Professional Services Staff: The Invisible Majority in Universities

Professional Services Staff – A new report says the people who keep UK universities running now make up the majority of the workforce, yet years of restructuring, eroding pay and missing career paths are taking a heavy toll on them.

The invisible majority: Professional and support staff and the future of UK higher education, published by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) in partnership with AHEP Consulting, looks at everyone who works in a university outside an academic contract. That includes research managers, technicians, data and IT specialists, finance and contracts teams, estates, student support and administration.

Together they make up 56% of the UK higher education workforce, 255,678 full-time equivalent staff in 2023, and account for 48% of the total pay bill. Yet the report argues they remain largely invisible in national data, in policy and in how institutions plan for the future.

The findings draw on two surveys of 450 staff carried out over the winter of 2025/26, an analysis of 50 institutional annual reports, and interviews with senior professional services leaders.

Why this matters for research

Very little research happens without professional services staff. Grant applications, costings, ethics and governance submissions, contracts, data management, lab operations and participant recruitment all lean on colleagues whose work rarely appears in a paper’s author list. When those teams are cut, restructured or stretched too thin, researchers feel it quickly.

The report notes that outsourcing works reasonably well where outputs are easy to see, such as catering and cleaning, but much less well where they are hard to verify, including research administration, IT and student support. It also points to the Technician Commitment, now backed by more than 140 signatories, as an example of what sector-wide recognition of an overlooked workforce can achieve. For those in research support roles, our peer-to-peer careers advice for research managers covers some of the same ground.

Change is landing hardest on the lowest paid

Almost two-thirds of respondents (65%) said change and uncertainty over the past five years had affected them negatively. In Scotland, where Universities Scotland calculates that 17 of 19 institutions face real-terms cuts to teaching funding in 2025/26, the figure rose to 81%, although the survey cannot directly link the two.

The impact was sharply divided by pay. Among staff earning under £40,000, 79% reported negative effects, compared with 51% of those earning £60,000 or more. Younger staff, those on fixed-term contracts and those aged over 60 were also more likely to have been harmed. Because lower-paid roles are disproportionately held by women and ethnic minority staff, the report warns these impacts fall on groups already facing persistent pay gaps.

Pay itself is a pressure point. Four in ten professional and support staff earn under £30,000, and the bottom two points on the national pay spine sit below the Real Living Wage. The report also cites tracking showing 110 institutions in redundancy or restructuring processes as of July 2026, with more than 12,000 job cuts announced in the previous 12 months. If that is close to home, our blog on facing redundancy in academia may help.

Restructuring is not cheap either. The report describes consultancies and change managers adding cost, new structures that sometimes add management layers rather than remove them, and a dip in productivity while change is under way.

High intensity, but still meaningful work

Three-quarters of respondents described their work as fragmented, reactive and deadline-driven, carried out at sustained high intensity, and the report finds elevated levels of burnout, depression and anxiety. Many described roles that had grown without any change to their grading or accountability.

Despite this, 60% rated their day-to-day work as good or very good. Staff found meaning in making a difference to students and colleagues, in feeling recognised and in having some autonomy. The authors caution that this goodwill should not be mistaken for evidence that the current level of pressure is sustainable.

Relationships are also under strain. More respondents said team culture and communication had worsened over the past five years (43%) than said they had improved (31%). Many described a divide between academic and professional staff that shapes whose expertise and time are valued.

Careers without a ladder

Academic careers come with well-understood routes, from lecturer to senior lecturer to professor, and published promotion criteria, however imperfect. Professional services careers largely lack an equivalent. Progression often depends on a vacancy appearing above you, and flatter structures after restructuring have narrowed the options further.

Training budgets are often among the first savings to be made, which the report argues becomes a false economy when institutions then buy in skills at a higher cost. Workload also makes it hard for staff to step away to learn. Management quality is uneven too: only 60% of managers say they have the training and information they need, and 59% say they have the time.

Technology is not the shortcut it is often sold as. The report finds that promised savings from new digital systems rarely materialise when systems are bought without redesigning the processes around them or training the people who use them.

What the report recommends

For universities, the report sets out five principles:

• Design jobs that work, so roles match the responsibilities people actually carry
• Implement digital systems with staff, not to them, with early involvement, proper training and redeployment rather than redundancy for those who automate their roles
• Develop managers who can lead people, manage change and run services well
• Build career frameworks that recognise lateral moves, project leadership and specialist expertise, with protected training budgets and low-cost options such as shadowing, job rotation and mentoring
• Create fair and transparent reward, including total reward statements, which only 9% of providers currently issue

For government and sector bodies, it makes five recommendations:

• An independent review of the HERA job evaluation framework, used by 70% of UK universities and structurally unchanged since 1995
• Separate gender pay gap reporting for professional services and academic staff
• Compulsory reporting of all non-academic staff to HESA, extended to subsidiary and outsourced staff. Only 125 of 228 providers reported on all non-academic staff in 2023/24
• A What Works programme for higher education workforce development
• Removing the VAT barrier that makes shared services more expensive than in-house delivery

Investing in everyone who makes a university work

HEPI’s Chief Executive, Nick Hillman, put it simply: “Professional services staff keep higher education institutions running.”

The report’s central argument is that universities facing financial pressure keep reaching for the same tools, cutting training, restructuring and buying systems, and that these often undermine the very capability institutions need to get through hard times. Its alternative is strategic investment in people: better-designed jobs, real career paths, capable managers and fair pay.

Researchers have spent years arguing that a healthy research culture has to look after the people in it. This report is a reminder that the same applies to the colleagues who make the research possible in the first place.