Developing Professional Staff in Universities under Quality Assurance Systems

Human resource capacity has become a critical issue for contemporary universities in enabling them to deliver multiple agendas in complex environments (Gordon & Whitchurch, 2007). In recent years, many governments have proceeded with deregulation and developed schemes to assure the quality of higher education. Today, universities have a greater autonomy under the new quality assurance systems but are, at the same time, required to be more accountable vis-à-vis their fund providers and other stakeholders, particularly the governments and other public or semi-public funding organisations. Furthermore, universities compete more and more globally with each other and with other knowledge providers. Not only academic staff but also administrators and other administrative and academic support staff members need to be more responsive to social demands and some of them are required to be professionalised1 in certain functional areas, sometimes involving a blurring of the traditional boundaries of staff – academic and non-academic – in order to ensure the efficiency and optimise universities’ outcomes. This article considers issues and challenges in human resources, particularly in professionalisation of non-academic staff under new quality assurance systems.