Despite the diversity of entry points into academia, little research exists examining the experiences and impact of precarious employment at different life stages. Drawing on interviews with 19 academics employed casually or on fixed-term contracts in Australian universities, this paper illustrates how precarious employment is experienced at…

Early career academics face a rapidly changing higher education sector and too little is known about what helps them flourish in the profession. This paper responds to that gap by reporting research undertaken in a single or intrinsic case study of one Australian university. We invited participation from a full cohort of 1019 academics in one…

The "Developing Indigenous Early Career Researchers Project" is a three-year longitudinal study funded by the Australian Research Council that ran from January 2020 to December 2022. Its main focus was to investigate the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous Early Career Researchers working in universities across Australia. This…

This article reports on the findings of a study that explored the benefits and challenges for women of working at an Australian regional university in early 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines whether living and working at a regional university with dispersed campuses presented particular challenges for women and whether it had an…

This article presents an adaptation of an arts-based research method usually reserved for child-focused research to examine organizational processes. We developed Draw, Write, Reflect (DWR), advancing a known method, Draw and Write, for investigating phenomena relating to child participants, to explore a new context: adults engaging in academic…

Learning to teach science out-of-field (OOF)--teaching science without the required qualifications or specializations--raises a number of challenges for teachers. This paper uses a spatial-temporal lens to examine teachers' experiences of learning to teaching science subjects OOF over time. The analysis draws on longitudinal interviews with OOF…

The higher education (HE) landscape continues to grow in complexity; thus, there is a need to improve the understanding of leadership in this context. This action research (AR) study was undertaken in a multi-disciplinary context of an Australian university to develop and evaluate an action learning (AL) project promoting leadership practice. An…

To date, there has been little examination of those who complete training in male-dominated sectors and continue to work in these sectors within regional Australia. Therefore, in this preliminary qualitative study, we examine the attraction and retention issues of women entering male-dominated trades within regional NSW. This paper reports on…

There is general consensus that vocational education and training (VET) faces a number of workforce problems, including the ageing of VET teachers, the high level of casualisation, the need to increase the capacity of trainers, and the maintenance of industry currency. These issues, along with the need for the VET sector to respond to critical…

There is a lack of distinction and definition around how the vocational education and training (VET) sector in Australia might effectively recruit and retain suitably qualified teachers, trainers and assessors. The logic is clear: in order to enable and develop an immediate pool of competent and qualified workers for new and developing industries,…

The rapid re-expansion of agriculture following a decade of drought highlighted long-standing unresolved issues in the Australian agriculture workforce. This paper investigates the career paths of existing farmhands, through a theoretical lens to increase our understanding of career pathways on agriculture. Semi-structured interviews were…

The McDonaldization of higher education refers to the transformation of universities from knowledge generators to rational service organizations or "McUniversities". This is reflected in the growing dependence on a casualized academic workforce. The article explores the extent to which the McDonaldization thesis applies to universities…

This study was aimed at identifying the critical interactions within work environments that support the development of early career academics as researchers in institutions with lower order research profiles, that is, environments that differ from research-intensive universities. Ten early career academics, five from Australia and five from the…

Reliance on teacher assistants (TAs) in mainstream schools to support students with disability and learning difficulties is an increasing trend in Australia. In 2011, over 80,000 TAs were employed costing approximately $3billion per annum [DEEWR. 2012. Job Outlook. Accessed June 2013. http://joboutlook.gov.au/default.aspx]. This paper reports on…

Encouraging older workers to stay in the workforce has become a policy priority, not least because the life expectancy of Australians has increased dramatically over the past several decades, effectively inserting a new stage in life, often called the "third age." This report explores the possibility of using that third age to embark on…