WORKFORCE
campusreview.com.au
How did you come up with the idea of Curio?
This is my whole background. I used to be a senior tutor at the
University of Melbourne, where I was responsible for hiring and
finding, in particular, the casual staff to teach in tutorials and
practical classes, for example.
Trying to find them was an annual struggle … and this was
15 years ago. Through my work as the education sector leader
at Nous Group – a consulting firm where I work with a lot of
universities – I saw that this hadn’t been solved yet.
I thought, well, it’s so easy these days to develop platforms and
get them out there into the market and tell people about them.
So why don’t I see if we can create something that’s going to help
people find great teaching opportunities with some of our great
universities. So far it seems to be going well.
Let’s say, hypothetically, the majority of academics gravitate toward
your site. Would that mean academics would not need to create
physical, paper CVs and things like that?
I think absolutely it could possibly go that way. I think there are
other sites such as Academia.edu, that’s based in the US, I believe,
trying to do a similar thing more on the research side. Academics
themselves are always going to want to have more of a tenure track
position that allows them to do both teaching and research.
I think there is also, increasingly, a group of people more
interested in doing just teaching-focused roles and being able
to do it in almost a freelance mindset, a bit how journalists and
some graphic designers work these days. I think there are great
opportunities for people who are interested in having that sort of
career and using our site to find that sort of work.
Would you consider expanding Sessions to include university admin
staff and other support workers, too?
Can this program help prevent universities from hiring dodgy staff?
It certainly can. First the universities would have to check that [the
candidates] do have those particular qua Y