After a major review of staff statistics during 2025, HESA plans to reintroduce and alter mandatory workforce reporting for universities.
Technical staff data will be collected (alongside professional and operational staff) which is a major shift in recognising the strategic importance of technical professionals in the higher education workforce.
These changes are expected to come into effect from the 2028/29 academic year.
Redefinition welcome
This change is one the UK Institute for Technical Skills & Strategy actively supports, and has long been championed through the TALENT Commission report and Technician Commitment initiative.
Technical professionals will no longer be badged as “non-academics”, but not before a clearer definition of a technician is confirmed and guidance is supplied to the sector.
Moving back to mandatory reporting of “non-academics” isn’t just a U-turn; this change means that technical professionals will be (rightly) reflected in workforce data, which can help future-proof the aging workforce.
Whilst many may see this as a short-term data burden, there is long-term value in better understanding the demographics and roles of the technical workforce to advance knowledge and shape future skills policy.
Understanding technical professionals better
It’s no surprise that the 2025 HESA staff statistics consultation raised the ongoing challenge of how to define technical staff. Technical professionals have long been poorly understood at a system level. Job titles vary widely, roles are often classified differently between institutions, and the specialist skills that these experts bring are not captured consistently.
HESA has plans to refine this and provide accompanying guidance ahead of data reporting changes. This will no doubt be a welcome aid for universities who employ tens of thousands of technical professionals working across engineering, digital, laboratory, creative and research infrastructure roles, but data on this workforce remains fragmented and inconsistent. Job titles vary widely, roles are often classified differently between institutions, and the specialist skills that technical staff bring are rarely captured in a meaningful or comparable way.
Policymakers and sector bodies still struggle to answer fundamental questions about technical professionals which is a challenge given the significant impact technical roles have on curiosity-driven research, world-class higher education teaching, and alignment with the government’s IS-8 growth sectors. This makes it difficult to develop an accurate picture of the UK’s technical workforce, including its size, composition, age profile and distribution of skills. As a result, strategic decisions about workforce development, investment, and policy interventions are often made in the absence of robust evidence.
Despite this, targeted policy interventions such as the Growth and Skills Levy and T Levels do offer promise and potential to create a stronger technical skills pipeline, helping address workforce sustainability challenges. The UK Institute for Technical Skills & Strategy is supporting long-standing structural issues of unclear and inconsistent technical career pathways through a collaborative initiative with 27 universities part of the Technical Career Pathways Lab.
Joining forces
Another change to be implemented by HESA is increasing the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes to collect four-digits. This will provide more detailed information on the specialist knowledge, techniques, and skills that underpin technical occupations and better capture the diversity of roles in higher education.
The recently published UK Standard Skills Classification, developed by Skills England, provides a timely opportunity to address long-standing gaps in how technical roles are understood.
By focusing on skills underlying the four-digit Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes, the framework offers a consistent way to identify technical roles.
For the higher education sector, this creates the potential to map technical skills more consistently across disciplines, facilities and functions, reflecting the practical contributions technical staff make to learning, teaching, research and innovation.
This skills-based approach is particularly valuable in the higher education sector where technical roles are often multifaceted and evolve in response to emerging technologies, teaching and research priorities, and institutional needs. It will also allow a more nuanced understanding of technical capability that goes beyond job titles and organisational structures.
Used effectively, the classification could support better alignment between institutional workforce data and national skills policy, helping to identify transferable expertise, emerging skills gaps and future training needs.
It also offers the opportunity to connect technical roles in higher education more clearly to the wider skills system, supporting transferability across sectors and clearer progression pathways for technical professionals.
Over the long-term, this framework has the potential improve the recognition of technical careers and stronger alignment with education, research, and innovation policy.
Data-informed policy interventions
Improved data is essential to tackling current and future technical skills shortages, and the sector is definitely moving in the right direction to achieve this.
The planned return of mandatory HESA workforce reporting from 2028-29 provides a window of opportunity to improve how technical professional data is captured and understood within sector datasets.
Aligning HESA reporting with the UK Standard Skills Classification, through the capture of four-digit SOC codes for technical professionals, would allow technical skills and capabilities to be analysed consistently across institutions over time.
More robust and consistent data would enable earlier identification of emerging skills needs, including those linked to emerging government priorities and deliver the UK’s long-term research and development ambitions. It would also support targeted interventions in training, recruitment, and skills development, ensuring that technical capacity evolves in line with Skills England’s national priorities.