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The primary aim of this study is to delve into the causes of occupational stress and burnout amongst administrative staff members in Pakistani universities. It does so by employing a qualitative research strategy, offering a comprehensive understanding of the issue.

This study uses a qualitative research strategy to examine the causes of occupational stress and burnout amongst administrative staff members in Pakistani universities. Around 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted via Teams with administrative employees in renowned universities in Rawalpindi, Islamabad and the Lahore region of Pakistan. Saldana's (2014) structured inductive data analysis method was used to analyse the collected data.

The study sheds light on the harsh realities faced by university administrative staff in Pakistani universities. These include top management ineffectiveness, role ambiguity, role conflict, favouritism, inequality, a communication gap with higher authorities, disparity of rewards and recognition, no career paths and opportunities, feeble leadership, corruption, inappropriate use of power, mishandling of qualified staff and non-acceptance of shifting roles from administration to academia. These are not just academic concepts but real-life challenges that demand immediate attention.

The study's findings have significant implications for Pakistan's Ministry of Education. Based on these findings, the recommendations proposed can serve as a roadmap for enhancing interpersonal development, implementing career development programmes, succession planning and supporting university administrative staff. These initiatives can lay the groundwork for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal-4 targets, making this research a valuable resource for policymakers.

As universities find new ways to implement professional development programmes (PDPs), very few scholarly studies have focused on how lifelong learning could serve as a tool to enhance the professional development of staff. To address this knowledge gap, this study aims to examine how the integration of lifelong learning modes into PDPs in a university setting in South Africa could enable professional staff to advance their knowledge and skills. Additionally, the study explores how the different PDPs could be conceptualised by way of lifelong learning to enhance the professional knowledge and competences of staff.

Data were gathered from 41 professional staff in three campuses of the university. The narrative data gathered were evaluated using thematic analysis that consisted of a detailed process of identifying, analysing, organising, describing and reporting the themes that were generated from the data.

Findings suggest that when the university integrates lifelong learning approaches into its professional development programmes, it allows staff to develop their knowledge and skills through diverse learning approaches. When institutions adopt these diverse learning approaches, it enable staff to situate their learning needs along the different lifelong learning modes, negotiate suitable learning modes and flexible schedules with their heads of department, and learn the accepted norms and values of the university. These findings among others lead to further questions about how PDPs could be designed using the three lifelong learning modes to enable staff to prepare adequately for the future of work in higher education.

This study contributes to the scholarly discourse on lifelong learning by showing how higher education institutions could design PDPs along formal, informal and non-formal learning approaches to enhance the knowledge and skills of staff.

University intellectual output such as theses and dissertations are valuable resources containing rigorous research results. Library staff who are key players in promoting intellectual output through institutional repositories require skills to promote content visibility, create wider outreach and facilitate easy access and use of these resources. This study aims to determine the skills of library staff to enhance the visibility of intellectual output in federal university libraries in southeast Nigeria.

A survey research design was adopted for the study. The questionnaire was used to obtain responses from library staff on the extent of computer skills and their abilities for digital conversion, metadata creation and preservation of digital content.

Library staff at the university libraries had high skills in basic computer operations. They had moderate skills in digital conversion, preservation and storage. However, they had low skills in metadata creation.

The study has implications for addressing the digital skills and professional expertise of library staff, especially as it concerns metadata creation, digital conversion, preservation and storage. It also has implications for the university management to prioritize the training of their library staff in other to increase the visibility of indigenous resources and university Web ranking.

This study serves as a lens to identify library staff skill gaps in many critical areas that require expertise and stimulate conscious effort toward developing adequate skills for effective digital information provision. It sheds light on the challenges that many Nigerian university libraries face in their pursuit of global visibility and university Web ranking.

The study discusses the professionalization of academic leadership in Israel by analyzing and comparing two different training programs: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s (HUJI) program and the CHE-Rothschild program. The HUJI program began in 2016 to train the professoriate to take charge of leadership positions alongside a separate program for administrative staff, while the CHE-Rothschild program was launched in 2019 to train academic leaders, both professors and administrators from universities and colleges nationwide. The analysis reveals two “ideal types” of collegiality: While Model A (exemplified by the HUJI program) bifurcates between the professoriate and administrative staff, Model B (exemplified by the CHE-Rothschild program) binds administrative and academic staff members through course composition, pedagogy, and content. The study suggests a pattern of redefinition of collegiality in academia: we find that while academic hierarchies are maintained (between academic faculty and administrative staff and between universities and colleges), collegiality in academia is being redefined as extending beyond the boundaries of the professoriate and emphasizing a partnership approach to collegial ties.

The purpose of this research is to assess how full-time tenured academic staff promotion practices (SPP) in Malaysian private universities (MPUs) influence academic staff engagement (SE) and academic staff performance (SP).

The research used quantitative and descriptive methods, focusing on MPUs' academic staff as the unit of analysis. Sampling involved simple random and stratified techniques, with 314 academic personnel surveyed. Participant data was collected through a questionnaire, and study hypotheses were tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) via a bootstrapping approach.

The findings show that SE somewhat mediates the connection between SPP and SP and that SPP significantly influences SP.

This study emphasizes the importance of impartiality and transparency within university administration when promoting academic staff. Universities should adopt modern strategies and approaches for advancing their employees to higher positions, doing so will motivate employees to fully invest in their work, leading to sustained high-performance levels.

This research has substantially improved the understanding and the practical utilization of literature about SP, SPP and SE. This improvement can potentially facilitate the development of models, theories, research initiatives, and practical strategies geared toward enhancing staff efficiency.

This chapter is focused on what we can learn from oppressive governance, in this case specifically relating to university governance in terms of vice chancellors and presidents, to the deputy vice chancellor and deputy president and down the ever-growing university hierarchy to deans and heads of schools and their deputies, from a Freirean perspective. Freire wrote at length about how leaders ‘controlled’ education and why they did so, but he also wrote at length about how governments control populations – himself being both a political prisoner and a person in exile to escape persecution. This chapter subsequently examines Freire's ideas around what techniques people employ to control populations and applies them to a higher education setting because the similarities are numerous and the tactics familiar.

Based on a review of professional staff (PS), which includes research managers and administrators, in 54 academic publications, I propose a novel definition for this category of staff: ‘degree holding university employees who are primarily responsible for developing, maintaining and changing the social, digital and physical infrastructures that enable education, research and knowledge exchange’. The proposed definition facilitates the development of new research questions that target the level of the organisational fields of higher education and science, to complement research on the university and individual levels. This view supports the study of the contributions of PS to higher education and science. I anticipate that such a broader focus will help to counter and nuance accounts of ‘administrative bloat’ by focusing on how PS as a group shape and are shaped by the organisational fields of higher education and science, rather than dismissing them as superfluous or parasitic.

Considering the critical role of higher education institutions in the advancement of the 2030 Agenda, this paper aims to analyse the incorporation of the gender perspective (Sustainable Development Goal 5) in the University Cooperation for International Development.

Following a qualitative methodological strategy, this paper identifies the potentialities and challenges of this perspective from the point of view of the technical staff of the cooperation units of seven Spanish universities.

Results show a strong intention to incorporate gender principles, in accordance with the SDGs framework. However, the findings also point to certain divergences in the forms of understanding and implementing gender equality in practice. Finally, this paper uncovers a variety of strategies to navigate the resistances, still existing in the university community.

Spain is orienting the legal framework of its cooperation and international relations towards the ambitious horizon of a feminist foreign policy. Universities are key actors in international development cooperation and the implementation of the SDGs. This is an issue that has received little research attention, particularly from a gender perspective.

Although universities have been decentralized for academic freedom and autonomy, resources are being increasingly centralized, and the role of central administration is growing for efficiency and excellence reasons. At the same time, a division of labor is progressing by assigning specific tasks to professionals. The professionals are also centrally managed. Educational development was introduced by central administration to cope with the massification and quality assurance of higher education. Although it played a great part in promoting educational reform, it also suffered from the rejection of academics and the lack of methodology. Unlike ITC service and student service, educational development touches the autonomy of academics and is always torn between the central administration and academics. This chapter analyzes the structural and cultural difficulty of educational development in Japan by tracing its historical development and by comparing to other countries.

This study examines the management practices and alignment features needed to develop academic staff’s careers, mainly focusing on teaching competencies in the evolving landscape of Cambodian public universities.

A multiple-case research design was adopted to collect data from interviews with 11 academic leaders and focus-group discussions (FGDs) with 13 academic teachers at two public universities in provincial Cambodia. A thematic approach was performed to code and analyse data to address the research questions.

This study found that the management of academic careers in the selected universities was hybrid, deregulating state control to relative institutional autonomy for contracted employees but rather centralised management for civil servants. However, weak institutional leadership and negligence in formulating comprehensive institutional guidelines for strategic human resource management (HRM) have caused misalignments of management practices to develop academic careers in the studied contexts.

This case study limits its findings to two universities in provincial Cambodia. Nevertheless, this study adds to the scarce literature on the research topic in Cambodian public universities and opens a path for cross-institutional and national comparative studies on similar foci.

This is a ground-breaking study set in the evolving space of Cambodian public higher education, where attention to the research area remains limited.