Australia’s tertiary education workforce, comprising skills training and higher education, is central to our modern economic transformation. This is the workforce that will be tasked with helping students, communities and businesses adapt to technological, task-based, knowledge, demographic and labour market change. It is also the same workforce that tackles reams of regulatory and compliance change across jurisdictions.
Yet, often when discussing our tertiary education workforce the conversation and analysis is narrow and focused on trainers and assessors alone. While a vital cohort of the tertiary workforce, we need to expand the conversation and analysis beyond trainers and assessors to include the complex ecosystem of professionals required to design, govern and sustain high quality training systems is detrimental to the system in its entirety.
More plainly, we must walk and chew gum at the same time.
Skills and knowledge systems operate in an environment where core job requirements shift and evolve quickly. The ‘shelf life’ of skills is shortening, and continuous upskilling is the norm rather than the exception.
As a result, the expectation on training providers is to be agile, industry responsive, data informed and to combine flexible delivery with robust quality assurance. For their part in this, trainers and assessors are the most visible element, responsible for interpreting standards, maintaining industry currency and supporting diverse learners, often while juggling validation, materials development and professional development obligations.
The effectiveness of their interpretation and their ability to deliver an excellent student and institutional experience is fundamentally shaped by the wider institutional capability that surrounds them.
Behind every registered, quality assured and compliant program, there is a network of financially and learner centred specialists, whose work is largely invisible to learners and policymakers, and in some cases to regulatory agencies. Compliance and quality staff translate regulatory frameworks, design internal assurance systems and monitor risks so that training remains credible to students, regulators, business as the employer and to the public.
Finance teams model investment and costing flows over time, manage cash flow and, and reconcile the tensions between affordability, sustainability and innovation in program design. Human resource professionals plan and manage the broader workforce profile, ensuring that recruitment, induction, performance development and industrial arrangements support the right mix of capability across teaching and non teaching roles.
These functions are not auxiliary or subordinate, they are mission critical. Any discussion about the tertiary education workforce that does not have a focus on these roles is likely to be another half-baked tertiary policy cake.
These roles are fundamental to whether skills systems can scale delivery, partner with industry and respond to emerging priorities such as digital transformation and inclusion. For skills training, research shows that compliance and quality roles are distributed across leadership, administration, student support and corporate roles, reinforcing that workforce planning must consider the whole organisational architecture rather than a single occupational group. Strategies to build a resilient workforce therefore need to invest in leadership pipelines, regulatory literacy, data and digital capability, and cross functional collaboration alongside traditional trainer development.
Any focus on reframing the tertiary education workforce is likely to mean a reframing of investment models and accountability settings so the full range of roles essential to quality are valued, not only those standing at the front of the classroom.
For the Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia, skilling the tertiary education workforce is not a catchphrase. Rather, better recognition of the comprehensive nature of the tertiary education workforce, and how we can work collaboratively to ensure ongoing recognition and skilling is a core element of our future national prosperity.
Felix Pirie is the CEO of the Independent Tertiary Education Council of Australia (ITECA).
The Koala thanks Felix and ITECA for permission to publish this piece, which first appeared in the ITECA Newsletter (27/1/26).
