Why tertiary education cannot build excellence on a disposable workforce, and what to do instead
Tertiary education has built its workforce on insecurity, casual teaching, fixed-term research, perpetual restructuring, and is now compounding it by cutting deeper in a funding squeeze. You cannot build world-class teaching, research or training on a workforce you treat as disposable. There is a way out, and it works for universities, vocational and private providers.
For institutional, academic & people leaders · Aotearoa New Zealand & Australia · 15 minute read
THE SHORT VERSION
Tertiary education's workforce problem is not, mainly, a shortage. It is precarity. Universities run a large share of their teaching on casual and fixed-term staff; vocational providers cannot lure ageing, casualised trainers from better-paid industry; and private providers churn through lean teams between intakes. On top of this structural insecurity sits a live funding crisis that has driven thousands of redundancies and constant restructuring. This paper argues that precarity is not free, and that the way through is to see, stabilise, develop and grow the capability an institution already holds, including the casual and fixed-term workforce it can barely see, using a skills-first operating model.
There is a hard truth here that especially applies in a downturn. An institution that cannot see its own capability cannot cut intelligently. It can only cut blindly, shedding the very teaching quality, research depth and institutional knowledge it exists to provide. Precarity and a hiring-and-firing reflex are two faces of the same blindness.
PART ONE · THE PROBLEM
For three decades, casual and fixed-term work has been not an accident of tertiary education but a deliberate cost strategy. In Australian universities, around 60 per cent of staff are in insecure employment, casual or fixed-term, and at some institutions casual academics deliver the bulk of undergraduate teaching. The Universities Accord named this plainly: high precarious employment undermines the quality of teaching and research and limits workforce capacity. This is the critical point. Casualisation is a legitimate industrial-relations grievance, which also degrades the core product, because you cannot build excellence on staff who have no security, no development and no path.
This structural precarity is compounded by recent financial shocks. In Australia, the pandemic, caps on international students, and higher visa fees cut student-visa applications by roughly 30 per cent, and by 2023 to 2024 around 70 per cent of the country's public universities were running deficits, up from just three in 2019. The sector shed close to 4,000 jobs in 2025, with more forecast. In New Zealand, falling enrolments pushed most universities into deficit, a government top-up failed to prevent several hundred redundancies across Otago, Victoria, Massey, Waikato and AUT, and the Tertiary Education Commission now requires institutions to hold a surplus. The reflex has been to cut, often deepest at the most precarious edge, the casual and fixed-term staff who are, in the sector's own language, the first shock absorbers.
It is worth being precise about the impact of this approach. When a casual workforce is invisible in the institution's own accounting, reported as full-time-equivalents rather than people, cuts fall on capability nobody has measured or could properly see. Institutions speak of shedding a few hundred FTEs; behind those numbers are thousands of individuals carrying real teaching and research. Cutting what you cannot see (amputation in the dark) is not a strategy.
Precarity runs through the whole sector, but it looks different by institution type. Solving it means treating these as three expressions of one condition.
Academics, many casual and fixed-term, researchers, professional staff. The casualised core.
Universities are where precarity is most entrenched and most consequential. A majority-insecure workforce does much of the teaching with little development, no security and almost no route to a continuing role; despite legislation to convert long-serving casuals, well under one per cent have been moved to ongoing employment. Wage-theft findings across the sector have laid bare how systematically the model relies on underpaid, insecure labour. The result is a brain drain of early-career researchers, a broken pipeline from PhD to permanent academic, and now redundancy rounds that strip out capability the institution cannot afford to lose and cannot easily rebuild. The deepest problem is visibility: an institution that reports people as FTEs cannot see, develop or protect the capability those people hold.
Polytechnics, Te Pūkenga, TAFEs. Industry-expert tutors and trainers, often casual and ageing.
Vocational education runs on people who know a trade or profession from the inside, and that is exactly who it cannot attract or keep. The trainer workforce is ageing, with nearly half over fifty, highly casualised, and paid less than teachers elsewhere, so an experienced tradesperson earns more staying on the tools than moving into teaching. Australia needs thousands more VET teachers within five years even as demand surges through fee-free initiatives. In New Zealand, the disestablishment of Te Pūkenga and the rebuild into regional polytechnics has layered profound instability on top, with around 855 roles lost and campuses closed. The core challenge is a pipeline one: how to bring industry experts into qualified teaching, and develop and keep them once there, rather than burning through casual staff.
PTEs and RTOs. Lean teams of trainers and assessors. Agile but exposed.
Private training establishments and registered training organisations are leaner and more market-driven, which is a strength and a vulnerability. They run on small teams, often contractor-style, carry a heavy compliance load under the quality regulators, and are highly exposed to enrolment and international-student volatility, the same visa changes that hit the public sector hit them harder. Precarity here shows up as high churn and a staffing model built around the next intake rather than a stable, developing workforce.
| Dimension | Universities | Vocational providers | Private providers |
|---|---|---|---|
| The workforce | Academics (many casual & fixed-term), researchers, professional staff | Vocational tutors and trainers, often from industry | Trainers and assessors, lean teams |
| The defining pressure | Casualisation and a broken academic pipeline | Ageing trainers you cannot lure from better-paid industry | Thin margins, compliance load, enrolment volatility |
| How precarity shows up | A teaching precariat the institution cannot even see | Casual, ageing trainers and constant restructuring | High churn and contractor-style staffing |
| What's missing | Secure pathways and visibility of casual capability | A pipeline from industry into qualified teaching | Development and continuity beyond the next intake |
The casual model looks cheap on a spreadsheet, which is why it has endured. But the true costs sit off that spreadsheet: teaching quality eroded by staff with no time or support to develop, research continuity broken as early-career people leave, institutional knowledge walking out the door with every contract that is not renewed, and a reputation for insecurity that deters the very talent the sector competes globally to attract. Wage-theft liabilities have added hundreds of millions in real, on-balance-sheet cost. Precarity is a loan against the future of the institution, and the interest is compounding.
Casual and fixed-term staff are treated as invisible and disposable.
A recurring finding across sector and union reviews of academic work
The single root, across every institution type: most providers cannot see the capability they already hold. The casual and fixed-term staff who do much of the teaching, the industry expertise sitting in a sessional trainer, who is qualified and current for what, who could be developed or stabilised, who is at risk of leaving, all of it is hidden behind FTE accounting, scattered contracts and a few people's memories. You cannot stabilise, develop, deploy, grow, or even responsibly cut capability you cannot see. In a sector both casualising and restructuring at once, that blindness might be the easiest thing it can address.
THE TURN
The reframe is to stop seeing the workforce as a variable cost to be flexed up and down, and start seeing capability as a core asset an institution needs to build and deploy. That does not mean an institution cannot change shape, particularly under financial pressure. It means it should do so with its eyes open, protecting and redeploying capability rather than shedding it blind, and building on stability rather than relying on the next wave of casuals.
That turns the workforce question from a cost question into a capability question. Casualising and cutting treat people as interchangeable units; a skills-first model treats them as capability to be seen, developed and grown. In tertiary education that approach has a particular payoff: the same record of skills, qualifications and currency you build to develop and stabilise people is the record you need to assure teaching quality and satisfy the regulators. The compliance burden and the capability engine become one system. That is what TalentJam is built to do.
PART TWO · THE SOLUTION
TalentJam is a skills intelligence platform built on a continuous loop. Skills feed Performance, Performance feeds Growth, and Engagement runs through all of it. The four disciplines apply across all three institution types; what changes is which one carries the most weight. Together they do something tertiary education badly needs: they make the invisible precarious workforce visible and developable, and thereby turn capability from something an institution sheds into something it builds.
TalentJam builds a living capability profile for every person, continuing, fixed-term and casual alike, so the people behind the FTE numbers finally become visible: who actually teaches what, what research and industry expertise the institution holds, whose qualifications and currency are up to date, and where the genuine capability and single points of failure sit. In universities it surfaces the casual capability hidden in the accounts; in vocational providers it captures the industry expertise and dual-professional currency of trainers; in private providers it holds the compliance and assessor currency the regulators demand. And when an institution must change shape, it is the difference between cutting surgically and cutting blind.
Capability profiles, including casuals / Qualification & currency tracking / Research & industry expertise mapping / Workforce visibility for restructures
Casual and fixed-term staff are routinely cut out of the development, feedback and recognition that permanent colleagues receive, often expected to upskill in unpaid time. TalentJam makes light, skills-anchored development and verifiable currency native, and extends it to the whole workforce, not just the tenured. That lifts teaching quality where most of the teaching actually happens, supports the move from provisional to full status for those pursuing it, and gives academic and programme leaders the means to develop their people rather than merely roster them. Developing the people who do the work is not a luxury an institution drops in a downturn; it is how the work stays good enough to attract students at all.
Development for all staff / Teaching-quality currency / Supervision & review / Programme-leader enablement
Chronic uncertainty, restructuring fatigue and the sense of being disposable are corroding wellbeing and driving talent abroad. TalentJam's engagement capability gives institutions low-friction listening and structured recognition that surfaces a disengaging researcher or a burning-out trainer while there is still time to act, rather than reading it in a resignation or a competing offer from overseas. In a sector haemorrhaging early-career researchers and not always able to lure trainers from industry, holding on to the people you have, and making them feel seen, is the difference between rebuilding and unravelling.
Pulse listening / Recognition / Brain-drain early-warning / Retention through change
This is the pillar that breaks the trap. The pathways tertiary education most needs, casual to continuing academic, early-career researcher to established academic, industry expert to qualified vocational trainer, all require deliberate development, and all are currently left to chance or blocked entirely. TalentJam maps them explicitly and ties each step to the capability and qualification it requires, so the conversion that fewer than one per cent of casuals achieve becomes a managed pathway, and the tradesperson the VET sector cannot attract has a supported route in through recognition of prior learning. That rebuilds the pipelines the sector has hollowed out, and gives precarious people a reason to stay and invest.
Casual-to-continuing pathways / Early-career researcher development / Industry-to-trainer routes / Recognition of prior learning
Most institutions already own fragments of this: an HR system that sees current staff, a qualifications register, an LMS, an engagement survey that people may or may not act on. They sit in silos, and the precarious workforce falls through every gap between them. The loop is the point. Capability data makes the whole workforce visible. Performance informed development lifts quality where the teaching happens. Engagement holds the people you cannot afford to lose. Growth rebuilds the pipelines precarity broke, which reduces the dependence on an endless churn of casuals, which stabilises and improves the institution, which feeds the next turn. Each pillar makes the others work harder, and the compounding is what turns a disposable workforce into a durable one.
THE STRATEGIC CASE
This is the argument that matters most to a vice-chancellor, a chief executive or a council, and it is the slowest to land because it runs against thirty years of instinct. The institutions that emerge strongest from this period will not be the ones that casualised hardest or cut deepest. They will be the ones that could see their capability, stabilise the people who carry their teaching and research, and grow their own academics and trainers, while competitors hollowed themselves out one redundancy round at a time. In a global contest for students, researchers and reputation, a stable and developing workforce is not an overhead to be minimised. It is the product.
An institution that can see capability across its whole workforce, protect and redeploy it through change rather than shed it, and grow its pipeline of academics and trainers, reduces its dependence on the precarity that is quietly degrading it. It also gains what no restructure can deliver: the data to plan and shape its workforce based on the capability it holds, rather than the alternating vacancies and over-supply it lurches between. That is a longer build than a redundancy round, and a harder conversation than a hiring freeze. It is also the only one that compounds.
IN PRACTICE
Consider a university facing a deficit and a restructure, a large casual teaching workforce it reports only as FTEs, early-career researchers it is quietly losing overseas, and a leadership team about to make cuts with very little visibility of what it is actually cutting. Here is how the loop changes the trajectory.
From cutting blind to building deliberately
→ Quarter one. Everyone, including casual and fixed-term staff, gets a capability profile, and for the first time the institution sees the people behind the FTEs: who teaches what, where the research and industry expertise sits, whose qualifications are current, and which casuals are in fact carrying core, ongoing work.
→ Quarter two. The restructure proceeds on the basis of capability rather than guesswork, protecting and redeploying critical teaching and research capability instead of shedding it blind. An engagement signal keeps an early-career researcher a competitor abroad was courting.
→ Quarter three. Several long-serving casuals carrying ongoing teaching are moved onto a managed path to continuing roles, and two are supported toward the development they had always been denied. The institution starts converting precarity into stable capability.
→ Year two. Workforce planning and quality assurance run from the same system. The institution is smaller but not hollowed, its core capability intact and visible, its pipelines being rebuilt, and its reliance on an invisible casual underclass falling. It changed shape with its eyes open.
The same loop turns a blind restructure into a deliberate one, keeps the researchers it can least afford to lose, and begins converting precarity into capability. That is the point of facing the trap with a consistent, connected model rather than another round of cuts.
THE TIMING
Two forces are colliding right now. The structural precarity is decades deep, and the acute funding crisis is forcing the very restructuring that does most damage when an institution cannot see its capability. International-student revenue is volatile and politically contested in both countries, the vocational system in New Zealand is being rebuilt from the ground up, and every institution is being asked to do more with a workforce it has spent years destabilising. The reflex to cut and casualise harder is strongest exactly when it is most dangerous.
The institutions that come through the next decade in better shape will not be the ones that flexed their workforce hardest. They will be the ones that could see, stabilise and grow the capability they already had, changing shape deliberately and rebuilding on something more solid than the next contract, while the rest of the sector cuts blind and recasualises. That is an advantage no funding cycle can take away.
See your capability. Stabilise it. Grow it.
TalentJam gives universities, vocational and private providers a live picture of the capability inside their whole workforce, casual and continuing alike, and the loop to develop, retain and grow it, so change is something you do with your eyes open. To see what it looks like for you, visit www.talentjam.io to book a walkthrough.
SOURCES & NOTES
National Tertiary Education Union analysis and the Australian Universities Accord final report (2024 to 2025): rates of casual and fixed-term employment, the impact of precarity on teaching and research quality, and casual-to-continuing conversion rates. Sector and academic analysis (The Conversation, Times Higher Education, peer-reviewed studies, 2024 to 2026): insecure-work estimates, wage-theft findings, early-career-researcher brain drain, and the FTE-versus-headcount gap. Reporting on Australian university redundancies and the international-student caps under Ministerial Direction 111 and visa-fee changes (2024 to 2026). New Zealand reporting on university deficits and redundancies across Otago, Victoria, Massey, Waikato and AUT, Tertiary Education Commission surplus expectations, and the disestablishment of Te Pūkenga and rebuild into regional polytechnics (2023 to 2026). Jobs and Skills Australia VET Workforce Blueprint and related analysis (2025): VET teacher shortages, the ageing and casualised trainer workforce, pay relativities, and projected demand. Several figures are estimates, projections or modelled and are described as such; precarity rates vary by institution and by whether fixed-term staff are included. Figures cited as approximate or as ranges reflect variation across published studies, methods and dates.