30 September 2022 
Ruth Turner, Membership Officer
Today we publish the report 'Recruitment in Estates and Facilities Management', a first-stage report into the specific challenges currently being faced by those recruiting into specialist estates and facilities roles in UK universities. This is the result of work undertaken jointly by AUDE and UHR and with the support of our memberships we will continue to investigate this area.
As AUDE Executive Director Jane White and UHR Executive Director Helen Scott write in their intriduction to the report, "To suggest that our universities are experiencing a challenging recruitment environment will come as little surprise to anyone reading this report. UK unemployment is at its lowest rate since 1974 – a state easy to categorise as a straightforward success, until some of the underlying reasons for the situation are investigated. In the summer of 2022 there were more than 1.2 million unfilled job vacancies. In the past many of these unfilled roles would have been taken by foreign workers or older workers that have dropped out of the workforce since Covid. In the midst of a cross-workforce search for a salary that supports the individual through the current cost-of-living crisis, we have been in a candidates’ market. Virtually every sector is affected, including higher education.
"One of the benefits of both AUDE (the Association of University Directors of Estates) and UHR (Universities Human Resources) belonging to the umbrella body Professional Higher Education Services Ltd (PHES) is that we collaborate easily and naturally on shared issues. The issue of recruitment within our universities, and specifically into estates and facilities teams, has led to a joint project to look at the challenges estates teams are facing in making new hires. This report acts as a first stage output, and we are interested in member opinion on where this project should go next: the issue is multi-faceted."
Members can download a copy of the report now.
