Planning is under way to prevent a future staffing shortage across New Zealand universities as traditional sources for academic staff dry up at the same time as a large proportion of the academic workforce retires.

The Academic Workforce Plan: Towards 2020 is a collaborative project across the eight New Zealand universities. It has received funding under the Tertiary Education Commission's Priorities for Focus Fund and is an initiative of the Human Resources Committee of the New Zealand Vice Chancellors' Committee. This group has appointed a steering committee to lead the project.AWP-2020 steering committee chairman and University of Otago Human Resources Director Kevin Seales says the eight universities share concerns that as New Zealand moves towards 2020, universities will face significant difficulties in maintaining an effective and efficient academic workforce. These concerns are at the heart of the project.

He says the traditional off-shore sources of academic staff (replacements and new areas of study/research) are decreasing and New Zealand staff are being attracted out of the sector and offshore.

During this same period members of the existing academic workforce will be retiring at a higher rate than ever before experienced.

Due to the changing demographic profile in New Zealand this workforce will need to include a significantly greater proportion of Maori and Pacific staff than at present.

"With this situation in mind the overall aim of the project is to develop a workforce plan that quantifies the supply of and demand for academic staffing within New Zealand's universities and identifies strategies to address any issues towards 2020", says Mr Seales.

A significant component of the project will be the collection and analysis of demographic information about the academic workforce from all the universities. The project will need to analyse this data across a variety of dimensions including gender, ethnicity, academic discipline, and age so that all significant gaps can be identified between forecasted demand and supply. The steering committee has contracted Business and Economic Research Limited (BERL) to do this work.

However, demographic information about the universities' academic staffing is currently difficult to obtain with no single body accountable for its collective integrity.

"We believe this will be the single biggest challenge for the project", says Kevin Seales.

The project will also be supported by an advisory group consisting of academic staff members from each university, and the Universities' HR Information Expert Group, which will attempt to overcome the information and data issues that could be challenging.

A subsequent project will be considered which looks at planning issues related to the general non-academic staff workforce.