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Guy Littlefair , pro-vice chancellor International at Auckland University of Technology . Photo : Supplied
Partner or perish ?
Why universities need to partner with industry to succeed in a changing world .
Guy Littlefair interviewed by Martin Betts
Guy Littlefair , PVC International at Auckland University of Technology , joined HEDx to share insights into transitions between university and business environments and the importance of partnerships . He gives great pointers to how universities and businesses can best work together in addressing local and global issues , drawn from his academic leadership experience in New Zealand and previously as Dean of Engineering and PVC of industry and strategic partnerships at Deakin University . Littlefair also has extensive experience in the corporate world .
Their conversation took place in the week that Mark Scott took over as VC at the University of Sydney , foreshadowing a focus on forging partnerships as a priority for all in the sector .
MB : How easy do you think it is to move between both academic and business life in a career these days ? GF : I ’ ve worked in the automotive sector and the manufacturing sector in the UK . I also worked for the ministry of defence in London as a development engineer .
And when I first arrived in Auckland , I worked for a marine electronics company here . That experience really taught me a lot about the business world . It taught me about finance , about managing people , and also about being managed myself . And it really also taught me about being accountable for timely outcomes .
They ’ re all really learned experiences . You can ’ t get them from a textbook . You ’ ve got to go through it and learn it .
One of the big differences is the pace . Universities really are a lot slower in terms of their pace than the corporate world . Now , why is that ? My hypothesis is that in universities , we tend to think of things in three-year chunks . Our undergraduate degree is typically three years , our PhD is three years . And I think that then sets the tempo of the organisation .
Of course , what we saw last year with the pandemic is that all universities reacted pretty quickly to the situation . So , when we need to , we can move fast . I think there ’ s something there .
I think universities and many people within them struggle to understand who the customer is . Is it a student ? Is it the government ? Is it the employers of our great graduates ? Is it the society or the communities that we serve ? Not understanding who your customer is can cause problems with respect to business development , relevance and ultimately accountability .
When we think about how we measure and reward our academics , the metrics are fairly clear . It ’ s about the quality of teaching , it ’ s about the quality and usually the quantity of our research outputs . It ’ s about the amount of external funding which comes in to support that research endeavour . And it ’ s also about service , whether that ’ s service to the university or service to professional bodies or a service to the community of practice .
When I think about my own experiences , I probably went backwards in terms of my career trajectory when I came back into the university sector , and that is a problem . Another potential problem I see is in the leadership space . I don ’ t think we do all that well in training or equipping our academics to become leaders . Sometimes we see academics move into leadership roles and they really become challenged by that new territory . They ’ re not prepared for the HR challenges , the difficult conversations , the financial complexities of running a department or a school or faculty .
They ’ re not really prepared for the leadership loneliness . What tends to happen , of course , is you move into a leadership position and you move away from your passion . You move away from what brought you into the university in the first place and that ’ s teaching , it ’ s research , and above all it ’ s students .
I ’ m wondering whether we couldn ’ t take the opportunity as a sector to think more
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