WORKFORCE
campusreview.com.au
Easy
matching
casuals
Website helps unis make
precise searches for sessional
academics with the abilities
and preferences they want.
David Bowser interviewed by James Wells
A
new website may change the way many universities source
their casual academic staff.
Sessions, developed by technology start-up Curio, is
an online platform that allows universities to search, recruit and
manage casual teaching academics. It’s designed to provide a
rich source for casual recruitment and to give employers specific
information on the people they are hiring.
Casuals looking for work register their profiles on the site and
employers use a search engine to find potential employees. It’s
Sessions’ search engine that differs it from other job boards and
LinkedIn, the company states.
“The power is in the details the search provides of the
individual teaching experiences that each of them has, down
to the subject or unit they’ve taught, the qualification it was
a part of, and the Australian qualifications framework level
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that it was at as well,” Curio founder Dr David Bowser says.
Bowser got the idea via his experience as a University of
Melbourne senior tutor, when he was responsible for hiring casual
teaching staff. He describes the process of finding suitable staff as
“the annual struggle”.
Federal Department of Education statistics show that in 2013,
there were 69,331 casual academic staff – both acting casual and
full-time equivalent – in Australian universities. Of this number,
22,883 were teaching only. The same statistics show there were
45,298 full-time academic staff in that year.
Here, Bowser explains to Campus Review what sparked the
creation of Sessions, and how the platform aims to address the
continual struggle faced by academics and universities alike.
CR: David, how does Sessions help casual academics find good
work?
DB: The first part is that educators – academics and casual
academics, depending on the university – register on the site. The
information collected from [them includes] their qualifications and
where they are from. But [here’s where] the power is: [we collect]
the details of the individual teaching experiences each of them has.
It gives a real classification of their particular teaching experiences,
which the universities can then search through using algorithms
that we’ve developed. They can find exactly the type of talent they
are looking for.