rather than a broader range of skills that would prepare them more adequately for a wider
range of positions. As one technical services manager from a physics department put it, if technicians do
not continue to receive general training, then ‘people who stay in one department might not be
employable elsewhere.’ Here we return to points mentioned earlier, namely that – according to several
interviewees – departments need to be more willing to offer, and technicians themselves need to be more
willing to avail themselves of, opportunities for training in a broader range of skills than is required for
their current role. One vehicle for encouraging this might be some kind of technician registration scheme,
to which we now turn.
6.3 TECHNICIAN REGISTRATION
Registration is a form of occupational regulation. It exists when an agency registers the names, addresses
and other relevant details of some or all of the individuals who work in a particular occupation. A certain
level of skill and/or possession of particular qualifications may be required for an individual to be able to
join a register. There may also be requirements for ongoing training and continuing personal
development. Registration may be voluntary or mandatory. Especially in cases where possession of
certain competences or qualifications is a prerequisite for registration, individuals who join a register may
also have the right to use a title of some kind. In order to retain the designation, individuals must pay the
fees required for continued membership of the relevant governing body (Sandford Smith, Lewis, and
Gospel 2011).
The recently-founded Technician Council is considering the possibility of establishing a
voluntary registration scheme for technicians in engineering, science, ICT and health care (DBIS 2009b:
18, 2010). Under the auspices of the Council, the relevant professional bodies - such as the Science
Council and the Engineering Council – are seeking to establish the standards by reference to which
people’s eligibility for registration might be judged, along with any requirements for ongoing training and
professional development. If the scheme is indeed implemented, people who have the requisite skills,
qualifications, and experience, and who are willing to pay the relevant fee, will be able to use a title after
their name (perhaps something like, ‘Registered Technician’). The immediate objective of the scheme
would be to provide a clear and credible signal of the skills possessed by (registered) technicians,
increasing their appeal to a broader range of employers and thereby enhancing their wages and career
prospects.29 Ultimately, the aim would be to improve the status and esteem in which technicians are held,
thereby persuading greater numbers of talented young people to pursue a career as a technician than do so
at present.
Of course, it will be financially viable for professional bodies to administer a registration scheme
only if sufficient numbers of technicians are willing to register. Technicians will be eager to do so only if
the prospects of using the achievement of registered status either as a vehicle for achieving promotion at
their current employer, or as a passport for securing a move to a better job elsewhere, are good enough to
29
There is some evidence that licensure – a stronger form of occupational licensing than registration or certification, whereby only individuals
who are registered and certificated can practice a particular trade – does indeed increase the wages of the relevant workers. Similar, though
smaller, effects would be expected in the case of registration and certification (Humphris et al. 2010).
41
persuade them that it is worthwhile paying the requisite fees. This will only be the case if registration
standards reflect the needs of employers, so that registered technicians offer them the kinds of skills they
need. What that means is that professional bodies, as the representatives of those employers who use
technicians, will have an incentive to stay attuned to employers’ requirements as the latter change over
time, for the simple reason that if they do not do so the appeal of their registration schemes, and therefore
their fee income, will decline.
Both academics and technicians displayed cautious support for a registration scheme along the
lines noted above. Some of the most commonly made points were as follows. First, a number of
interviewees pointed out that schemes akin to that being developed by the Technician Council already
exist. For instance, both the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers already offer technician grades of membership. However, in the experience of the
interviewees, few technicians have availed themselves of such opportunities. If the proposed technician
registration scheme is to be successful, therefore, interviewees were adamant that it must yield clear and
tangible benefits in the form of better wages and career prospects. In the words of one technician, ‘I
personally would not join something like this until I had seen the benefits’, and, as an academic noted, ‘I
suspect most [technicians] would join only if it would help career progression’. Higher wages and better
career prospects are, of course, precisely the objectives that such a scheme would be intended to promote
and, as noted earlier, there is a clear sense in which achieving those objectives – and thereby ensuring that
the benefits of registration are sufficient to persuade technicians to sign up - is the key challenge that must
be met in designing the proposed scheme.
Second, interviewees noted that, given the range of qualifications that technicians possess when
they first join the sector – with some having no qualifications beyond GCSEs, some arriving with
vocational qualifications, and others having degrees - it is important that there be a number of a different
routes through which people can access the scheme, so it is viewed as relevant by people with different
initial levels of qualification. Given that not all technicians want to ascend to the highest ranks, there
should also be various levels within the registration scheme at which technicians can settle, whilst still
gaining credit and recognition for what they have achieved up to that point.
Third, interviewees indicated that the scheme would be most likely to appeal to younger
technicians who as one interviewee put it - ‘still have a career to forge’, rather than older technicians who
have found their niche and are no longer seeking career advancement. Interviewees argued that the
requirements for achieving registered technician status might constitute a useful focus for young
technicians’ appraisals, providing them with a goal that could both inform their efforts to develop their
career, and indeed to broaden their notion of a ‘career’ so that it encompasses not just their current
department or even university but other universities and, indeed, employers outside of the university
sector. In this way, it would be possible, as one department services manager put it, to ‘sit down with a
young technician and say, “Aim at this” [i.e. registered status] without being too prescriptive [about
where precisely the technician would end up] ... It would help to provide a career structure independent of
the university structure, in whatever institutions.’ Thus, registration might also provide a way of
addressing one of the common shortcomings of the ongoing training provided for technicians, namely that
while research technicians may become expert in the specific set of techniques required to support the
work of the group or laboratory to which they are attached at one particular moment in time, they may
lack opportunities to acquire a more rounded technical education, especially if the academic leading their
group is reluctant to allow them time away from the laboratory bench to attend training courses.
Registration is of course likely to require that technicians possess a broader range of skills and
42
experiences than will be acquired by working in just one laboratory or group, and might therefore provide
technicians with a way of getting themselves out of the grasp of what one interviewee referred to as ‘overpossessive academics’ and thereby securing extra time away from the laboratory for training.
The issues surrounding registration are closely bound up with the question of career paths for
technicians. It was argued above that the small number of senior technician posts in most departments
leaves little scope for advancement for technicians in one department. If technicians are to have a wider
range of career routes to more senior positions, they may have to be more willing to move to different
departments, different universities, and different sectors than many have been thus far. One technical
services manager expressed this point nicely when, in commenting on the limited scope for career
progression within universities, she observed that technical support in universities ‘is no longer a career
for life – it’s a stepping stone to another career [outside the university sector]’. Making such moves will
be easier if technicians have a more rounded or general technical education, as evidenced by their being
registered. In effect, some interviewees – academics from chemistry and the biological sciences in
particular - mentioned something very like this possibility, arguing that departments should try to ‘give
technicians as broad an experience as possible so they acquire transferable skills’ and in that way ‘keep
open their possibilities’ for career advancement both within and outside their current department and
university. In that way, gaining registered status might be a way for younger technicians in particular to
forge more satisfying careers, not only within but also ultimately outside the higher education sector.
However, this potential solution to the problems of technician careers may pose other problems.
Employers will only finance training if the increase in the value of what better-trained workers produce is
greater than the increase in those workers' wages over that same period. That condition is more likely to
be satisfied if the increase in the workers' skills is not readily apparent to other employers. The reason is
that if the increase in the workers' skills is readily apparent, then other employers will be more willing to
try to entice those workers away from the employer that trained them by offering them higher wages,
forcing the employer who trained the workers either to raise their wages to retain them or to reconcile
itself to losing them. Both of those alternatives will reduce the return the employer gets on its investment
in training and, therefore, will weaken its incentive to pay for training. Because registration promises to
increase the transparency of workers' skills - and also, in all probability, their generality and therefore
their appeal to other employers - it seems likely to cause employers to become less willing to pay for
training. Trainees will have to pay more for the training they receive, therefore, bringing us back to the
issue of the importance of ensuring that the benefits of registration really are sufficient to persuade
technicians to sign up to the scheme (Stevens 1999).
Finally, registration was welcomed by many interviewees as a means of enhancing the status and
esteem in which university technicians are held. While many academics understand and appreciate the
important contribution that technicians make to research and teaching within their department, and while
many departments have over the past few years taken steps to improve the standing of technicians – such
as including technicians on key departmental committees, giving them a higher profile in departmental
newsletters and other publications, and making awards for teaching technicians whose contributions are
highly rated by students – it remains the case that technicians often feel underappreciated, especially by
those outside of their department. Perhaps because their main role is to support and facilitate the work of
another, supposedly more eminent occupation that is widely thought to exercise authority over them, their
contribution to research tends to remain invisible to those who are not intimately involved in science and
engineering, with the result that their social standing is not commensurate with their true significance of
their work (Shapin 1989; Barkley and Bechky 1994: 91). In particular, some interviewees reported that
43
senior academics and administrators from their university sometimes betray a misunderstanding of the
role played by technical staff by making comments to the effect that technicians do no more than set up
equipment that is used by the academics, making no significant contribution to research in particular, and
that therefore they need little training. As one technician put it, ‘People don’t know what we do.’ Worse
still, according to some interviewees, this failure to understand and appreciate what technicians do
sometimes leads to a neglect of technical support by universities when strategic plans are being devised.
To quote the phrases used by a number of technical services managers, technicians are ‘a forgotten
workforce’ who are all-too-often ‘taken for granted’ and treated ‘as a bit of an afterthought’. These
interviewees felt that a registration scheme might be a way of ‘improving our profile’, that is of
cultivating an image or a sense of identity that makes clear to people outside of science and engineering
departments that technicians make a genuinely important contribution to research and that they need to be
highly skilled in order to be able to do so (cf. Keefe and Potosky 1997: 77-81).
At root, the concern being expressed here reflects the fact that technical work of the kind carried
out in university science and engineering departments stands at the interface of manual and mental labour,
involving as it does the production of cognitive (symbolic) representations of material objects and
processes. The danger to which the multi-dimensional nature of technical work gives rise is that, if its
more cerebral dimension is ignored, as sometimes appears to be the case in universities, then it will end
up associated only with physical effort, and will therefore be accorded low status (Shapin 1989; Barley
and Bechky 1994: 116; Whalley and Barley 1997).30 By helping to draw attention to the fact that
technicians are often highly skilled workers, registration promises to help overcome some of the
misconceptions about the nature both of technical work and also of the people who carry it out, thereby
helping to raise the status and esteem in which both are held.
30
Status differentials were also sometimes apparent in the relationship between technicians and technical officers, with some interviewees
cautioning against even casually referring to technical officers as ‘technicians’ because of the offence this would cause the (usually, more
academically qualified) technical officers.
44
7. CONCLUSIONS
We return finally to the questions posed at the outset of this report. There are a variety of different kinds
of laboratory and engineering workshop technicians in our universities: some, especially in post-1992
universities, focus on supporting teaching; others support research, whether it be through working in
laboratories, operating various analytical facilities, or designing and building experimental equipment and
apparatus; a third group help to sustain the general infrastructure that underpins teaching and research. In
carrying out their duties, these technicians play an extremely important role in the life of their
departments, with many making an indispensable contribution to the research projects they support in
particular.
The provision of technical support is becoming increasingly centralised, as departments strive to
exploit the benefits of economies of scale and reduce costs. This is especially true when it comes to very
generic aspects of technical support, such as stores, glassware, sterilisation, and the like. There are,
however, increasing calls for the centralisation of what are arguably more specialised forms of support,
perhaps most notably that provided by mechanical workshops. Here, the case for centralisation seems less
clear cut, with the benefits of cost savings potentially being offset by the difficulty of managing shared
workshops in ways that ensure the continued provision of high quality technical support. However, given
that university managers sometimes seem not to appreciate the vital contribution that workshop
technicians make to research, it is important to highlight the scope for centralisation to generate problems,
lest its advocates proceed in ignorance of the potential pitfalls.
Naturally, the precise skills of the technical workforce vary according to particular roles under
consideration. To the extent that it is possible to generalise, the current situation is as follows: mechanical
and electronics workshop technicians tend to have vocational qualification such as HNCs and HNDs;
most, though not all, general support technicians have vocational qualifications; research laboratory and
analytical services technicians tend to have either vocational qualifications such as HNCs or – especially
in the case of the younger occupants of these roles - undergraduate degrees; those teaching technicians
whose formal duties are confined to preparing materials and equipment for teaching that is actually
carried out by academics and PhD student demonstrators mostly have PhDs, while those whose formal
duties extend to the actual teaching are more likely to have a BSc; finally, technical or experimental
officers usually have advanced degrees, mostly PhDs. For the most part, this qualifications profile is
thought to be a decent match to departments’ needs. There are, however, signs that changes in the kind of
research that is being done, and in the technology that is used to carry it out, are leading to changes in the
skills that departments would like their technicians to have, as exemplified by the increasing demand for
mechatronic skills (especially in the case of physics and engineering technicians) and for analytical and
data-handling skills (in the case of chemistry and biological sciences, in particular).
The age profile of the technicians in chemistry, engineering and physics departments in the
sample is giving rise to an emergent succession planning problem, with around half of the technicians in
those departments due to retire within the next 15 years. The issue of succession planning is less pressing
in the case of the biological sciences, where the average age of technicians is only in the low 40s. the
departments’ approach to succession planning varies primarily with the availability of skilled labour on
the external labour market: where it is easy to hire suitably skilled workers, as is the case for departments
of chemistry and biological science, departments rely primarily on recruitment as the primary succession
planning tool; where skilled workers are in short supply, as is true of the case of the mechanical and
electronics workshop technicians on which departments of engineering and physics in particular rely, then
45
many departments have turned – or are seriously considering turning – to apprenticeship training as a
means of succession planning. Recruitment, in the case of biological sciences and chemistry departments,
and apprenticeship training, in the case of physics and engineering departments, is also viewed as a means
of updating the skills of the technician workforce so that they are more in tune with the current
requirements of research support in particular. At present, there is a need for better dissemination of
information about apprenticeships to departments, and there may also be more scope than is currently
being exploited for departments in different universities to work together on their apprenticeship
programmes, possibly via some kind of group training arrangement, so that they have the critical mass
required to persuade local further education colleges to respond to their needs. At present, there must be
doubts about the sustainability of both strategies: the current financial climate may militate against the
continued use of apprenticeships if universities prioritise short-term financial savings over long-term
technical support; while the reliance on graduates may ultimately prove unsustainable if the increase in
student fees leads to fewer people attending university, thereby reducing the supply of graduates.
Ongoing training for technicians still tends to be provided in a rather piecemeal fashion that often
appears to be related more to the emergent requirements of teaching and research than to the long-term
career development needs of individual technicians. One catalyst for remedying the lack of structured
skill development of the kind that might help technicians to forge satisfying careers is the proposed
technician registration scheme, satisfying the requirements which might help to provide both a focus and
a catalyst for ongoing technician training. The ‘flat’ organisational structure of universities allows room
for only a small number of senior technician positions, relative to the size of the technician workforce as a
whole, and therefore seems likely to place an insuperable barrier to career advancement for more than a
small number of technicians within any one department or university. A well-designed registration
scheme would provide a means for technicians to signal their ability and skills to employers, with the
achievement of registered status acting as a passport that might help technicians to secure a move to a
better job at another employer, thereby helping them to forge a more satisfying career.
46
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Settings. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Shapin, S. (1989). ‘The Invisible Technician.’ American Scientist, 77: 554-63.
Stevens, M. (1999). ‘Human Capital Theory and UK Vocational Training Policy.’ Oxford Review of
Economic Policy, 15: 16-32.
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THES (2008). ‘Labs at Risk from Loss of Expertise.’ Times Higher Education Supplement, 4th January.
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16th April.
Toner, P., T. Turpin, R. Woolley, and C. Lloyd (2010). ‘The Role and Contribution of Tradespeople and
Technicians in Australian Research & Development - An Initial Study.’ University of Western
Sydney: Centre for Industry and Innovation Studies.
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Whalley, P. and S. Barley (1997). ‘Technical Work in the Division of Labour: Stalking the Wily
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US Settings. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
48
APPENDIX 1: SUMMARY OF FINDINGS IN THE CASE OF BIOSCIENCE DEPARTMENTS
1. DESCRIPTION OF THE CASES
The research project involved case studies of 13 Departments, Schools, and Faculties of biological
science drawn from 9 different universities (6 pre-1992, 3 post-1992). The 9 pre-1992 cases were drawn
from 6 different universities and encompassed a range of different types of department, including: very
large multi-department faculties covering a range of sub-disciplines within biological science, broadly
understood; large unified departments of biological science, again covering a range of sub-disciplines;
smaller, relatively autonomous departments associated with a particular sub-discipline; and, in one case, a
single department drawn from within a larger, multi-department faculty of biological science. The 4 post1992 departments were all situated within larger Faculties, encompassing other disciplines related to
biological science (e.g. health sciences, forensic science). The range of sub-disciplines covered by the
cases includes anatomy, biochemistry, cell biology, pharmacy, plant science, and zoology. 28 interviews
were carried out, involving 11 academics and 18 technicians/technical services managers. A summary of
the key attributes of the departments in the sample can be found in Table A1:
Table A1: Summary of the attributes of the sample of biological science departments
Academics Postdocs Undergraduates PhD
Technicians Technical/Experimental
Officers
Mean
52
67
552
92
37
3
Maximum 221
268
1888
377
174
17
Minimum 16
2
116
4
9
0
The ratio of academics to technicians and technical officers varies from a low of 0.81 academics per
technician to a high of 2.2 academics per technician over the 9 pre-1992 departments in the sample, and
from a low of 1.1 to a high of 2.3 in the case of the post-1992 universities. If departments are weighted
according to their size, as indicated by the number of academics they employ, then average ratios are 1.3
and 1.9 academics per technician in the pre- and post-1992 departments respectively.
Almost every department had experienced a considerable decline in the number of technicians
over the past 10-15 years, with the technical workforce declining by 50% or even 70% in some cases.
While interviewees from 2 departments argued that they had previously been overstaffed, and that the
reduction in technician numbers had posed no problems, representatives of other departments said that the
changes had had a detrimental impact, either on the volume of practical work undertaken by students (4
cases), or on the ability of the department to deal with the absence of staff due to illness or off-the-job
training (2 cases). As one interviewee said, ‘We could do with 20% more technicians to give us breathing
space.’ Representatives from three of the post-1992 universities in particular indicated that the level of
technical support they received was insufficient to enable them to meet the increasingly demanding
targets they are being set for research and external consultancy work they are being set by their
universities as well as supporting the teaching required for their burgeoning undergraduate and MSc
programmes.
49
2. THE NATURE AND ORGANISATION OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT
The technical workforce employed in the pre-1992 departments of biological science visited for this study
is characterised by a division of labour between a number of different technician roles. While the exact
name given to each role, and the precise allocation of tasks between them, sometimes varies between
departments, and while some departments do not contain examples of every role, the following list
provides a reasonably accurate, broad-brush account of the different types of technician: infrastructure
technicians; research laboratory technicians; facilities technicians; experimental officers; mechanical and
electronics workshop technicians; and teaching technicians. We shall briefly consider each group in turn.
Infrastructure technicians – sometimes also called ‘stores’ or ‘floor technicians’ - support
teaching and research by carrying out basic duties such as warehousing, waste disposal, washing
glassware, decontamination, sterilisation, autoclaving, potting, and dealing with gas and liquid nitrogen
cylinders. In some, larger departments they may also assist in the preparation of media and
microbiological plates. A second category of technician, namely research technicians, supports the
activities of the scientists in the specific laboratories to which they have been allocated. That support
takes a number of different forms, ranging from generic laboratory support – including media preparation,
decontamination, sterilisation/autoclaving, maintaining and repairing equipment, cell and tissue culture,
and preparing microbiological plates – to carrying out more advanced experimental procedures and
compiling and analysing the data that is generated by those experiments. Research laboratory technicians
will also often instruct PhD and project students in how to perform experimental techniques and in the use
of scientific instruments and equipment. More senior research and infrastructure technicians often take on
managerial responsibility for one or more laboratories. Their duties will include budgeting, keeping basic
accounts, sourcing and ordering supplies, maintaining equipment, ensuring compliance with health and
safety regulations, carrying out risk assessments, helping with the induction of new PhD and postdoctoral
researchers into their laboratory, and managing more junior technicians. In virtue of their long tenure and
substantial experience, senior laboratory managers in particular are an important part of the ‘institutional
memory’ in departments and, by assisting with the handover from one postdoctoral researcher to another,
they provide an important source of continuity in laboratories and research groups.
Facilities technicians also primarily support research. Some specialise in particular instruments
and experimental techniques/processes - such as DNA sequencing, electron and confocal microscopy,
flow cytometry genomics, histology, HPLC, mass spectrometry, microarray, NMR, and proteomics –
while others are expert in the kind of work that is done in animal houses and greenhouses (e.g. in vivo,
horticulture). In three of the departments considered here, all of which are located in pre-1992
universities, the facilities technicians are supplemented by experimental officers. On average, there are 12
experimental officers in each of those three departments. Experimental officers, or scientific officers as
they are also sometimes known, stand part way between academics and technicians in the academic
hierarchy. They resemble technicians because they provide a service to researchers and students, based on
their knowledge of and expertise in the use of particular instruments and/or experimental techniques (of
the kind listed above). But in other respects they are more like academics. As we shall discuss in more
detail below, they are more likely to provide a significant intellectual contribution to research projects that
will be recognised by their being named as authors on scientific papers. Relatedly, they are more likely
than other kinds of technician to possess academic – as distinct from vocational – qualifications, in
particular higher degrees. The ability to provide high-quality technical support for research projects
demands a sound knowledge of underlying biological principles, of a kind usually acquired through an
50
undergraduate degree, so that experimental officers in the biological sciences usually possess at least an
undergraduate degree, with a majority of the experimental officers employed by the departments
considered here also having a PhD (obtained either prior to them taking up their current position or whilst
they were in post in virtue of their contribution to the research of the groups they support). In this respect
also they resemble academics. Finally, in some of the departments visited here, experimental officers are
like academics in being expected to apply for their own grants. In accordance with their position on the
academic-technician boundary, experimental officers are usually situated on the academic-related
segments of university pay scales.
A number of interviewees reported that research and facilities technicians and, in particular,
experimental officers often make an intellectually significant contribution to the research undertaken in
their departments. They often have many years of experience in using instruments and experimental
techniques for the analysis of the specific subject-matter under investigation in their research group or
department. Their expertise and know-how enables them to have a significant input into research projects,
by advising researchers on how to prepare their samples, on how to use the relevant instruments or
technique in order to gain the data they need, and also on how to analyse and interpret those data. In the
words of one experimental officer who specialises in NMR:
Central to making the facility effective and productive is determining the core question
the researcher is trying to answer and matching that to solutions that are achievable.
Those discussions then [also] help to direct and inform future developments ... in both
the technology to acquire and the applications to develop.’
In this way, technicians and, in particular, experimental officers provide a vital input into the generation
of scientific knowledge. Five departments reported that technicians’ and experimental officers’
contributions to research were formally acknowledged through their appearing as named authors on
scientific papers.31
Traditionally, all of the 9 pre-1992 departments of biological science considered here had its own
mechanical and electronics workshop technicians, whose task it would be to design, build, modify and
repair the experimental rigs, instruments, and other forms of apparatus used by researchers. The kind of
work undertaken by such technicians includes the fabrication of plant and microbiological LED arrays,
the construction of electroporator control units and of mounts for confocal microscopes, and the
development of bespoke electro-mechanical devices that facilitate the measurement of physiological
phenomena, as well as more routine maintenance work. Almost invariably, however, these workshop
facilities are being either severely reduced in scale or shut down entirely. Four of the 9 pre-1992
departments that once had their own workshops – including one very large integrated department of
biological science - have closed them, relying on outsourcing and/or the facilities available elsewhere in
31
Similar remarks were occasionally made about mechanical and electronics workshop technicians. Interviewees from two of the biological
sciences departments that had retained a significant number of workshop technicians described them as sometimes having a major input into the
technical aspects of research projects. One academic, whose research relies heavily on the ability of workshop technicians to build novel
instruments for the measurement of the atomic properties of certain kinds of molecule, expressed this point as follows: ‘You’re not trying to build
a known device. You’re trying to make this measurement and the question is, can you build an instrument that works? [The answer emerges
through] professional collaboration between technicians and academics ... Such devices, requiring electronics skills and fine mechanics, are not
commercially available and we could not do our research without them.’ As was more often the case in physics and engineering departments, so
in this instance do we also have a situation in which technicians play an indispensable role in solving the technical problems that arise in the
course of scientific research. In this case, it should also be noted, the technicians were co-authors on the relevant academic papers.
51
the university to satisfy their need for mechanical and electronics support. The remaining 5 departments
have all seen considerable reductions in workshop technician numbers, up to the point at which 2
departments now have just one workshop technician. These changes have occurred partly because of a
decline in the volume of research support that the workshops were being asked to carry out, which in turn
reflected technological changes which made it easier and more economical to send equipment out for
repair rather than fix it in-house, and partly because of a desire on the part of universities to exploit the
benefits of economies of scale and thereby reduce costs by centralising workshop facilities.
The final role is that of the teaching technician. In most pre-1992 departments, such technicians’
formal duties are limited to setting out the equipment and materials required for undergraduate laboratory
classes. The teaching itself – the tuition in experimental techniques and the instruction in the use of
scientific instruments – is usually provided by PhD student demonstrators. This does not, however, mean
that technicians working in pre-1992 are never involved in teaching students. Two kinds of exception can
be identified, one formal, one informal. So far as the ‘formal’ exception is concerned, in one pre-1992
departments of biological science, research technicians from particular laboratories will teach
undergraduates on those occasions when practical classes focus on the experimental techniques
commonly used by those technicians. Moreover, research and facilities technicians often contribute
informally to teaching, for example by advising undergraduate project students on how to use particular
pieces of equipment and carry out experimental procedures.
In practice, of course, the division of labour between the different categories of technicians is not
always as sharp as the account presented above might suggest. Smaller departments in particular may not
be able to support as many specialised technicians as their larger counterparts, and – as a result – often
make more use of mixed roles. For example, it may be necessary for research support technicians to carry
out some of the tasks that in larger departments are undertaken by specialist infrastructure technicians
(e.g. autoclaving, media preparation). In a similar vein, as previewed in the previous paragraph, while the
majority of a research technician’s time may be devoted to supporting the activities of scientists in his/her
laboratory, in smaller departments a fraction of his/her time may formally be allocated to providing
teaching support during periods when undergraduate laboratory classes focus on the area of biological
science that is the speciality of that technician’s research group.
In some of the larger departments, however, the division of labour between different kinds of
technician is quite pronounced, and is becoming sharper still as departments attempt to exploit the
benefits of specialisation and economies of scale. In the case of a large integrated faculty of biological
science, for example, there has been a concerted effort to maximise the amount of time that research
technicians spend in the laboratory, providing the more specialised forms of technical support that are
their forte, rather than on more generic activities such as glassware, stores, autoclaving, etc.. This has led
to a very clear differentiation of tasks between research technicians, on the one hand, and a central,
faculty-based pool of infrastructure technicians, on the other. A similar approach has been mooted in
another multi-department faculty of biological science, whose administrators are considering moving
towards the use of a central, faculty-level pool of specialised infrastructure technicians for those aspects
of support that are common to a number of departments (e.g. basic teaching support, cleaning glassware,
sterilisation), whilst leaving more specialised research technicians within their ‘home’ department. The
aim of the proposed reform is of course to increase flexibility, exploit economies of scale, and therefore to
increase efficiency.
The 4 post-1992 departments of biological science visited for this study have ostensibly moved
towards a more centralised approach to technical support, with a view to increasing the flexibility and
52
efficiency with which the technician workforce is used. In all 4 cases, the department is situated within a
larger, multi-department Faculty and, formally, the locus of control for the technicians in each case lies at
the Faculty rather than the department level. However, in 3 of the departments the technicians are divided
into teams that support particular subject groups within their Faculty. Given that those subject groups are
usually associated with particular departments, then a good deal of the day-to-day management of the
technicians still takes place at the department level. In practice, therefore, the managerial systems in these
past-1992 universities are perhaps not quite as centralised as they might appear at first glance.
The majority of the technicians’ time in the post-1992 departments is spent supporting teaching.
More specifically, two departments suggested that around 80% of their technicians’ time is spent
supporting teaching, with 20% being devoted to research and consultancy activities. Indeed, only one of
the 4 departments visited for this study employed any specialist research technicians, with the people in
question having been hired on fixed-term contracts to work on externally funded research projects. Within
their broad pool of teaching technicians, all 4 post-1992 departments had a small number of technicians
who specialise in the use of particular experimental techniques, procedures and instruments (e.g. HPLC,
cell culture, microbiology, NMR, spectroscopy), although – as already noted – such technicians will
typically spend considerably more time supporting teaching, and less time on research support, than their
counterparts in pre-1992 universities. In all 4 post-1992 departments, the teaching technicians do not
simply prepare the materials, apparatus and equipment used in practical classes. They also teach the
students, by demonstrating how to carry out experimental procedures and how to use scientific
instruments and other pieces of apparatus. More experienced technicians may also help to design some of
the experiments.
3. TECHNICIAN WORKFORCE:
QUALIFICATIONS
ORIGINS,
AGE,
TENURE,
CONTRACT
TYPE
AND
3.1 Origins
Interviewees were asked to estimate the shares of their department’s current technical workforce who
were trained in-house via their own apprenticeship or traineeship scheme and recruited from various
external sources. Their responses revealed that the predominant source of technicians in biological
science departments was external recruitment: all 10 of departments that returned usable data indicated
that at least 70% or more of their technicians were recruited externally. The 6 pre-1992 departments who
provided data variously estimated that between 10% and 30% of their technicians had come to the
department straight from school and had been trained internally, being rotated around a number of
teaching and research laboratories and taking vocational qualifications like ONCs, HNCs and City and
Guilds via day release at a local college.32 None of the 4 post-1992 universities had made any use of
apprenticeship training, hiring all their technicians from the external labour market.
32
Almost all such apprenticeship schemes closed down some 10-20 years ago (though, as we shall see below, one has recently been revived).
Perhaps most notably, the pressure on departments to reduce technician numbers over the past two decades militated against taking on
apprentices, as also – in some cases – did the propensity of trainees to leave once they had completed their apprenticeship. Another contributory
factor was the difficulty of finding appropriate college courses. Until around 10 years ago, one medium sized department of biological science
still used to send its trainee technicians to a local further education college for an HNC in applied biology. However, due to declining enrolments,
local colleges ceased to offer either that course or a BTEC in Applied Science, so that the department’s young technicians now have to receive all
of their training in-house.
53
So far as the source of the external recruits is concerned, while many technicians had previously
worked in industry, two other sources of external recruits also figured prominently: 20-30% of the
technicians in 3 departments had previously worked as technicians in other university departments; while
6 of the 10 departments indicated that a significant proportion (minimum 20%, on average around 30%)
of their technicians were recent graduates, having been hired after recently completing a BSc (sometimes
at the same universities, sometimes from other universities).
3.2 Age profile
The average age of the technicians in the bioscience departments visited for this study is around 41.
Roughly 43% of the technicians in those university departments are due to retire within the next 15 years.
3.3 Contract type
Around 80% of the technicians in the 11 departments for which data are available are on open-ended
contracts. Some of those ‘permanent’ positions will of course be partly financed via income obtained
through external research grants, a trend that some departments are attempting to encourage as they
attempt to reduce their reliance on diminishing HEFCE funding. That figure rises to around 85% if the 4
post-1992 departments are viewed in isolation, which is unsurprising given that they rely less on external
research funding than the older universities.
3.4 Qualifications
So far as the pre-1992 universities are concerned, research laboratory technicians tend to have either
vocational qualifications (such as HNCs, HTEC, and City and Guilds) or, especially in the case of young
technicians, undergraduate degrees. In around half of the pre-1992 biological science departments visited
for this study, some research technicians also possessed a PhD. The picture is similar in the case of
facilities technicians: older technicians, along with those working in animal or horticultural facilities,
typically possess a vocational qualification; younger technicians may have a BSc; while some of the
technicians who work on various kinds of instrument may have an MSc or PhD. As noted earlier,
experimental officers typically have PhDs. Unsurprisingly, mechanical and electronics workshop
technicians tend to be vocationally qualified. While some infrastructure technicians appear to have been
vocationally trained, possessing BTECs or HNCs, many have no formal qualifications beyond those
acquired at school. Finally, the greatest variety of qualifications in pre-1992 departments of biological
science is to be found in the case of teaching technicians. The most commonly held qualifications appear
to be vocational in nature (e.g. BTECs, HNCs). However, a substantial minority of teaching technicians
appears not to have received any qualifications beyond those acquired at school, while a still smaller
minority are qualified to degree level (or even – in one or two cases – possess higher degrees).
Matters are more straightforward in the post-1992 departments of biological science. All 4
departments had similar qualifications profiles, with a majority (65%+) of their technicians being
qualified at least to BSc level, and with many having higher degrees. Indeed, in two departments, nearly
half of the technicians had an MSc or PhD. A majority of interviewees felt that, although the technicians
employed in these departments do carry out at least some of the actual teaching involved in practical
classes, someone with a vocational qualification such as an HNC, along with substantial experience,
54
would be quite capable of doing the job well. In practice, however, for reasons that will be considered
below under the heading of ‘recruitment’, most of the technicians in these departments are qualified to at
least first degree level.
A majority of the pre-1992 departments indicated that an undergraduate degree – but not an MSc
or PhD - is now a prerequisite for someone wishing to fill a research technician position. Graduates are
more likely to have a sound grasp of the scientific principles underlying the research they are supporting,
interviewees averred, and are therefore less likely to make errors and more likely to be able to deal with
any problems that arise. Many interviewees emphasised that both the nature and also the pace of change
in biological science made it especially desirable to recruit graduates for research support roles. So far as
the nature of change is concerned, the point here is that the development of high throughput sampling and
other types of automated experimental procedure implies that the demand for research technicians who
can do no more than carry out experimental procedures is likely to decline.33 Conversely, the demand for
technicians who have the scientific understanding and analytical skills required to analyse the data
generated by those experiments is likely to increase. Given that the requisite data-handling and analytical
skills are most likely to be acquired in the course of a university education, rather than via vocational
training, it is unsurprising that universities are looking mainly to graduates to fill research technician
roles. The rapid pace of change in the kind of experimental procedures used in biological science is also
something that, according to interviewees, militates in favour of hiring research technicians who have a
(good) BSc. The reason is that, thanks both to their grasp of underlying scientific principles and also to
the general intellectual skills developed during the course of their degree, (good) graduates are thought to
be more able to familiarise themselves with new areas of research and to assimilate new techniques than
people with only vocational qualifications.34
The consensus appears to be that nothing more than a vocational qualification such as a BTEC or
ONC/HNC is required both for people providing infrastructure support and also - in those departments
where teaching technicians’ official duties were confined to preparing the equipment and materials for
student practical classes - teaching support. Indeed, some interviewees argued that that the duties carried
out by such technicians could quite adequately be carried out by people with no qualifications beyond
those acquired at school, so long as the people in question were careful, methodical, and conscientious.
In contrast, in those institutions where the teaching technicians were formally involved in demonstrating
how to carry out experimental procedures and use instruments, it was thought that the minimum
requirement for a teaching technician was either an HNC plus considerable experience or a BSc.
For the most part, interviewees indicated that the skills profile of their technical staff was a good
fit for their department’s needs. However, it is worth noting two caveats to this general view. First,
interviewees from 3 post-1992 departments suggested that because many of their technicians have an
MSc or PhD, they tend to be over-qualified for their role. Second, representatives of around half of the
pre-1992 departments visited indicated that each of their departments contained some older staff who,
partly because of the rapid pace of change in the technical requirements of biological research, and partly
because of their own reluctance or inability to acquire new skills, have skills that are increasingly
33
The prime example of the nature and pace of technical change in biological science is DNA sequencing: twenty years ago it could not be done;
between around 1992 and 2000 departments built up significant capacity in sequencing, relying heavily on manual techniques that required
considerable input from technicians; by around 2006, however, automation had advanced to the point where there was significantly less need for
technician support for sequencing.
34
This is not to say that it is impossible for someone who is vocationally qualified to display the requisite flexibility, but rather that – as the
interviewees saw things - people with degrees are better placed to do so. In practice, so far as new recruits are concerned, the point is moot,
simply because most applicants for research technician posts now have a degree.
55
peripheral to their department’s requirements. The existence of this problem was often said to be one of
the drawbacks of the low labour turnover (well under 10%) that was said to characterise most of the
biological science departments visited for this study. Several interviewees observed that, while longstanding staff often have substantial reserves of expertise and know-how, and provide an important source
of continuity in research groups and laboratories, their presence can be a mixed blessing. For if the
techniques and instruments in which those staff are expert are no longer central to the discipline, having
been marginalised by changes either in the kind of science that is being done or in the technology that is
used to do it, then low turnover may be problematic, as it can lead to there being technicians who – if they
are reluctant to retrain – are less and less useful to the department. The difficulty of finding useful work
for such technicians, and the strain that their presence places what is often an already over-stretched
capacity to provide technical support, is a source of frustration for technical service managers and
academics alike. Higher rates of turnover would help to prevent such situations from developing, with
new recruits usually having up-to-date skills and a greater willingness to learn. We shall return to this
issue in Section 6 below.
4. RECRUITMENT
All 13 bioscience departments reported that there was an abundant supply of skilled labour on the external
labour market. Advertisements for almost every kind of biological science technician currently elicit large
numbers of applicants. Many departments stated that they receive upwards of 40 applicants per post, with
2 reporting over 100 and one over 200 applications for technician jobs. Moreover, even relatively low
grade teaching support posts, for which the minimum requirements are an HNC or ONC with some
industrial experience, attract interest not only from very large numbers of graduates but also from people
with PhDs and postdoctoral experience.
Not all of these applicants are appointable. Some graduates may lack the practical skills required
for the job (e.g. they may not know how to carry out basic tasks, such as how to make up a molar
solution). Departments typically set practicals tests to weed out such people. Other applicants, especially
graduates and people with higher degrees, may fail to appreciate either that teaching technician posts
involve a considerable amount of repetitive, mundane work – for example, putting out many sets of the
same experimental apparatus for student practicals, and preparing buffers and enzyme solutions - or that
research technicians are typically supporting scientists and providing them with a service rather than
devising and prosecuting their own programme of research. Technical service managers involved in
recruitment are determined to identify and reject applicants who labour under such misapprehensions, for
two main reasons: first, because they want to avoid the discontent and disruption that might ensue when
such people’s expectations about their jobs are disappointed; and, second, because in the current financial
climate they are keen for HEFCE-funded positions in particular to remain filled for a substantial length of
time, lest the positions be frozen upon becoming vacant. In the words of one technical services manager,
‘A key question is, “Will he stay?”,’ the reason being that, if the person leaves, ‘finance may take the post
away’. However, even when unsuitable candidates like those just mentioned are ruled out, departments
are adamant that they are able to take their pick of large number of suitable candidates. As another
technical service manager concluded, ‘It’s never a struggle appointing.’35
35
The one possible exception to this finding concerns animal technicians, whom some departments find hard to attract.
56
While the labour market for technicians used to be local, with applicants for technician posts
mostly coming from the same area as the university that employs them, the past 5 years have seen the
market – especially for research technician posts - expand until it has become national or even
international in scope, with many departments also receiving numerous applications not only from all
over the UK but also from overseas nationals. There is no one profile for recruits. To the extent that it is
possible to generalise, recruits to research technician posts tend nowadays to be relatively young people
who have recently graduated from university. Teaching support roles are perhaps more commonly taken
by older individuals, some – especially in post-1992 universities - with degrees, others with vocational
qualifications, and some with no qualifications beyond those they acquired at school. Older people tend to
be preferred for teaching support roles because, especially if they have worked in industry, they are
thought to be more used to routine work of the kind often undertaken by technicians than younger recruits
and therefore more likely to be remain in post for a reasonable length of time, as well as being – in virtue
of their age - more mature, more reliable, and better at dealing with young students.
5. APPRENTICESHIPS
There is little interest in apprenticeships amongst the biological sciences departments visited for this
study, primarily because - as noted above - they are inundated with applications for technician positions
and therefore perceive little if any need to grow their own technicians in-house. Moreover, according to a
number of interviewees, the age profile of the technicians who work in biological science is such that
succession planning is not yet a major issue, so there is correspondingly less need for an apprenticeship
scheme.
Aside from these two main points, four other factors were adduced by interviewees as deterrents
to taking on apprentices. First, the reduction in the number of technicians employed by departments has
left them with insufficient spare capacity to countenance employing trainees who will not be fully
productive employees almost from the outset. In the words of one technical services manager, ‘We don’t
have sufficient skilled posts to be able to sacrifice one for an apprenticeship.’ A second, oft-remarked
impediment to participation in apprenticeships is the difficulty of finding a local college that is willing to
offer a suitable off-the-job course. As noted earlier, it was the lack of a college willing to offer a relevant
HNC that led one department to discontinue its apprenticeship scheme a few years ago. Third,
interviewees from two departments were sceptical about whether they would be able to attract good
applicants for trainee posts, because such people would most probably want to go to university rather than
become apprentices. Finally, 2 departments expressed concerns about the health and safety issues arising
from having people who are just 16-18 years of age in laboratories where carcinogenic and radioactive
substances are commonly used.
The only case of an apprenticeship scheme for laboratory technicians amongst the 13 departments
of biological science visited for this study is to be found in a medium sized department in a pre-1992
university. The department’s technicians have what by the standards of biological science departments is
a comparatively high average age (in the late 40s). In anticipation of forthcoming retirements, 2
apprentice teaching technicians have recently been recruited. The apprentices are being trained under the
auspices of the government’s Advanced Apprenticeship scheme, and are studying for a level 3 BTEC in
Applied Science (Laboratory and Industrial Science). The formal training contract with the Skills Funding
Agency is held by a local FE college, which provides both the off-the-job training for the BTEC and also
57
the assessment for the NVQ component of the apprenticeship framework. Despite formal responsibility
for organising the apprenticeship having been passed on to an external training provider, the department’s
technical service manager noted that there was a considerable administrative burden arising from the
scheme. In selecting the apprentices, the department was looking for young people with a minimum of 5
GCSE passes, including maths and science, who did not want to go to university and who are likely,
therefore, to remain in the department once their training is complete. In practice, the apprentices who
were taken on are aged 18 and 19, one having AS levels and the other A levels, though neither harbours
ambitions of going to university at this moment in time. While the apprentices have been given 3-year,
fixed term contracts of employment, the expectation is that they will be retained once they have
completed their training.
6. ONGOING TRAINING
Much of the training provided both for new recruits to technician posts, and also for more established
members of the technical staff, is uncertificated and takes place informally, on-the-job. Depending on
their level of experience, new recruits may either be sent to the teaching labs in order to acquire basic
laboratory skills or, in the case of graduate recruits, given a brief induction and then sent to the research
laboratory for which they have been recruited. Once there, they are typically receive on-the-job training in
the relevant experimental techniques, and in the use of the relevant instruments, either from an academic
or an experienced technician. Interviewees said that this reliance on informal, uncertificated training was
to some extent inevitable, because some of the techniques used in research laboratories are relatively new
and therefore have not been absorbed into standard training programmes. As one technician put it, ‘By
definition, because we do research the techniques are new and, therefore, aren’t certified.’ On occasions,
such training becomes more formal, as in one large department where there is an ongoing technical
seminar series covering both techniques and more general issues (e.g. career development). Departments
also often send their technical staff on training courses provided by their own university in the health and
safety procedures required for dealing with the carcinogens, biological agents, and radioactive materials
often used in biological science departments, as well as technical training in the use of HV trans
illuminators and laminar flow cabinets. University staff development units also provide technical staff
with various forms of training, to develop their personal, IT, and managerial skills.
Equipment manufacturers are a significant source of external training for established technicians.
The departments of biological science visited for this study have received vendor-supplied training in, for
example, DNA sequencing, confocal and electron microscopes, NMR spectroscopy and x-ray
crystallography. Typically, such training accompanies the purchase of new instruments or the
development of new software for the equipment in question. Occasionally, technicians are sent on formal
training courses offered by other universities (e.g. in NMR, bioinformatics). Interviewees from 2
departments said that they had sent some technicians on HEaTED training courses.
Few of the departments of biological science visited for this study appear to make much use of
certificated vocational training for their established technicians. While 4 departments would like to send
some of their infrastructure and teaching technicians for HNCs in Applied Biology, only one of them has
been able to find a local college willing to offer the course. Only two of the 13 departments have used
NVQs. In neither case has the experience been a happy one; the NVQs are thought to be overly
bureaucratic and to involve little actual training, and are therefore unlikely to be used in the future. Some
departments have sent their technicians to local colleges for formally certificated NEBOSH health and
58
safety training.36 Only one department reported having supported a technician to an undergraduate degree
whilst (s)he was in post. It is more common for departments to sponsor technicians for advanced degrees,
with 3 departments having sponsored some of their current technicians for MSc degrees and 5 having
done so for PhDs.
While interviewees indicated that the identification of the training needs of established technical
staff is gradually being formalised through the implementation of personal development reviews, it is still
often described as ad hoc, being driven more by the demands of current circumstances – for example,
upcoming research projects – rather than by a systematic appraisal of the long term needs of the
technicians themselves. Moreover, when training needs are identified, some interviewees highlighted
various impediments to their satisfaction. First, interviewees in one post-1992 and 3 pre-1992
departments noted that, because of limited spare technical capacity and the increasing pressure to carry
out research, some academics are reluctant to allow the technicians who support their groups to spend
time away from the laboratory, either for off-the-job training or to broaden their skills by spending time in
other laboratories. One consequence is that the technicians in question end up with a rather narrow range
of skills, whereas they would be better served in the long term by having a greater range of expertise. As
one academic said, departments should – but, all too often, do not – give technicians ‘as broad an
experience as they can so they can acquire [more] transferable skills’. The danger is that if technicians
specialise too much, ‘people who stay in one group for a long time might not be employable elsewhere.’
We shall return to this issue below, when we discuss the scope for technicians to forge a satisfying career
within university bioscience departments. Second, technical services managers in two universities
remarked that ‘funding is getting tight’ and that it would be harder to support requests for training than in
the past. Third, if finding the time and, perhaps increasingly, the money to provide training for established
technicians is problematic, then it also has to be said that on occasions it is hard to persuade some
technicians to avail themselves of opportunities to augment their skills. Interviewees from 7 pre-1992
departments remarked that some older technicians in particular may have found their niche in their
current role and be reluctant to acquire new skills, even though doing so may be required not to further
their chances of promotion to a higher grade role but simply to keep pace with the rapidly changing
requirements of their discipline. One technical services manager described the situation as follows:
‘People do get set in their ways; when they reach a certain age they [sometimes] become less willing and
less able to learn new skills ... [so] they struggle with the new technology.’ This reluctance to train can be
problematic for technical services managers and heads of department, who – as noted earlier - may be
confronted with technicians whose skills are increasingly out of date and irrelevant for the department’s
current needs, and for whom it is therefore increasingly difficult to find useful work. While the use of
early retirement and voluntary severance schemes has helped to alleviate problems of this kind, it has not
eliminated them completely and several departments continue to struggle with the challenge of finding
useful work for older technicians whose skills have become increasingly irrelevant to the current
requirements of their role.
36
An important exception to this general picture of relatively limited use of certificated vocational training concerns those departments of
biological science that use animals in their research. Home Office regulations require research establishments that use animals to have suitably
trained staff. Consequently, the animal technologists who work in departments that use animals will have received formally certificated
vocational training (e.g. offered by the Institute of Animal Technology).
59
7. BROADER HR ISSUES AND CAREER PROGRESSION
Interviewees at all but one department reported that the move to the common pay spine in 2005 had gone
smoothly and had not generated major discontent amongst technicians. Of greater concern at present, in at
least some departments, is the fact that many technical staff have reached the top of the segment of the
common spine associated with their current grade. This implies that the scope for them to receive
additional increases in pay beyond those agreed in national negotiations for academic staff is very limited.
Managers in three biological sciences departments in particular said that this had led to some unhappiness
within the ranks of their technicians.
One way for technical staff to deal with this problem is, of course, to seek promotion. However,
while - as already noted - some technicians have found their niche or comfort zone in middle-ranking
roles, and as a result do not seek further advancement, many interviewees said that other technicians had
expressed frustration at the lack of opportunities for promotion. The main cause of the problem lies in the
relatively small size and ‘flat’ organisational structure characteristic of university science departments,
which means that there are typically only a very small number of senior laboratory and technical services
manager positions in any one department. The low turnover rate amongst technical staff implies that, once
filled, such roles are likely to remain occupied for many years, eliminating the scope for other technicians
to be promoted into them. As one technician said, using a phrase that was often used to describe the
limited opportunities for career advancement available to technicians, ‘It’s dead man’s shoes.’ A partial
substitute, adopted in some departments, is for technicians to develop their existing role by assuming
additional responsibilities until the role warrants re-grading. However, such an approach cannot come
close to solving the problem of limited promotion opportunities, not least because the scope for using it is
of course limited by the total set of tasks that the department needs to have carried out.
If the scope for promotion within one’s department is limited, then one might have expected
technicians to look outside their department when seeking to advance their career. While interdepartmental moves of this kind do happen, they are not especially common, reflecting what a number of
interviewees described as the ‘rather parochial’ attitude of many technicians. Many older technicians in
particular are said to be reluctant to move to a new laboratory within the current department, let alone to a
different department. Moreover, according to a number of interviewees, to the extent that biological
science technicians are willing to move between laboratories and departments, their efforts to do so may
be hampered by their having acquired only the narrow range of skills required for their current role. Here
we return to points mentioned earlier, namely that – according to several interviewees –
departments/academics need to be more willing to offer, and technicians themselves need to be more
willing to exploit, opportunities for training in a broader set of skills than is required for their current role.
Doing so will enable technicians not only to move more freely to seek promotion but will also – as one
interviewee put it – furnish them with an ‘exit strategy’ in case changes in science and technology
eliminate the need for their current post.
60
APPENDIX 2: SUMMARY OF FINDINGS IN THE CASE OF CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENTS
1. DESCRIPTION OF THE CASES
The research project involved case studies of Departments and Schools of Chemistry in 11 universities,
10 of them of the pre-1992 variety and one being a post-1992 university. 17 interviews were carried out,
involving 8 academics and 14 technicians/technical services managers. The key attributes of the
departments in the sample are summarised in Table A2:
Table A2: Summary of the attributes of the sample of chemistry departments
Academic Postdoc Undergraduate PhD
Technician Technical/Experimental
s
s
s
s
Officers
Mean
42
60
470
145
20
5
Maximu
60
180
706
215
32
16
m
Minimum 20
14
304
15
8
0
The ratio of academics to technicians and technical officers ranges from a low of 1.1 academics per
technician to a high of 2.9 academics per technician. Weighting departments according to their size, as
measured by how many academics they contain, then the average ratio is about 1.8 academics per
technician.37
Almost all of the departments said that there had been significant reductions in the number of
technical staff over the past 15 years. Technician numbers have declined, relative to the number of
academics and students requiring support, to such an extent in 5 departments that, while they can just
about meet all the demands on their time when their full complement of technicians is present, they
cannot do so when technical staff are absent, either due to illness or because they are away on a training
course. In the words one technical services manager, ‘When everyone’s here, we’re just about able to
cope. During periods of illness, or if two people are on leave, we struggle.’ What this means in practice is
that, for example, academics or PhD students or research technicians have to be taken away from their
main jobs in order to assist in undergraduate laboratory classes, and researchers have to wait longer for
their technical needs to be met than was the case in the past.
2. THE NATURE AND ORGANISATION OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT
There is considerable similarity in the organisation of technical support across the 10 pre-1992 chemistry
departments visited for this project. Typically, and with exceptions noted below, the technical workforce
is divided into the following broad categories of worker:
•
•
•
•
•
37
Research technicians
Health and safety officers
Scientific glass blower
Analytical facilities technicians
Mechanical and electronics workshop technicians
An earlier study of the finances of 14 chemistry departments circa 2007-08 also reported a ratio of one permanent technician post for every 1.8
permanent academic posts (IoP and RSC 2010: 12-13).
61
•
•
Stores technicians
Teaching technicians
Research laboratory technicians are typically involved in providing basic support for their research
laboratory, including purifying and distilling solvents, preparing chemicals, cryogen refills, dealing with
gas cylinders, making up thin liquid chromatography plates, ordering supplies, and carrying out minor
repairs to equipment. They will help to set up equipment for researchers and will provide assistance in
conducting experiments, as well as preparing and collating results for analysis. They may also carry out
various forms of chemical analysis using spectrophotometers, mass spectrometers, NMR spectroscopy
and gas chromatography, as well as liaising with other technical staff in the department – in analytical
services, for example, and in the workshops – about meeting their research group’s technical needs. They
will also help to introduce PhD and project students to the laboratory and associated equipment, thereby
helping to ensure continuity in laboratories, and ensure compliance with health and safety regulations.
Senior research technicians will be more involved in helping to design experiments and in interpreting
results. They will also be involved in the management of laboratories or even, in the case of larger
departments, entire floors of departments (containing several laboratories). Their managerial duties will
include budgeting and accounts, sourcing and ordering supplies and equipment, carrying out risk
assessments, ensuring compliance with health and safety regulations, and managing junior technicians.
All but one of the pre-1992 departments visited for this study had research technicians. In the one
department that did not, some of their duties – such as preparing solvents and dealing with glassware –
had been taken on by stores technicians. 4 of the department visited have technicians as designated health
and safety officers. 9 of the 11 departments also have their own scientific glassblower, who although
based in the department of chemistry in many cases also provides services for other university
departments.
As their names suggests, analytical facilities technicians support research by helping to provide
various services pertaining to the analysis of the properties of chemical compounds and molecules. The
analytical facilities in question include, to name but the most common, NMR spectroscopy, mass
spectrometry, HPLC, microanalysis and X-ray diffraction. The technicians who work on such facilities
sometimes work under the supervision of an academic or an experimental officer. Experimental,
technical, or scientific officers – as they are variously known - occupy intermediate positions, part way
between academic and technician roles, in the ‘academic related’ part of the university hierarchy. Every
one of the 10 pre-1992 chemistry departments visited for this study contains experimental officers.38 The
precise number varies from 2 experimental officers in one medium-sized department to 16 in one of the
larger departments, with an average of around 5 such positions across the sample as a whole. The
experimental officers found in chemistry departments tend to specialise in the use of analytical facilities
such as NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, HPLC and x-ray crystallography. Experimental officers’
and analytical services technicians’ expertise in the experimental techniques associated with such
facilities, often honed over many years of experience, enables them to advise scientists on how to design
experiments and prepare samples for analysis, on how to optimise the instruments so that they are
appropriately set up for the task at hand, and also on the analysis and interpretation of the data that are
generated (e.g. by refining and interpreting x-ray diffraction data in order to infer the structure of the
molecule or crystal being analysed). In the words of one technical services manager:
38
There was no experimental officer in the one post-1992 chemistry department studied for this project.
62
‘You need their [analytical service technicians’ and experimental officers’] expertise to
properly validate and interpret results (for example, spectra) ... the technicians interact
with the academics and help them to identify what the data is [sic] saying.’
Indeed, interviewees at one department reported that an equipment manufacturer had sent its own
technicians to the university in order to learn the new HPLC techniques that the department’s technicians
had devised. In all these ways, analytical services technicians and experimental officers often make an
invaluable contribution to the research that takes places in their departments.39
The ability to contribute to research projects in this way usually requires not only considerable
technical know-how but also a sound knowledge of the physical and chemical principles underlying both
the instrument being used and domain of chemistry being investigated, which is why experimental
officers are usually qualified to at least BSc level. A majority of those considered here also have a PhD,
the latter sometimes having been acquired whilst its bearer was in post as an experimental officer. An
indication of the importance of the contribution made by experimental officers to research projects in the
chemistry departments visited is the fact that they are often named as authors on scientific papers, with
many experimental officers having substantial numbers of publications.40
Seven departments, all situated in pre-1992 universities, have retained their own mechanical and
electronics workshops, although in 5 of those cases the number of workshop technicians has declined
considerably over the past few years. This reflects space and salary costs and also the reduced demand for
workshop services, partly as a result of fewer repairs being done in house and also due to a shift in the
focus of research away from areas that require extensive workshop support and towards topics that
demand less support. In 3 other pre-1992 universities, attempts to exploit economies of scale and reduce
costs have led to a situation in which the department of chemistry now shares a mechanical workshop
with other department (in one instance with a department of biology and in two cases with a department
of physics). In at least one of these cases, the shared workshop still contains dedicated chemistry
technicians who are the first port of call for the academics from the chemistry department who need
technical support.
Technical support for the one post-1992 department of chemistry in the sample is provided by a
broader faculty-level pool of technicians, who service a variety of departments in the biological sciences
as well as chemistry, and from a shared, faculty-level workshop. The rationale for this approach is that,
because technicians are line managed at the faculty level rather than within departments, there is greater
flexibility to reallocate them between tasks and departments as circumstances demand, leading to a more
responsive and economical service.
There are ongoing technical reviews at two of the pre-1992 universities visited as part of this
study. In one case, the possibility of the centralisation of a chemistry department’s mechanical workshop
is under consideration. In the other, a move towards something akin to the ‘shared services’ approach
adopted in the post-1992 university is being considered, whereby those elements of technical support that
39
Interviews in chemistry departments also suggested that the mechanical and electronics workshop technicians have a significant input into the
technical aspects of research projects, along the lines described in more detail elsewhere in this report in the case of engineering and physics
departments. As one technical services manager put it: ‘It’s a two-way conversation. The PIs [principal investigators] will have an idea but they
won’t [necessarily] have thought through its technical feasibility. The technicians will come up with suggestions and, via several rounds of
conversation, come up with something that does the job the PI wants it to do.’ Another interviewee thought that it would be more accurate if his
department’s mechanical workshop was referred to as a ‘development and design workshop’ in recognition of the fact that it did far more than
simply produce standard items.
40
Interviewees in two departments also reported that experimental officers often also assume a managerial role, not just with regard to particular
analytical facilities, but also within the associated research group, taking charge of the day-to-day running of the group on behalf of the academic
group leader and training PhD students in the relevant experimental techniques.
63
are generic in the sense of being common to a number of departments (e.g. basic teaching support,
cleaning glassware, autoclaving) might be taken out of departments and provided by a central, facultybased pool of technicians. The aim – as in the post-1992 university – is to exploit economies of scale and
increase efficiency.
All of the departments considered here have a cadre of dedicated teaching technicians. In a
majority (8 out of 11) of those departments, the teaching technicians do little formal teaching. Typically,
the task of instructing undergraduates in the relevant experimental techniques is carried out by academics,
PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers, with the teaching technicians facilitating that teaching by
preparing the requisite materials, apparatus, and instruments but not actually carrying it out themselves.
The three main exceptions to this general rule are all found in departments – two pre-1992, one post-1992
– where a majority of the teaching technicians have BScs and are formally involved in demonstrating how
to use the instruments and in teaching experimental techniques. In two other departments, the technician
who has taken on the role of laboratory manager has a graduate degree and assists academic staff in
designing and running undergraduate practicals. In practice, of course, technicians’ contribution to
teaching often extends beyond the limits just described, with technicians of all kinds providing informal
advice and assistance to students on how to use instruments and carry out experimental procedures both in
laboratory classes and also – in the case of project students - in research laboratories.
While it is undoubtedly always the case that the division of labour within chemistry departments
was never quite as sharp as the account presented above might suggest, as evidenced by the fact that
teaching and analytical services technicians have typically provided informal instruction to undergraduate
project students, the distinctions between different roles appear to be being eroded on the margins in at
least some departments, as hard-pressed technical service managers struggle to find a way of dealing with
declining technician rolls. In particular, 4 of the departments visited have in the relatively recent past
begun to allocate their technicians not only a primary but also a secondary role, whereby they act as a
backup to the person whose main job it is to, say, provide NMR or x-ray services, filling in for that
individual when (s)he is absent. ‘The substitutes may not have the same level of expertise as the primary
role holder,’ one technical services manger commented, ‘but [they] can at least keep things ticking over.’
And by adopting such a strategy, department managers hope to be able to increase their ability to respond
flexibly to both unforeseen and planned staff absences (e.g. for training).
3. TECHNICIAN WORKFORCE:
QUALIFICATIONS
ORIGINS,
AGE,
TENURE,
CONTRACT
TYPE
AND
3.1 Origins
Departments were asked to estimate the shares of their current technical workforce who were trained inhouse and recruited externally. All but one of the 10 departments that provided data suggested that at least
half of their current technical workforce was recruited from the external labour market, with 7 of the
departments in the sample indicating that recruitment accounted for over 60% of their workforce. The
exception to this general pattern was a large department of chemistry in a pre-1992 university that had for
many years run its own apprenticeship scheme through which many of its older technicians had been
developed. As this example illustrates, the technical staff who are ‘home grown’ are usually older staff,
who were trained in-house under old university technician apprenticeship schemes, most of which ceased
operation well over a decade ago, or via Youth Training Scheme which existed in the 1980s. Some
64
younger stores and teaching technicians may also have been trained internally, almost invariably by
means of informal on-the-job training (rather than via an apprenticeship scheme).
The major sources of external recruits were industry and other university departments, each of
which on average accounted for around 30% of the current technical workforce. In 4 cases, a small
number of younger technical staff entered the technical workforce direct from a department’s own
undergraduate programme. In one exceptional case, where an unusually high percentage of the
department’s technical staff were experimental officers, and where a number of research technicians had
followed an academic rather than a vocational route, 30-40% of the technical staff were estimated to have
been recruited to the department directly from university, either as recent graduates or newly minted
PhDs.
3.2 Age profile
Despite the fact that 6 of the 9 chemistry departments who were able to provide data on the age profile of
their technician workforce have implemented early retirement and voluntary severance schemes in the
recent past, the average age of the technicians in those 9 departments is about 47. Roughly 43% of the
technicians in those university departments are due to retire within the next 15 years.
3.3 Labour turnover and tenure
Turnover amongst the technician workforce is low, and large numbers of technicians - amounting to over
50% of the technician workforce in some cases - have been in post for over 20 years.
3.4 Contract type
Around 87% of the technicians in the 10 departments for which data are available are on open-ended
contracts (though some of those positions will be financed at least in part via income obtained from
external research grants rather than from core HEFCE funding). The vast majority of the technical staff
who are on fixed-term contracts are concentrated in two pre-1992 departments, in each of which about 1/3
of the technical workforce is on a fixed-term contract. No other department in the sample has more than a
couple of staff in fixed-term positions.
3.5 Qualifications
Moving on to the qualifications possessed by members of the technical workforce, technical or
experimental offers tend almost exclusively to be qualified to BSc or PhD level. In every department
visited for this study, the analytical facilities technicians tended to have a mixture of BScs and vocational
qualifications such as an HNC in chemistry, as did - in all but one case – the research laboratory
technicians.41 Almost without exception, interviewees viewed the fact that departments’ research
technicians typically have a mixture of HNCs and BScs as a good match to their departments’
requirements. However, there were differing opinions about whether there would need to be a greater
reliance on research technicians with academic qualifications in the future. Some interviewees argued in
particular that changes in technology are increasing the extent to which tests and procedures that had to be
done manually in the past can now be automated. The upshot, those interviewees maintained, is that in
future there is likely to be less of a demand for technicians who can carry out practical procedures and
more of a need for technicians who can design automated experiments and analyse the data produced by
41
The two exceptions to this general pattern were a pre-1992 department where all three analytical services technicians had PhDs, and a pre1992 department in which all of the research technicians possessed an HNC.
65
them. Given that the requisite computing, data-management and analytical skills are more likely to be
acquired through degree programmes than through vocational education and training, this line of
reasoning suggests that that the demand for research technicians with BScs is likely to increase relative to
those with vocational qualifications. And, as we shall see below, it so happens that in practice
departments do seem to be recruiting more people with BScs to research technician posts, though - as we
shall also see - at least at present this may have more to do with the fact that departments advertising for
technicians are inundated with applications from graduates.
Two findings common to all the departments in our sample are that the mechanical and
electronics workshop technicians employed in chemistry departments tend to have vocational
qualifications - such as City and Guilds, HNCs, and BTECs - with just one or two in each of 3
departments possessing a BSc, and that few stores technicians possess any qualifications beyond O-levels
or GCSEs.
Matters were a little less clear cut when it came to the qualifications of teaching technicians.
Here, practice appeared to differ quite markedly between departments, usually – but not invariably –
according to how significant a role the technicians played in teaching students. In those departments
where laboratory classes were taken primarily by PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, teaching
technicians tended to be qualified to vocational level, typically possessing an HNC in chemistry, but with
some possessing BScs. The experience of those departments lends some support to the view that an HNC
is a suitable qualification for such technicians, for two main reasons. First, in one department whose
teaching technicians were not qualified beyond GCSE/O-level, it was felt that their lack of training was a
disadvantage and that the department would benefit if they took an HNC. Second, interviewees in 3
departments where teaching technicians’ formal duties were confined to preparing the materials and
equipment from practical classes that were actually taught by PhD students and postdoctoral researchers
felt that those teaching technicians who had a BSc rather than an HNC were over-qualified, given the
often rather mundane tasks they are required to carry out.
The situation was rather different in those departments where the teaching technicians either
currently play a significant role in instructing students in experimental techniques, or where the
department would like them to do more actual teaching in the future. In the three cases where technicians
currently make a significant contribution to teaching, one half or more of the teaching technicians have
BScs, with some possessing advanced degrees, so that they have a level of understanding that is deemed
sufficient to enable them to instruct the students. In the other case, where the department would like its
technicians to take a more prominent role in teaching in the future, it is thought that, if technicians are to
assume more responsibility for designing experiments and teaching in practical classes, then it is
important that more of them should have a BSc.
4. RECRUITMENT
There was considerable agreement amongst interviewees from all parts of the country about the state of
the external labour market for technicians. All but two departments reported that they currently receive
large numbers of high-quality applicants for research and teaching technician posts, often from people
with higher degrees and postdoctoral experience. Ratios of over 50 applicants per place were quoted by
some departments. As one head of a chemistry department in a southern university put it, ‘We are awash
with skills.’ Similarly, the technical services managers of chemistry department in the midlands and the
north of England remarked that they’re ‘snowed under’ and ‘swamped’ with applicants for research and
66
teaching technician posts. The existence of an abundant supply of skilled labour is usually attributed to
the fact that chemical and pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, GSK and Astra-Zeneca, as well as
university departments, have been – and continue to be - making people redundant and thereby releasing
them on to the labour market. The upshot is that, even allowing for the fact that departments have to take
pains to ensure that applicants both possess the relevant practical skills, and also appreciate the sometimes
mundane nature of technician work, it is relatively easy for departments to find good people to fill such
posts.
The one exception to this general rule concerns mechanical and electronics workshop technicians,
in which case skilled labour is said to be rather scarce. More specifically, 6 departments said that they had
experienced difficulties in recruiting mechanical and electronics workshop technicians. In the words of
the manger of the mechanical and electronics workshops in one midlands-based chemistry department,
‘We are struggling to recruit engineers ... We have no chance of recruiting anyone.’ This is, of course,
quite consistent with the experience of many of the engineering and physics departments included in this
study, who have found it hard to hire good workshop technicians. Moreover, just as some physics and
engineering departments have responded to the paucity of workshop technicians on the external labour
market by starting apprenticeship programmes, so too has one chemistry department just begun an
apprenticeship scheme for its workshop technicians.
5. APPRENTICESHIPS
While departments are conscious of the need to engage in succession planning in order to deal with their
ageing technician workforces, none of the 11 chemistry departments currently have an apprenticeship
programme for their laboratory, teaching, or analytical services technicians. The main reason is the ease
with which skilled laboratory technicians can be recruited from the external labour market, which implies
that departments do not have to train their own technicians in-house. Four other factors were mentioned
by interviewees as deterrents to taking on apprentices include the following. First, the very limited spare
technical capacity possessed by departments means that when they get the chance to make a new
appointment, they cannot afford to employ someone - like a trainee - who will initially work at less than
full capacity, but must instead take on a more experienced person who can work productively straight
away. As one technical services manager commented, ‘We don’t have the luxury of the time required to
train them [apprentices]. We’ve got to get someone in who can hit the ground running.’ Second, and
relatedly, the considerable workload currently borne by established technicians deprives them of the time
needed to provide the on-the-job train required by apprentices. A third, oft-mentioned barrier to
involvement in apprenticeships is the difficulty of finding a local college that is willing to offer a suitable
course, in particular an HNC in chemistry (5 departments). Finally, one department expressed concerns
about the health and safety issues arising from having young (16-18 year old) people in laboratories.
The closest to an exception to the general pattern of non-participation in apprenticeship training for
their research, analytical services, and teaching technicians arose in the case of a pre-1992 university
chemistry department that in 2009 almost took on two apprentice laboratory technicians. Those
technicians would have been part of a larger cohort of 10 apprentices, who were to have been trained
under the auspices of a broader, faculty-wide apprenticeship scheme encompassing departments of
physics and biological science as well as chemistry. The scheme was motivated by concerns about the age
profile of the technician workforce, and also by dissatisfaction with the limited practical skills and
commitment of potential recruits. Apprentices would have received training in the general skills required
67
by a laboratory technician, taking a BTEC in Applied Science at a local college and being rotated around
the participating departments in order to gain on-the-job training. They would have been on a fixed term
contract, but the hope was that they would have been retained upon successful completion of the training
programme. However, shortly before advertisements for apprentices were to run, the university’s finances
deteriorated, and approval for the scheme was withdrawn.
At present, two other pre-1992 departments are contemplating the possibility of taking on
apprentice laboratory technicians. In one, frustration at the lack of practical skills possessed by applicants
for one of its research technician posts has led the department to consider taking on an apprentice. The
second department is undertaking a technical review that may lead to the creation of a faculty-level pool
of technicians, who would provide certain basic kinds of technical support such as basic teaching support,
glassware, and autoclaving for a number of different departments. An apprenticeship training scheme in
basic laboratory skills is being considered for such technicians.
The only case in which a chemistry department has ongoing plans to take on apprentices is to be
found in a pre-1992 department that has just sought approval to take on apprentices in its mechanical
workshop. As is the case with the engineering and physics departments that have started apprenticeship
schemes, the plan to take on apprentices is intended to address a succession planning problem in a context
where the availability of skilled workshop technicians on the external labour market is very limited. The
proposed scheme is similar to those adopted in the engineering and physics departments discussed
elsewhere in this report: the scheme will run under the auspices of the government’s Advanced
Apprenticeship programme; the formal contract with the Skills Funding Agency will be held by an
external training provide (in this case a local FE college); apprentices should have 5 GCSEs at grades AC, with a B in mathematics; they will begin by studying for an ONC in engineering, with a view to
moving on to an HNC; and they will be on a 3-year, fixed term contract of employment, with the hope
being that they will be kept on once they have completed their apprenticeship.
6. ONGOING TRAINING
A good deal of ongoing training for technicians is provided in-house by more experienced members of
staff, usually on-the-job (e.g. welding) but sometimes via short (one- or two-day) internal training courses
on specific techniques and pieces of equipment (e.g. x-ray, NMR). University staff development units
provide the usual gamut of personal training (e.g. presentation skills, IT skills), as well as training in
management that might prove to be of use for those technicians who have moved into managerial roles.
The university may also provide training in health and safety, some of it leading to formal certificates
such as the NEBOSH health and safety qualification. Perhaps most notably, interviewees in three
chemistry departments noted that such on-the-job instruction was being used in order to train a new
scientific glassblower in preparation for the day when the current incumbent of that role retires. In at least
two of those three cases, the aim is for the trainee’s skills to be formally certificated and, to that end, the
trainees in question will be entered for the examinations run by the British Society of Scientific
Glassblowers.
Equipment manufacturers constitute the most significant external source of uncertificated
ongoing training. Such vendor-supplied training is usually associated with the purchase of new
equipment, though it can also be purchased on its own. Examples include the x-ray and 5-day NMR
training courses provided by Brooker, training in high pressure and high vacuum technology offered by
Swagelok, and courses in gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and infrared spectroscopy offered by
68
Perkin Elmer. Equipment manufacturers also help to train workshop technicians in the use of CNC
machines. Interviewees in 3 of the 11 chemistry departments said that they had sent some of their
technicians on HEaTED courses. Local colleges may also sometimes be used for uncertificated training
(e.g. in welding).
Few chemistry departments appear to make much use of certificated vocational training for their
established technicians. Indeed, only one of the departments visited for this project is currently sending
any of its established technicians for such training. (More specifically, it is supporting two of its older
research technicians through BTEC level 3 qualifications in Applied Science and in Laboratory Science,
and is also helping some of its stores technicians to gain NVQs in warehousing.) Two other departments
had attempted to sponsor some of their established technical staff for an HNC in chemistry, but had been
unable to find a local college willing to offer that qualification.
Moving on from vocational to academic qualifications, interviews revealed that all but two of the
chemistry departments visited for this study contained one or two technicians who have taken, or are
currently studying for, an undergraduate degree whilst working as a technician in the department. The
degrees in question are usually in chemistry, although that is not invariably the case: in three departments
the people in question worked in the mechanical workshop and took degrees in engineering or product
design; while in another university an analytical services technician took a degree in physics. The
technicians who take degrees typically do so part time, occasionally in their ‘home’ university but more
often either at the local post-1992 university or via the Open University. Their home department gives
day release and pays some or all of their fees. Two departments are currently sponsoring technicians for
MSc degrees in chemistry. Finally, it is worth noting that many of the experimental officers and analytical
facilities technicians who have PhDs acquired them in virtue of the work they have done as technicians.
Interviewees indicated that the identification of training needs for established technical staff is
gradually being formalised and systematised through the implementation of personal development
reviews/appraisals. Moreover, in most cases interviewees felt that well-made requests for training would
be supported, so long as they helped to promote the interests of the department as well as those of the
individual making the request. However, a minority of interviewees also sounded certain cautionary
notes. First, representatives of two departments observed that a combination of declining technician
numbers and increases in the demands made upon those who remain is making it harder to find the time
for technicians to go on external training courses, with some academic staff in particular being reluctant
to allow technicians to have long periods of absence from the laboratory. One head of department
indicated that dealing with this problem might require departments formally to guarantee technical staff a
certain number of days of off-the-job training each year. Second, technical services managers in two
universities remarked that ‘funding is getting tight’ and that it would be harder to support requests for
training than in the past.
7. BROADER HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ISSUES
Most of the chemistry departments (10 out of the 11) included in this study of departments reported that
the introduction of the common pay had been relatively unproblematic in the case of technical staff.
Indeed, interviewees in one department in particular reported that technicians ‘generally did very well’
out of the move to the common spine, because the process of job evaluation that accompanied it had led
to the recognition that they were carrying out hitherto unacknowledged duties and, therefore, to higher
pay.
69
APPENDIX 3: SUMMARY OF FINDINGS IN THE CASE OF ENGINEERING DEPARTMENTS
1. DESCRIPTION OF CASES
The research project involved case studies of Faculties, Departments, and Schools of Engineering in 12
universities, 8 of which were pre-1992 and 4 of which were post-1992 universities. Of the 8 pre-1992
universities, 4 were large, multi-department faculties of engineering. In each of those cases interviews
were conducted at the faculty level, with extensive supplementary interviews at the level of individual
departments in one case. Three of the other pre-1992 case studies were general engineering departments
that contained a number of different divisions within the same department. The final pre-1992 case study
was formed by a free-standing department that concentrated on one sub-discipline of engineering only,
namely electrical engineering. The 4 post-1992 departments were all situated within larger Schools,
encompassing other disciplines related to engineering (e.g. computing, physics). A total of 26 interviews
were conducted, involving 14 academics and 20 technicians/technical services managers. A summary of
the key attributes of the departments in the sample can be found in Table A3:
Table A3: Summary of the attributes of the sample of engineering departments
Technicians Technical/Experimental
Academics Postdocs Undergraduates PhD
Officers
Mean
133
121
1340
367
53
4
Maximum 382
475
3170
1500
147
12
Minimum 26
1
450
30
17
0
The ratio of academics to technicians and technical officers varies from a low of 1.2 academic per
technician to a high of 4.7 academics per technician in the case of the pre-1992 universities, and from a
low of 1.5 to a high of 2.2 in the case of the post-1992 universities.42 Weighting departments according to
their size, as measured by how many academics they contain, then the average ratio is 2.7 academics per
technician and 2.0 academics per technician in the pre- and post-1992 universities in the sample
respectively.
In every case, interviewees indicated that there had been significant reductions in the number of
technical staff over the past 10-15 years, either in absolute terms or relative to the number of academics
and students for whom support is required. Even so, none of the pre-1992 departments said that they
currently had serious difficulties in providing adequate support for teaching and research. However,
academics in two of the post-1992 universities did report a concern about the level of research support
they received, reflecting the fact that, while technical support in those departments had until very recently
been devoted almost exclusively to teaching, the academic staff now require additional technical support
in order to meet the increasingly demanding targets they are being set for research and external
consultancy.
2. THE NATURE AND ORGANISATION OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT
42
It is worth noting, however, that it is unclear how meaningful comparisons between these ratios are, given that technicians in post-1992
universities tend to concentrate almost exclusively upon teaching support rather than research support.
70
In the 4 multi-department faculties of engineering, it was traditionally the case that each of the constituent
departments would have its own mechanical and electronics workshops, as well as its own specialised
laboratories. Over time, however, the need to cut both wage and space costs has led all but one of these
faculties to amalgamate at least some of their workshops. Typically, now, some of the departments in
each faculty share a mechanical workshop, usually on the basis of similarities in the kind of work they
require, so that there might perhaps be 3 or 4 mechanical workshops shared between (say) 7 or 8 different
engineering departments. Such sharing of facilities may also reflect the imperatives of the increasing
amount of research in engineering that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Individual departments
have usually been allowed to retain their own electronics technicians and, of course, they also continue to
have their own more specialised laboratories and facilities, along with the associated technicians, such as
clean rooms for electronics engineering and nano-technology, electron microscopy suites and X-ray
diffraction facilities for materials engineering, wind tunnels for aeronautical engineering, structural
testing facilities for civil and materials engineering, facilities for advanced manufacturing in automotive
and aerospace engineering, chemistry laboratories and combustion facilities for departments of chemical
engineering, and pilot plants tissue/cell culture labs for bio-engineering.
Each of the three general engineering departments has its own central mechanical and electronics
workshops. In the larger two departments, some of the individual divisions or research groups also have
their own, smaller and more specialised satellite workshops and laboratories, specialising along the lines
mentioned in the previous paragraph. Two of these three departments are currently reviewing the way in
which they provide technical support, examining the scope for avoiding duplication, exploiting economies
of scale, and thereby cutting costs, by amalgamating workshops/laboratories and pooling technical staff.
As already noted, the 4 post-1992 departments are all situated within larger Schools,
encompassing other disciplines related to engineering (e.g. computing, physics). Formally, the line
management of the technicians in those departments lies at the School rather than the department level, as
the universities in question attempt to exploit the benefits of economies of scale and create central pools
of technicians that can be controlled more effectively, and therefore used more efficiently, than when
control was decentralised to the departmental level. In practice, interviewees in most – but not all - of
these universities said that departments still enjoyed a decent measure of control over their technicians, so
the managerial systems are not perhaps as centralised as they might first seem.
The departments indicated that the vast majority of their full-time technician roles are mixed in
the sense that their incumbents provide support both for research and teaching. Few of the pre-1992
departments have many teaching-only technician roles, though some technicians – especially those on
fixed term contracts associated with an externally funded research project – tend formally to provide
support only for research. Unsurprisingly, the pre-1992 and post-1992 departments in the sample exhibit
considerable differences in the precise balance that is struck in allocating scarce technician time between
teaching support and research support, with technicians in the post-1992 universities devoting
considerably more of their time to teaching support than do their counterparts in the more researchintensive, post-1992 universities. For example, while a recent time allocation study carried out in one pre1992 department revealed that around 75% of total technician time was devoted to supporting research, 3
of the post-1992 universities estimated that at least 70% of their technicians’ time was currently spent
supporting teaching (though two of those departments also indicated that they were being encouraged by
their university to increase the proportion of technician time allocated to supporting research and external
consultancy).
71
Departments typically have a variety of different types of research technician. These include both
mechanical and electronics workshop technicians, and also laboratory technicians working in a variety of
facilities, and on a range of tasks and pieces of equipment, including microfabrication, electron
microscopy, MRI, lasers, high-speed photography, and tissue engineering, to name but a few. By
operating – and, as we will see, in many cases designing and constructing – the experimental apparatus
and equipment that the scientists need for the data generation and hypothesis testing part of their projects,
such technicians play a key role in engineering research.
So far as the workshop technicians in particular are concerned, interviewees at a majority of
departments emphasised that academics do not usually provide technicians with detailed technical
drawings of the equipment or apparatus required to give practical effect to their ideas. Instead, academics
typically involve technicians in the early stages of their projects, when they have framed the research
problem they are trying to address but before they have a clear idea about the kind of rig or experimental
apparatus required to help solve it. It is here that the technicians’ input - and, in particular, their
knowledge and understanding of engineering and electronics, their practical expertise and understanding
of what particular tools and instruments can be used to achieve, their knowledge of the properties of
different materials, their skills in using computer-aided design packages, and their general problemsolving skills – comes into its own. For it is on the basis of that knowledge and expertise, much of it
accumulated over many years of work in industrial and university labs and workshops, that the
technicians will help to correct and develop the academic’s initial rough outline in order to come up with
a design for the requisite experimental rig, piece of apparatus, or electronic component that will be get the
job done in practice. In the words of one mechanical workshop superintendent, ‘People come in with half
formed ideas and we try to make them work.’ Indeed, such is the importance of this part of the
technicians’ work that one interviewee argued that his department’s mechanical workshop should be
renamed as the ‘Design and Fabrication Service.’
The account given by many interviewees, therefore, is one in which research is portrayed as a
dialogue or iterative process, whereby academics and technicians work as a team in order to design the
experimental apparatus required to give practical effect to researchers’ ideas. In doing so, technicians
make an indispensable contribution to the research that takes places in engineering. Moreover,
representatives of 5 of the 8 pre-1992 departments visited for this project stated that this contribution is
sometimes recognised by technicians being included on the list of authors of the academic papers that
derive from the projects they support.
Teaching support technicians typically assist academics and PhD/postdoctoral student
demonstrators in running laboratory classes by preparing the requisite materials and equipment and by
remaining in the laboratories whilst the classes are under way in order to ensure adherence to health and
safety regulations. Moreover, in most of the engineering departments visited at least some technical staff
are actively involved in teaching students, most notably by providing instruction in how to use various
pieces of equipment and by supervising final year projects. For example, one large, multi-department
faculty of engineering has a number of ‘technical tutors’ who help to teach practical skills to
undergraduates, while departments in three other universities have technical officers who are involved in
devising new experiments for laboratory classes, in demonstrating equipment and experimental
techniques, and in providing expert design support for student projects. Furthermore, interviewees
suggested that even in those departments where technicians do not formally provide tuition, they may still
do so informally, most notably by providing both undergraduate and postgraduate students with advice
about the design of the objects required for their research projects (in the case of engineering and
72
electronics workshop technicians) or providing guidance in particular experimental techniques and
associated equipment (in the case of technicians who are embedded within research laboratories that
accept undergraduate project students).
Finally, three other kinds of contribution that technicians make to research and teaching should
briefly be noted. First, senior technicians usually take responsibility, in conjunction with an academic
colleague, for carrying out risk assessments of the instruments, facilities and experimental rigs used in
engineering departments. Second, and relatedly, electrical and electronics technicians often carried out
safety tests for various kinds of electrical appliances found in departments (PAT testing). Third, and
finally, lower grade technicians usually provide basic support for research and teaching, by working in
stores, preparing basic materials, disposing of waste, and so forth.
3. TECHNICIAN WORKFORCE:
QUALIFICATIONS
ORIGINS,
AGE,
TENURE,
CONTRACT
TYPE
AND
3.1 Origins
Interviewees in all 12 departments indicated that a majority of their current technician workforce was
recruited from the external labour market, rather than developed internally via an in-house apprenticeship
or traineeship scheme. More specifically, 6 of the departments visited estimated that over 90% of their
current technician workforce had been acquired externally, usually from industry. Another 6 departments
estimated that over 70% of their technicians were recruited, with the remainder typically being either
graduates or – most often - older workers who had been obtained via old departmental apprenticeship
training programmes, most of which had by the 1990s been discontinued due to cuts in the size of the
technician workforce, the poaching of newly qualified apprentices by other employers, and the ready
availability of workers on the external labour market. However, as will be discussed below, more recently
a shortage of skilled workers on the external market – coupled with concerns about an ageing workforce,
has led to a resurgence of interest in apprenticeship training amongst engineering departments, with many
of the departments considered here either recently taking on apprentices or seriously contemplating doing
so.
3.2 Age profile
The average age of the technicians in the departments is around 51, a figure that would have been a little
higher were it not for the early retirement and voluntary severance schemes operated by some of the
departments in the past few years. To put this point slightly differently, around 48% of the technicians in
the university departments considered here are over 50 years of age. The age profile of the technician
workforce is currently the cause of considerable concern within engineering departments and, as we shall
see below, has been one of the major reasons why a majority of departments in the sample have either
recently begun, or are very seriously considering, taking on apprentice technicians.
3.3 Labour turnover and tenure
Turnover is usually said to be ‘very low’ or ‘effectively zero’, and with all but two of those departments
who provided numerical data reporting turnover rates of under 5% per annum amongst their technicians.
Tenures of 10-30 years – and in many cases considerably longer - are common amongst technicians,
73
though the data obtained also reveal that a substantial fraction (35-45%) of the technician workforce in
three of the larger departments in the sample has been employed within the past five years.
3.4 Contract type
All of the technicians in the post-1992 universities considered here were on open-ended contracts. Around
83% of the engineering technicians in the 7 pre-1992 universities for which data are available are on
open-ended contracts, with no department having more than about 30% of its technical staff on fixed-term
contracts.43
3.5 Qualifications
All but one of the departments reported that the vast majority (85%+) of their technical staff are
vocationally qualified, possessing HNCs, HNDs, and City and Guilds awards in mechanical engineering
and electronics.44 Interviewees reported that, on the whole, the skills possessed by the technicians in their
departments correspond well to the departments’ requirements. However, interviewees also observed that
there remains some scope for improvement. Perhaps most notably, interviewees in 6 of the 12
departments stated that they would like to have more technicians who possess mechatronic skills and
who, as a result, are able to work at the interface of mechanical and electronic systems (e.g., by setting up
data acquisition and control systems). Three other departments also stated that they need more technicians
who are well versed in 3-D design and CAM-CAD packages. More generally, departments reported that
they would like to have more technicians who are multi-skilled, and who as a result are able to respond
flexibly to the varying demands made by the researchers they support.
To the extent that it is possible to generalise, the small numbers of technical staff who possess
BSc or higher qualifications usually fall into one of two main categories. First, and most often, they
occupy what are variously described as technical, experimental or scientific officer roles. The data
collected for this study suggest that such positions are found only in pre-1992 universities (where there is
an average of 6.5 scientific or technical officers across the 8 departments visited). Technical officers are
like technicians in that they possess technical expertise but they differ in being more likely to specialise in
the use of particular instruments or techniques. For example, in three of the pre-1992 universities
considered here, people occupying scientific or experimental officer roles are BSc-qualified design
engineers who specialise in providing technical support for the design of the experimental rigs,
components and pieces of apparatus required for research projects. Other experimental officers specialise
in electronic circuit design, in electron microscopy, in the use of lasers, and in clean-room techniques such as molecular beam epitaxy - used for research in semi-conductor materials and electronics.
Experimental officers are more likely than technicians both to manage laboratories or other experimental
facilities (e.g. combustion facilities, electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, X-ray diffraction, etc.),
and also to design and conduct experiments and to analyse and interpret the results of those experiments
themselves. Consistent with this, as noted above, technical and experimental officers are more likely than
technicians to have a BSc or PhD, and are more likely than technicians to be named as authors on
academic papers.
Second, the evidence gathered here suggests that technical staff with degrees tend also to support
research that involves the application of traditional engineering principles to particular kinds of subject43
These figures exclude apprentices, who are usually on fixed-term contracts until they have completed their apprenticeship.
The one exception was a department of engineering in a post-1992 university, where all but two of 17 technical staff have at least an
undergraduate degree.
44
74
matter that are usually studied by one of the other scientific disciplines (e.g., bioengineering and chemical
engineering). In such cases, technicians who have at least a BSc, and sometimes a higher degree, in the
relevant science are employed to help run the research laboratories in question and to provide subjectspecific scientific input into the design of experiments and the analysis of data. Degree-level knowledge
or better is said to be essential for research technicians working in such fields.
4. RECRUITMENT
When seeking to recruit to technician posts, engineering departments are typically looking for people who
are vocationally qualified to HNC or HND level (or equivalent) and who have considerable industrial
experience. Such recruits are valued primarily as a source of up-to-date practical skills in machining and
electronics. Consistent with this profile, recruits tend to be middle-aged men, who have acquired
vocational qualifications and many years of experience, usually in industry but sometimes as technicians
in other university departments. Typically, recruits come from the same area as the university itself, so the
relevant labour market is local or regional.
Interviewees expressed mixed opinions about the state of the external labour market. While
representatives of 3 departments suggested that they had experienced no difficulty in recruiting skilled
labour in the recent past, 6 reported that there had been occasions in the last few years when they had
struggled to find acceptable candidates for technician posts, sometimes to the extent that they had failed
to make an appointment.45 Such problems were not confined to one particular geographical area, with
universities from all of the regions covered in this study reporting no more than a low-to-moderate
availability of skilled labour on the external market. While some interviewees attributed such difficulties
to the low wages paid by universities relative to what is available in industry, the limited availability of
skilled labour was most commonly said to reflect the decline of the traditional industries from which
technicians had been recruited in the past.
If it is the case that actions speak louder than words, then it is noteworthy that there has been
sufficient concern about the scope for recruiting skilled technicians – even amongst those departments
who suggested that there was a reasonable availability of workers on the external market - for there to
have been a revival of interest in apprenticeship training schemes, with all but two of the engineering
departments visited as part of this project either restarting, or giving serious thought to restarting, an
apprenticeship in the past few years.46
5. APPRENTICESHIPS
The evidence gathered for this project suggests that the last few years have seen renewed interest in
apprenticeship training amongst university engineering departments. Of the 12 departments visited for
this project, 6 have either recently started – or are just about to begin - an apprenticeship scheme for their
technicians. Apprenticeship programmes are also under formal consideration in 2 of the other
departments.47 Such developments are motivated primarily by a belief that apprenticeship training is
45
Two of the post-1992 universities disclaimed any knowledge of the external labour market, having not tried to recruit anyone for several years.
The two universities that have not seriously considered becoming involved in apprenticeships are both post-1992 universities, one of which has
recently begun to recruit some of its own undergraduates to technician posts. While not taking on apprentices, there is a sense in which – like the
departments that have revived their apprenticeship schemes – that university too is beginning to rely more heavily than it did in the past on inhouse training to acquire the technicians it needs.
47
All but one of the 8 departments just mentioned are in pre-1992 universities.
46
75
central to sustaining high quality technical support in the face of the twin problems posed by an ageing
technician workforce, with a significant number of technicians due to retire in the next 10-15 years, and
the limited availability of suitable workers on the external labour market. An apprenticeship programme,
one interviewee said, provides a way of dealing with the problem of ‘where the next generation of
technicians is coming from.’ In some departments, apprenticeships are also viewed as a means of
bringing in fresh young people whose skills can be tailored so that they are more closely attuned to the
current requirements of the department than are those of some of the older workers they are replacing (by
having, for example, more mechatronic and CAD skills).48
The 6 departments that have decided to take on apprentices have adopted very similar strategies
to managing the programme. In each case, the apprentices are taken on under the auspices of the
government’s Advanced Apprenticeship scheme. All 6 departments have devolved formal responsibility
for organising the apprenticeship to an external training provider (in 4 cases, a local further education
college, in one a private training provider, and in one a group training association). It is those external
training providers that hold the apprenticeship training contract with the Skills Funding Agency and are in
direct receipt of the government training subsidy. The government funding covers the fees for the college
courses required for the apprentices’ off-the-job training and also pays for the assessment of their
practical on-the-job skills (i.e., the NVQ).49 The universities have to pay the apprentices’ wages, typically
£12,000-£13,000 per annum, and also cover the costs of overseeing the scheme and providing the on-thejob training.50 In some cases, those costs are split between the relevant department and the central
university. In others, the department covers the entire salary cost. Given the relatively low apprentice
wage, given that departments expect the apprentices to do a fair amount of useful work after their first
year, and given finally the scope for apprenticeship training to yield highly skilled and adaptable
technicians of a kind that appear to be increasingly hard to come by on the external labour market, these
departments believed that apprenticeship training was a worthwhile investment.51
So far as the content of the training programme is concerned, apprentices are typically studying
for qualifications in mechanical and electrical/electronic engineering. Apprentices typically start at level
2, working towards an ONC and an NVQ2, before progressing to a level 3 NVQ and an HNC.52 The
departments provide the apprentices with the requisite on-the-job training and work experience by
rotating them through different workshops and laboratories, thereby exposing them to a wide variety of
tasks, materials, and equipment and also developing their flexibility. The off-the-job training required for
the ONC and HNC comes from a local further education college, which apprentices attend either via day
release (in the case of 5 departments) or via block release for the first year of the apprenticeship followed
by day release thereafter (in one case).
48
While a stable workforce with a high average tenure brings benefits, most notably the accumulation of a considerable stock of practical
knowledge, it also gives rise to problems. In particular, according to interviewees in 2 departments, the stability of the technician workforce
sometimes makes it more difficult for departments to update the skills of their technicians. Both apprenticeship training, and also - where possible
- recruitment, are viewed as ways of updating the skills of the technician workforce.
49
In the case of one department where an established technician is a trained NVQ-assessor, the assessment of the apprentices’ practical skills is
undertaken in-house, being subject to periodic verification by the local college.
50
In three cases, interviewees from departments that have embarked upon an apprenticeship scheme expressed reservations about the quality of
support they received from the external provider that was ostensibly organising the training. Concerns encompassed both the quality of teaching
on the college courses taken by the apprentices and also the effectiveness with which the provider notified the department of any problems (e.g.
apprentices who were struggling with, or failing to attend, the college courses).
51
While representatives of the departments that had taken on apprentices were clearly conscious of the amount of time that experienced
technicians had to spend training apprentices on-the-job, some interviewees also observed that providing such training raised the morale of the
established technicians, who enjoyed passing on their skills. As one senior technician put it, ‘We want to leave a legacy of young, well-trained
people to the department.’
52
An exception to this general pattern is to be found in the one post-1992 university in the sample that has started an apprenticeship scheme,
whose apprentices are studying under a Laboratory Technicians Apprenticeship Framework rather than an Engineering one, and are aiming at a
level 2 rather than a level 3 qualification.
76
The number of apprentices taken on by each department is low, averaging just one or two year
each. The rate or intensity of apprentice training, as measured by the ratio of the number of apprentices
currently in training to the total number of technicians employed, averages about 5% across the
departments that offer apprenticeships. That figure will rise over time if departments, most of whom have
only recently started taking on apprentices again, continue to do so and ultimately have apprentices in all
three years of their training programmes.
In selecting their apprentices, engineering departments are typically looking for young people
aged between 16 and 20 who have passed 4-5 GCSEs at grades A-C, with English and a science at grade
C and mathematics at grade B. Some departments set practical tests for shortlisted candidates. The quality
of the pool of applicants for apprenticeships appears to be mixed, with 4 departments receiving enough
good applicants to fill all the places on offer but two struggling to do so. Apprentices have a fixed term
contract of employment, coterminous with their apprenticeship, but departments hope and expect that
they will be kept on at the end of the training programme, subject to satisfactory performance.
Four departments are currently neither involved in, nor formally considering, an apprenticeship
scheme. Two of them had seriously contemplated taking on apprentices in the recent past. In one case, the
department came close to participating in an apprenticeship scheme similar to those described above.
However, the scheme was shelved before any apprentices were taken on due to concerns about the
financial implications of the rather high grade that newly qualified apprentices would be assigned. The
department may well revisit the possibility of taking on apprentices in the next couple of years, possibly
in conjunction with a neighbouring department of physics. In the second case, an engineering department
in a post-92 university attempted to establish an apprenticeship scheme about 5 years ago, primarily in
order to introduce ‘new blood’ – and, more specifically, new skills, especially in digital media and
product design – into its ageing technician workforce. However, the university refused to countenance the
scheme, on the grounds that the department in question already had enough technicians.
Only 2 engineering departments, both in post-1992 universities, have not seriously contemplated
taking on apprentices within the past few years. One appeared to have had little difficulty in recruiting
workers from the external labour market, and therefore has little need of apprentices. The extent to which
it has attempted to develop its own technicians internally has been limited to academic, rather vocational,
education and training and has involved the department recruiting recent graduates from its own BSc
programme to technician posts. In the second case, interviewees said that the department has found it less
easy to recruit high quality workers, but remains sceptical about apprenticeships, for three main reasons:
first, because they feel that the job requires people with more industrial experience than the apprentices
would possess; second, because they are concerned that young apprentices will lack the maturity required
to do a do a good job;53 and third because in a small department like the one in question, where the
technical staff are already working at full capacity, experienced technicians simply do not have the time
to provide the on-the-job training required by the apprentices.54
53
It is interesting to note in this regard that one of the departments that has taken on apprentices has had concerns about the attitude of some of its
young trainees, ultimately dismissing two of them for lack of commitment. The conclusion that the department has drawn from that experience is
not, however, to cease its involvement in apprenticeship training but rather to refine its selection procedures, and in particular to consider taking
18-19 year old apprentices rather than 16-17 year olds.
54
This problem was also noted by one of the departments that had taken on apprentices.
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6. ONGOING TRAINING
We move on now from the training of new staff to consider the provision of training for established
technical staff. While most engineering departments expressed a willingness to fund ongoing training for
established technicians in cases where it promotes the department’s goals, personal development
appraisals appear to have had only a limited impact in terms of systematising the identification of training
needs. In some cases, appraisals have only recently been introduced. In others, while appraisals have
formally been introduced, they have not been received enthusiastically by technical staff, or indeed
carried out at all in practice. As one interviewee put it, only ‘lip service’ has been paid to appraisals and in
practice they have ‘fallen into abeyance.’ The evidence gathered here suggests, therefore, that despite
recent efforts to formalise and systematise the identification of the training needs of established
technicians through personal development reviews and appraisals, in practice many departments continue
to provide such ongoing training in a rather ad hoc, unstructured fashion, simply as the requirements of
research and teaching support dictate. There was, as a result, concern expressed by interviewees in a small
minority of departments that ongoing training for technicians was ‘sometimes a bit forgotten’.
Interviewees suggested that one of the most important sources of training for established
technicians is the other technical staff within their department and/or university. Such training usually
involves more skilled technicians passing on their practical skills – in, say, welding, milling or
microscopy - to more junior colleagues informally, on-the-job. Occasionally, such training may be
formalised into short, in-house training courses. A second variety of in-house training that deals with
technical issues focuses on the many health and safety issues that arise in engineering departments and
involves training in to how to deal with hazardous materials and/or situations training (e.g. lasers,
radiation, lifting, etc.). Third, university staff development units usually offer a range of training courses
in non-technical skills centring on personal development and managerial skills, some of which may be
used by technicians who are moving into laboratory and departmental services manager roles.
The second major source of uncertificated training for established staff is equipment
manufacturers, who typically provide training for a small number of technicians from departments that
buy a new piece of kit from them as part of the purchase price (e.g. CNC machines). Having received that
training, the individuals in question pass it on to their colleagues as necessary via informal, in-house
training, so that the requisite skills are disseminated more widely through their home department. Such
vendor-supplied training can also be purchased independently of the equipment itself. The departments in
the sample considered here have used external providers to develop their technicians’ skills in a variety of
different areas, including computer-aided design, microwaves, welding, CATIA software for digital
product design, and the use of data acquisition devices and associated software like Lab View. Local
colleges may sometimes be used for uncertificated training (e.g. in welding).
Some limited use is made of training that is certificated in the sense of leading to formal
qualifications. 3 departments said that they had sent small number of established technicians – as distinct
from apprentices - to local further education colleges for certificated vocational training (leading to
NVQs, HNCs, and HNDs). 8 departments reported that they have supported small numbers of technicians
– typically just one or two per department – to take a degree. More often than not, the degree in question
is a BSc, though sometimes it is a Foundation degree (one department), sometimes an MSc or PhD (2
departments in each case). Typically, the technicians take their degrees part time, either at the local post1992 university or via the Open University, with their home department granting them day release, or
block release for OU residential summer courses, as appropriate and paying some or all of their fees.
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Interviewees also reported that little if any use is made of joint technician training either with
engineering departments in other universities or with industry. Only 3 departments had made any use of
the training offered by the technicians organisation, HEaTED.
7. BROADER HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ISSUES
Interviewees at three engineering departments indicated that the introduction of the common pay spine in
2005, and the associated job evaluation and grading process, had generated some discontent amongst
technical staff, some of whom felt that the outcome involved highly dissimilar jobs being given the same
grade. While discontent with such outcomes appears to have dissipated over time, it has been replaced in
the same departments by a new source of dissatisfaction, namely the frustration – referred to by
interviewees from 4 departments - that some technicians feel about having reached the top of the spine
segment associated with their grade and the limited scope they enjoy to take on new responsibilities in the
way required to develop their role so that re-grading is warranted. In the words of one technician, ‘you
cannot get re-graded and the whole process grinds to a half ... It’s dead men’s shoes.’
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APPENDIX 4: SUMMARY OF FINDINGS IN THE CASE OF PHYSICS DEPARTMENTS
1. DESCRIPTION OF CASES
The research on technical support in physics is based on case studies of 9 university departments,
including 8 pre-1992 and 1 post-1992 universities, and 2 non-university research laboratories. 15
interviews were conducted, involving 8 academics and 18 technicians/technical services managers. A
summary of the key attributes of the departments in the sample can be found in Table A4:
Table A4: Summary of the attributes of the sample of physics departments
Technicians Technical/Experimental
Academics Postdocs Undergraduates PGR
Officers
Mean
57
87
364
150
32
2
Maximum 132
200
812
345
80
11
Minimum 15
18
0
12
9
0
The two non-university physics laboratories employ around 650 and 1200 people, including scientists,
engineers and administrators as well as technicians. The total number of technicians is around 250 and
350 respectively.
The ratio of academics to technicians and technical officers varies from a low of 0.63 academics
per technician in one pre-1992 department to highs of 3.3 in the case of one pre-1992 university and 14.0
in the sole post-1992 university in the sample. If departments are weighted according to their size, as
measured by the number of academics they contain, then the average ratio is 2.8 academics per technician
across all 9 departments (falling to 2.1 academics per technician if the sole post-1992 university in the
sample is excluded from the calculation).55
A majority (7 out of 9) of the departments said that there had been significant reductions in the
number of technical staff over the past 10-15 years, either in absolute terms or relative to the number of
academics and students for whom support is required. These reductions were attributed to cuts in funding.
Despite falling number of technicians, none of the departments said that they currently faced serious
problems with providing adequate support for teaching and research. More specifically, none of the
departments indicated that a lack of technical resources had impacted detrimentally on the amount of
practical work undertaken by undergraduates. Nor, except perhaps on the margin, did most interviewees
indicate that a lack of technical support had led to a significant reduction in their department’s capacity to
conduct research.56 However, 4 departments did suggest that their technical staff were working at full
capacity, and that they struggled to provide adequate support when people were off sick or absent from
the department for other reasons. As one Head of Department put it, ‘We are at the limit of our technical
resource.’57
55
This does not appear to be substantially different from the a ratio of one permanent technician post for every 2.4 permanent academic posts
reported in a recently published overview of the finances of 14 university physics departments circa 2007-08 (IoP and RSC 2010: p. 12-13).
56
For similar findings, see IoP and RSC (2010: iii).
57
The paucity of spare technical capacity may have consequences for the kind of technician training that departments provide, for reasons that
will be discussed in Section 5 below.
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2. THE NATURE AND ORGANISATION OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT
The support of laboratory and engineering workshop technicians is essential for many branches of physics
research. While the amount, and the nature, of technical support required varies according to the precise
fields of research in which a department specialises - with space research and solid-state physics, for
instance, requiring considerably more technical support than theoretical physics - it is undoubtedly true
that academic physics as a whole is heavily dependent on the support provided by technicians. In
particular, many physicists use bespoke instrumentation, so that the ability of departments and nonuniversity research laboratories to develop high-quality, custom-built instruments is of paramount
importance for their success. Senior technicians also tend to take responsibility, along with an academic
colleague, for undertaking risk assessment and for ensuring that academics, PhD students and postdocs
comply with health and safety regulations when carrying out their research. Technicians on lower grades
will also tend to provide basic support for research and teaching, by working in stores, preparing basic
materials, disposing of waste, etc..
Departments typically have a variety of different types of research technician. These include both
mechanical and electronics workshop technicians, and also laboratory technicians working in a variety of
facilities, and on a range of tasks, such as technical drawing, lasers, microfabrication, cryogenics, high
field magnets, and MRI. In all but one of the cases considered here, technical support is organised
primarily at the department level, with some devolvement of control and responsibility for the provision
of highly specialised technical support to individual research groups. More specifically, 7 of the 9
university physics departments considered in this project have their own centralised departmental
mechanical and electronics workshops, manned by dedicated technicians.58 In some of the larger
departments, these central workshops may be supplemented by smaller, satellite workshops attached to
specific research groups and catering to the specific technical requirements of those groups, though on the
whole the use of such smaller workshops is diminishing as departments attempt to exploit the benefits of
economies of scale and cut costs. Those laboratory technicians who are allocated to particular facilities or
pieces of equipment that are used by a number of research groups - such as lasers, clean rooms, helium
liquification, and MRI - also tend to be managed at the departmental level. In contrast, day-to-day control
of the technicians who provide other, more specialised forms of technical support is often devolved to the
relevant research groups, which have often raised the funding for those technicians via external grants.
Research support in some departments is also provided by technical or experimental officers.
Technical officers in physics resemble technicians in possessing technical expertise but who are more
likely than technicians to specialise in the use of particular instruments or experimental techniques. They
also differ from technicians, and more closely resemble academics, in often playing a significant role in
the design of the experiments on which they work, in analysis of the empirical data produced by those
experiments, and also in the more general management of long-term research projects (in particular those
funded by rolling grants). Finally, technical and experimental officers are more likely than experienced
technicians to have a BSc or PhD. In some universities, the use of the terms ‘technical officer’ and
‘experimental officer’ appears to have ceased since the move to common pay spine in 2005. In others
cases, the use of those titles persists but only for those employees who already bore the relevant job title
in 2005. In such cases, the expectation is that no new appointments will be made to
experimental/technical officer positions and the use of those titles is expected to die out as the remaining
58
The two exceptions are as follows: one pre-1992 university shares its mechanical workshop with its university’s department of chemistry; while
the sole physics department in our sample that is situated in a post-1992 university has a small number of teaching technicians who operate as
part of a faculty-level pool, on which a variety of departments can draw, and who work in a shared, faculty-level workshop.
81
technical/experimental officers retire or move to other jobs. This diversity of practice helps to explain the
fact that, while there is a mean of 2 technical or experimental officers per department in the sample
considered for this study, this average conceals significant variation in the number of people bearing those
titles across the different departments: only 4 of the 9 university physics departments visited contained
people bearing the title of Experimental or Technical Officers; while no fewer than 11 technical officers
were found in just one large, research intensive department.
In carrying out their duties, research technicians and technical officers typically work closely with
their academic colleagues, drawing on their knowledge and understanding of engineering, electronics, and
physics in order to design, build, modify, test and operate the instruments and equipment that the
scientists need for the empirical part of their research. Such knowledge enables technicians not only to
operate standard equipment so that it satisfies the performance standards required by the scientists, but
also to modify existing equipment in order to perform new functions, and even to devise and construct
new instruments and experimental set-ups in order to meet novel technical challenges posed by
researchers.
In discussing those cases where scientists require bespoke instruments and new experimental
apparatus in order to generate the data required for the empirical side of their research, interviewees at a
majority of the physics departments in our sample were keen to point out that scientists do not usually
provide technicians with detailed descriptions, let alone complete technical drawings, of the relevant
equipment or apparatus. On the contrary, scientists typically involve their technicians in the early stages
of their research, when they have defined the scientific problem they are trying to address, established the
goals of their project, and identified the scientific principles that underpin it, but when they have only a
rough idea about the kind of equipment or apparatus required to achieve their research objectives.
Equipped with a broad sense of the objectives of the research, the technicians will draw on their
knowledge and practical expertise of engineering – and, more specifically, their understanding of what
particular tools and instruments can be used to achieve, their knowledge of the properties and
performance characteristics of materials, their skills in using computer-aided design packages, and their
general problem-solving skills - in order to develop an initial design for the requisite instrument,
electronic component, or experimental rig. The technicians will then discuss their suggestions with the
researchers, who may suggest changes, leading to a modified design. After a number of such discussions,
and possibly the production of a rough working model (e.g., using a rapid prototyping machine or 3D
printer), something that appears to be a workable design will emerge, at which point a prototype of the
relevant instrument, component, or piece of apparatus can be built.
What this account suggests is that the development of the instruments and other types of
equipment used in physics research is best viewed as an iterative process in which from the very early
stages of research projects technicians and academics engage in a dialogue about the best way to build the
objects required to give practical effect to the researchers’ ideas. As one technical services manager in a
physics department described it, the design of new instruments and experiments is ‘best done by
iteration’, whereby academics can involve the technical services from the start in a dialogue about what
they are trying to achieve and how to achieve it.59 In this way, technicians make an invaluable
contribution to solving the technical problems that arise in the course of research projects.
Indeed, not only is it the case that scientists typically do not present technicians with detailed
technical drawings of the equipment they need, a number of interviewees also suggested that it is
59
As we shall see below, this has important implications both for the kind of person who is suitable for a technician role and also for the
organisation of work within science and engineering departments and faculties.
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counterproductive when they try to do so, because the technicians’ superior knowledge of the practical,
engineering side of research means that they are better able than the scientists to design feasible, costeffective apparatus of the kind required to achieve the scientists’ goals. It is for this reason that, according
to another interviewee, ‘Technicians are [often] involved in projects right from the start, in the
[development of] the proposal’, participating in research team meetings when funding bids are being
developed and attending meetings with funding bodies to discuss the practical side of proposed, as well as
ongoing, projects.
The informal, iterative interaction between academics and technicians, as it might be termed, is –
according to one academic physicist - ‘priceless’ and is recognised in a number of ways. Perhaps most
notably, technicians’ contributions’ to research projects are often formally acknowledged by the authors
of the ensuing academic papers. Moreover, interviewees at 7 of the 9 physics departments in our sample
also said that technicians who made a substantial contribution to a research project, above and beyond
that normally expected of them, would sometimes be included as a named author on academic
publications. Inclusion as a named author was said to be most common in the case of papers focusing on
the design and operation of new scientific instruments, where – as noted above – technicians’ contribution
is most likely to be significant.
Another important aspect of technical support concerns support, not for research, but for teaching.
Teaching support technicians assist academics in putting on laboratory classes, primarily by preparing the
requisite materials and equipment and by remaining in the laboratories whilst the practicals are under way
in order to ensure that there are no breaches of health and safety regulations and to provide assistance
with equipment that malfunctions. Technicians may also help to design and test new practicals over the
vacation. In most (6 out of the 8) departments visited for this project, the technicians formally leave the
actual teaching – the demonstration of the experiments, the provision of instruction about how to use
equipment, and the discussion of the underlying physical principles – to PhD students and postdoctoral
researchers. In the words of one academic, teaching technicians ‘support the delivery of the core teaching
programme, [but] they don’t actually deliver it.’ In two cases, however, some of the teaching technicians
are formally involved in teaching, both in laboratory classes and also - in the case of one university - by
supervising final year projects. Moreover, interviewees suggested that even in those departments where
technicians do not provide formal tuition they may nevertheless do so informally, most notably by
teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate students how to use particular instruments and by
providing them with advice about how to design the objects and experiments required for their research
projects.
In most of the departments under consideration, there is a fairly sharp formal division of labour
between the technicians who provide research support and those who support teaching. About 20% of the
technicians in the departments in our sample have some formal involvement in teaching support, with
80% devoting themselves formally to research support alone. One concrete manifestation of this formal
division of labour is the fact that all of the university departments in our sample that take undergraduates
have technicians who specialise in supporting teaching. There is a mean of 4 such teaching-only
technicians per department in our sample. In 3 of the 8 departments, the division of labour between
research support and teaching support roles is stark, with there being no mixed roles whose occupants
formally provide both teaching support and research support. The other 5 departments supplement their
specialist teaching technicians with some mixed roles. There is an average of 3 such mixed posts across
those 5 departments. Overall, only around 8% of the technicians in our sample occupy such mixed roles,
underlining the sharp formal division between teaching and research support.
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In practice, however, this division is less pronounced than formal job descriptions suggest. In
particular, interviewees indicated that some of the technicians whose official duties centre exclusively on
the provision of research support also offer informal teaching support, perhaps most notably by assisting
undergraduates who are carrying out final year projects. This assistance may take a variety of forms,
depending on the nature of the project and technician in question. It may, for example, involve
technicians assisting with the design and fabrication of prototypes (in the case of engineering and
electronics workshop technicians), providing guidance in the use of particular pieces of equipment (in the
case of those technicians who specialise in the use thereof), or offering instruction in particular
experimental techniques (in the case of technicians who are embedded within research groups that host
undergraduate projects).
3. TECHNICIAN WORKFORCE:
QUALIFICATIONS
ORIGINS,
AGE,
TENURE,
CONTRACT
TYPE
AND
3.1. Origins
Most departments were able to offer rough estimates of the proportions of their current technical
workforce who were trained in-house and recruited externally. The principal source from which most of
the departments have obtained their technicians is the external labour market. More specifically, 7 of the 9
physics departments visited estimated that well over half (on average, 60-70%) of their current technician
workforce had been acquired externally (mostly from industry, but with a small contribution being made
by recruits from other university departments). The remaining 20-30% of the technical workforce in these
departments is composed of older workers who were trained in-house under old university traineeship
programmes, most of which ceased operation some 15-20 years ago.
There are exceptions to this general pattern. One university estimated that 75% of its physics
technicians came through an old in-house training scheme, while another indicated that around 40% of its
current technical workforce was home-grown. In the smaller of the two non-university research
laboratories, around 80% of the mechanical workshop technicians were home-grown via apprenticeships.
The larger of the two non-university research laboratories has continued to run a relatively large
apprenticeship programmes through the last decade and, as a result, around 50% of its current technicians
were trained in-house. In contrast, whilst it was the case that most of the physics departments considered
here used to have their own traineeship schemes for school leavers, almost all of them were shut down in
the late 1980s or 1990s, due to a combination of factors including: shortages of funding; a decline in
departments’ need for new technicians during a period when their technician workforces were being cut;
the poaching of newly qualified trainees by external employers; and the (then) high availability of
workers on the external labour market. The smaller of the two non-university research laboratories also
closed in traineeship scheme during that period, for similar reasons. Hence the fact that, in most of the
departments considered, a majority of the technical workforce has been recruited rather than grown inhouse.
However, as a later section will document, the availability of skilled recruits of the kind sought by
physics departments currently appears to be significantly lower than in the 1990s and early 2000s. And, as
we shall also see below, this change in the state of the external labour market has led to a revival of
interest in apprenticeship schemes for technicians.
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3.2. Age
The average age of the technicians in the departments and research laboratories visited for this project is
about 48, a figure which would be higher were it not for the fact that two of the larger university
departments, and one of the non-university laboratories, have implemented early retirement and voluntary
severance schemes within the past few years that have reduced the average age of their technicians. To
put this point slightly differently, around 55% of the technicians in the university departments considered
here are over 50 years of age. The relatively high average age of the technicians employed in physics
departments has led to concern about succession planning and, as we shall see below, has been one of the
catalysts for a revival of interest in apprenticeship training programmes in some departments.
3.3. Labour turnover and tenure
Turnover amongst established technicians is variously described as ‘low’, ‘very low’, and ‘effectively
zero’, with those departments and research laboratories who provided data reporting turnover rates of
under 5% per annum amongst their technicians. Consistent with this, the average length of service tends
to be high, with many technical staff having been in post for over 20 years. Indeed, the principal reason
why physics technicians leave universities is said to be retirement.
3.4. Contract type
Around 90% of the technicians in the 7 university departments for which data are available are on openended contracts. The greatest proportion of technical staff on fixed term contracts in any one of the
university departments visited for this study was around 37%.60
3.5. Qualifications
The majority of the technical staff who work in physics departments, and in the two non-university
physics research laboratories visited, have vocational qualifications in mechanical engineering and
electronics (e.g., HNCs, HNDs, City and Guilds, and Advanced Apprenticeships). Only a minority of
technical support staff - usually estimated at under 10% of the total technician workforce, though
amounting to 25% in the case of 2 university departments and 30% in a third - have BScs in physics or
engineering. Those people who have BScs are usually either technical/experimental officers, whose role
tends to demand the analytical skills and understanding of theoretical principles provided by a degree, or
– in 3 departments in particular – electronics technicians. In the latter case, the departments in question
indicated that a combination of the demands of the job and a paucity of people with relevant vocational
qualifications has led to a tendency to employee people with degrees to provide technical support in
electronics. The skills profiles of the departments in the sample are invariably said to be a good match to
the departments’ needs, though some departments and research laboratories said that they ideally they
would like to have more technicians with multiple or mechatronic skills.
4. RECRUITMENT
In seeking to recruit technicians, physics departments are typically looking for people with vocational
qualifications, usually acquired via an apprenticeship, and considerable industrial experience. Such
recruits are valued not only for their practical skills in machining and electronics but also for what a
number of interviewees referred to as their design or ‘problem-solving’ skills (that is, their ability,
60
These figures exclude any apprentices, all of whom are on fixed-term contracts for the duration of their apprenticeship.
85
developed during their time in industry, to modify and develop equipment in order to solve technical
problems). As one technical services manager who was involved in recruitment put it, alluding to the
informal interaction between technicians and researchers described above, ‘You need people who can
take an idea and develop it ... [who have] design skills.’ Or, in the words of an engineering workshops
manager from one of the non-university research laboratories, technicians ‘need breadth and versatility,
with problem-solving skills, so that they can work with little supervision.’
Consistent with this profile, recruits tend to be middle-aged men, usually with vocational
qualifications and considerable experience in industry. The relevant labour market is usually local or
regional rather than national, with recruits tending to come from the area in which the university is
located. Typically, recruits are attracted by the fact that working in a university offers more varied work,
greater autonomy, and superior job security and pensions, than do private sector technician jobs. These
intrinsic benefits of working in academia help to compensate for the fact that the wages offered by
universities are typically lower than those available in industry. Interviewees also observed that because
recruits tend to be older men who have paid off their mortgage and whose children have left home, they
are more able to afford to take the pay cut that is often involved in moving from industry to a university.
For the most part, and with the possible exception of electronics technicians, physics departments tend not
to recruit people with BScs to technician – as distinct from technical/experimental officer - posts, simply
because graduates tend not to have the practical skills and experience for which departments are looking.
Three of the university departments emphasised that even those recruits who have had a good
industrial apprenticeship and several years of experience may require additional ‘upgrade’ training in
order to be able to carry out some of their duties (e.g. making conical joints for ultra-high vacuum work,
precision welding and high-quality soldering of unusual materials, and using cryogenic equipment). The
need for such training - which is usually provided informally, on-the-job by more experienced colleagues
- arises because technical work of the kind just mentioned is so specialised that even experienced recruits
are unlikely to have had a chance to carry it out and acquire the relevant skills before arriving at the
university. It is in recognition of this point that interviewees from some of physics departments said that,
when recruiting for technician positions, they attempt to evaluate not only the existing skills of potential
recruits, but also their aptitude and attitude, in order to ascertain their ability and willingness to master the
new techniques – and also to engage in the problem-solving - required to support physics research. The
specialist nature of the skills required by departments also implies that it is important to try to retain
skilled workers once they have been trained in house. As one Head of Department put it, ‘You don’t want
a revolving door policy in technical support [because] once you lose those skills it’s very hard to rebuild
them’.
Having outlined the kind of person that physics departments would like to appoint to technician
roles, we shall consider the extent to which they are able to do so. Here, a majority of our interviewees
suggested that, in contrast to the 1990s and early 2000s, the picture is far from rosy. A majority of the
university departments (6 out of 9), and one of the two non-university research laboratories, reported a
low-to-moderate – and deteriorating - availability of skilled labour on the external market, as evidenced
principally by the fact that there had been occasions in the last few years when the field of applicants for
vacant technician posts was too poor to enable them to make an appointment, sometimes even after readvertising the job in question. Most, though not all, interviewees attributed such difficulties to the
relatively low wages paid by universities compared to those available in industry. The uncompetitive
salaries, coupled with the limited career prospects, were thought likely to deter young people in particular
from entering the university sector from private firms. Significantly, even in the case of those departments
86
where the supply of skilled labour is viewed as moderate – rather than low – there is sufficient concern
about the scope for acquiring skilled technicians externally for there to have been a revival of interest in
apprenticeship training schemes.
5. APPRENTICESHIPS
The past 5 years have seen a resurgence of interest in apprenticeship training schemes amongst university
physics departments, as technical services managers strive to find a way of continuing to provide high
quality technical support in the face of (i) an ageing workforce, with a significant number of technicians
due to retire in the next 5-10 years, and (ii) the limited availability of the right kind of workers on the
external labour market, given the wages that departments are able to pay. More specifically, of the 9
university departments visited for this project, 3 have either begun in the past three years – or are just
about to commence - an apprenticeship scheme for their physics technicians, while a fourth is currently
considering doing so. In addition, one of the two non-university research laboratories has a large, wellestablished apprenticeship programme.
The 3 university departments that have chosen to take on apprentices and the non-university
research laboratory have all adopted similar, though not identical, approaches to running their
apprenticeship programmes. In each case, the apprentices have been taken on under the auspices of the
government’s Advanced Apprenticeship scheme, and are studying for qualifications in engineering
(usually mechanical engineering, sometimes electronics engineering). Apprentices start at level 2,
studying for an ONC and an NVQ2, before moving on to work for a level 3 NVQ and an HNC.61 The offthe-job training required for the technical certificates is provided by a local further education college,
either via day release (in the case of two departments) or via block release for the first year of the
apprenticeship followed by day release thereafter (in the case of one department and the non-university
laboratory). The departments and laboratory provide the apprentices with the requisite on-the-job training
and work experience by rotating them through various laboratories and workshops.
In the case of the university departments, the number of apprentices taken on tends to be small,
usually just one or two per annum. The non-university research laboratory that continues to offer
apprenticeships has a larger programme, normally recruiting 6 trainees each year. Comparisons of
apprenticeship activity across employers and time are of course potentially clouded by differences in
skilled employment, with larger employers taking on more apprentices simply because they have a bigger
technician workforce to maintain. A simple way of allowing for such differences is to calculate the ratio
of the number of apprentices currently in training to the number of skilled employees within the relevant
occupation (in this case, technicians). This indicator, known traditionally as the apprentice–journeyman
ratio, can be used to compare the rate or intensity of training across employers. The intensity of training
averages about 3% across the three university departments that offer apprenticeships, and is about 6% in
the case of the non-university research laboratory.62
In selecting their apprentices, the university departments are looking for young people aged
between 16 and 18, who have GCSEs in English and, in particular, maths. Some departments set written
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Two departments suggested that level 4 skills are required for some technician work, especially the construction of precision instruments. Their
hope is that at least some apprentices will ultimately progress beyond an Advanced Apprenticeship to do an HND in order to acquire the requisite
skills.
62
One would expect the figure for the intensity of the apprenticeship training undertaken by university department to rise over time if those
departments, most of whom have only recently started taking on apprentices again, continue to do so and therefore ultimately have apprentices in
every year of their training programmes.
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and practical tests for shortlisted candidates. Departments report that they receive enough good applicants
to be able fill all the places they are offering. In all three cases, although the young people have a fixed
term contract of employment, coterminous with their apprenticeship, the departments hope and expect
that they will be kept on at the end of the training programme, subject to satisfactory performance. New
apprentices at the non-university research laboratory are usually aged between 18 and 20. Entrance
requirements are 4 GCSEs at grade C or above and maths at grade B. On the whole, the programme
attracts good applicants and, at under 10%, the drop-out rate is low.
All four organisations have passed on formal responsibility for organising the apprenticeship to
an external training provider (in three cases, a local further education college, in one a group training
association), though in some cases departments have had to work hard to ensure that the colleges deliver
the quality of support required for the apprenticeship programme to be a success. It is the external training
providers, rather than the departments and research laboratory, that hold the apprenticeship training
contract with the Skills Funding Agency and are in direct receipt of the government funding for the
apprentices. The government subsidy covers both the fees for the college courses required for the
technical certificate and key skills elements of the apprenticeship, and also the cost of the assessment of
the on-the-job training (NVQ). The departments and research laboratory are left, therefore, to cover the
(explicit) cost of the apprentices’ wages and the (implicit) costs of overseeing the scheme and providing
the on-the-job training. In the two cases for which data is available, salary costs are split between the
relevant department and the central university. Moreover, interviewees at two of the university
departments intimated that it was not long before apprentices were doing useful work around the
department, and that the time required for more experienced technicians to provide the on-the-job training
was not prohibitive, so that overall – while cost is undoubtedly a consideration - apprentices constitute
‘quite good value for money’. A similar view was expressed by representatives of the non-university
research laboratory, who noted that while apprenticeship training is not cheap, it is cost effective
nevertheless, because it delivers high quality technicians who are able to do the job required of them.
It is worth remarking that the three university physics departments that have taken on apprentices
are the biggest three in the sample, measured in terms of total technician numbers, and the first, second
and fourth biggest departments measured in terms of numbers of academics. The non-university research
laboratory is large indeed, with over 300 technicians in total. The scale of operations in these four cases is
undoubtedly one of the factors that drives and facilitates their involvement in apprentice training, because
it means that there is a sufficient demand for apprentices to make bearing the fixed costs of overseeing the
scheme worthwhile.
Three other university departments have seriously considered taking on apprentices, for the same
reasons as were noted above. In one department, a similar scheme to those described above was
developed that was supported by the department in principle but was not implemented in practice due to
financial concerns about the (rather generous) wages the newly qualified apprentices would receive. The
department may well revisit the possibility of taking on apprentices in the next couple of years, possibly
in conjunction with the department of engineering in the same university. In the second case, while
apprenticeship was viewed as ‘attractive in theory’ as a tool for dealing with the succession planning
problem, it was rejected, primarily for two reasons: (i) first, because of concerns about whether newly
qualified Advanced Apprentices would really have the skills required to do a job that proves taxing even
for technicians with many years of industrial experience; and (ii) second, because in a small department
like the one in question, where the technical staff are already working at full capacity, experienced
technicians simply do not have enough time to provide the on-the-job training required by the apprentices.
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The third department that considered the possibility of starting an apprenticeship scheme, only to reject it,
is situated in an area where a number of large manufacturing firms have shut down in the recent past,
yielding a relatively abundant supply of skilled workers whose availability significantly reduces the
department’s need to grow its own technicians. The department was also deterred from taking on
apprentices by the amount of time required for existing staff to administer the scheme and provide the onthe-job training and by the fear that newly qualified apprentices would be poached by local firms, as was
said to have happened all-too-often under the university’s old training scheme.
Only two physics departments had not seriously entertained the possibility of starting an
apprentice training programme. Significantly, neither had experienced the combination of an ageing
workforce and scarcity of suitable recruits that had prompted other departments to consider taking on
apprentices. In one, the average age of the technician workforce was estimated to be just 38, the lowest of
any of the physics departments considered here, so succession planning was not yet thought to be a major
issue. Nor had the department had much difficulty in finding suitable recruits from the external labour
market. In the other department, which is situated a post-1992 university where technicians are used
primarily to support teaching, it was thought that older recruits would be better than recent school-leavers
in dealing with students. This second department was also reasonably confident that it would be able to
pay enough to recruit suitable technicians when required to do so.
6. ONGOING TRAINING
Having considered apprenticeships, we move on now to explore the provision of ongoing training for
established technical staff. Although much of this training still appears to be provided in a rather ad hoc
fashion, as the requirements of research and teaching support dictate, the identification of training needs
is becoming increasingly systematic as more and more technical staff undertake personal development
reviews and appraisals. We start by considering uncertificated training, before moving on to training that
gives rise to formal qualifications.
A large amount of uncertificated, ongoing technician training is provided in-house by more
experienced members of staff, usually on-the-job but occasionally via short internal training courses in
specific techniques and in using certain pieces of equipment (e.g. lasers). Interviewees in both the
university departments and the research laboratories indicated that this is one of – if not the – most
important sources of training for established staff. Moreover, as noted earlier, given the practical and
highly specialised nature of some of the skills that technicians in physics are required to possess, such onthe-job training is probably the only cost effective way for technicians to acquire them. A second type of
uncertificated training is mandatory training designed to deal with the health and safety issues that arise in
physics departments (e.g. gas cylinder handling, lasers, radiation, etc.). Again, this kind of training is
usually provided in-house. Third, moving away from technical skills, university staff development units
offer the usual range of personal development and managerial training, some of which is used by
technicians, in particular those moving into laboratory manager and departmental services manager roles.
Equipment manufacturers constitute the major external source of uncertificated ongoing training.
Such training usually accompanies the purchase of new equipment and/or associated software, though it
can also be purchased independently of the latter. Perhaps most notably, 3 of the physics departments
visited for this study had recently refurbished their workshops and / or laboratories, and had introduced
several new pieces of equipment such as CNC machines and rapid prototypers (3D printers). The
technicians in those departments had all received extensive training from the manufacturers of those
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machines on how to programme and use them. Other examples of vendor-supplied training mentioned by
interviewees include training in vacuum technology from Edwards Vacuum Limited and Swagelok, and
in Labview graphical programming software from National Instruments. Interviewees were keen to
emphasise that, even though this training does not lead to a formal qualification, it is often intense and
high quality. Interviewees in two physics departments where a significant amounts of space research is
undertaken also reported that funding bodies such as the European Space Agency require technicians to
have taken certain external training courses (e.g. in ‘planetary protection’). Interviewees reported that
little use is made of joint training with departments in other universities - one exception is York
University’s annual 2-day training course in vacuum technology - and only two departments had made
any use of the training offered by the technicians organisation, HEaTED.
Departments also make some, albeit limited use of training that is certificated in the sense of
leading to formal qualifications. In a majority of the university departments (6 out of 9), there are one or
two technicians or technical/experimental officers who either have taken or are currently studying for a
BSc, usually either in physics, electronics, or engineering, whilst working as a technician. Typically, they
do so part time, either at the local post-1992 university or via the Open University, are given day release,
and have some or all of their fees paid by their home department. In a similar vein, both of the nonuniversity research laboratories have supported technicians who wish to do a degree. Indeed, in the larger
of the two, there are currently 3 technicians doing degrees and 4 doing foundation degrees. Little use
appears to be made of local further education colleges to provide certificated vocational training for
established – as opposed to apprentice - technicians (e.g. HNCs, HNDs). Of the university departments
visited, only two reported sending established on external, certificated vocational training courses. There
are some problems with the availability of college courses, with few colleges being willing to offer
courses (e.g. HNC electronics) given the relatively small numbers of people wanting to take them.
7. BROADER HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ISSUES
2005 saw the introduction of a new pay and conditions framework for all staff working in higher
education. Amongst other things, the new framework brought all staff – whether previously classified as
academic, academic-related, or non-academic staff – onto a single pay spine and provided for the
assessment of all posts. A majority (8 out of the 9) of the university departments indicated that the
introduction of the common pay spine, and the associated system of job evaluation, role analysis, and
grading had been viewed as fair by technical staff. Two departments in particular indicated that their
technical staff ‘came out very well’ at the end of the job evaluation process, the reason being that as the
number of technicians in those departments had declined over time the remaining technicians had taken
on extra responsibilities that were formally recognised only during the move to the common spine. As a
result, the job evaluation process led to them ending up with higher grades, and therefore higher pay, than
before.
However, as time has passed some problems appear to have emerged. The most oft-remarked
difficulty, noted by 4 departments, stems from the fact that the segments of the pay spine associated with
each grade are now shorter than they were prior to the introduction of the common spine. What that
implies, interviewees noted, is that people on a particular grade reach a pay ceiling earlier than they did in
the past. Having done so, they can secure pay increases only by taking on extra responsibilities. However,
especially given the relatively flat organisational structure in universities (with relatively few laboratory
manager, workshop superintendant and departmental services manager posts), the scope for taking on
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additional duties is quite limited, making it hard for people to ‘grow their roles’ in the way required for
upgrading. The consequent tendency for technicians’ pay to stagnate has led to some dissatisfaction
amongst technical staff.