Now hiring: staff members at a college near you.
At scheduled sessions, happy hour chats and informal dinner conversations, a common theme popped up over and over again at this week’s National Association of College and University Business Officers conference: colleges are seriously struggling to hire and retain employees.
The conference, held outside Denver, featured a number of sessions focused on staffing challenges in a new era of work reshaped by the coronavirus pandemic. Common issues include employees leaving for better pay, increased competition from the corporate sector, demands for remote work and rigid hiring policies that limit institutions from recruiting and retaining talent even as vacancies linger.
The Problems
Higher education, like many industries, pivoted to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many institutions shut down and shifted classes online. But while most have returned to a…
