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I was born and educated in the UK but have spent the entirety of my career working in the US in government and higher education. I'm not, and never have been, a faculty member but rather part of the 'academic staff' supporting researchers with technical and domain specific knowledge. Due to changing personal circumstances, I've recently been considering returning to the UK but was surprised at the disparity in salaries between my role at a US institution and similar positions advertised in the UK.

I know this question has been asked before with regard to academic salaries but how do UK universities attract and retain staff? Even within the UK, it seems like there are much better paying options in industry than a university. At my current institution in the US, we have a hard enough time recruiting staff and our salaries are 2 to 3 times higher than those I have seen posted in Britain.

What strategies or incentives do British institutions use to recruit staff that offsets such low salaries? Or do they rely on individuals being mission and prestige oriented to choose a role in a University over a for-profit corporation?

Alternatively, am I just spoiled by higher US salaries and UK academic staff positions are actually well compensated given the prevailing wage in their region?

Anyon
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Matt
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  • You might be interested: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/190543/is-there-a-rationale-for-working-in-academia-in-developing-countries – Allure Feb 23 '23 at 00:38
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    As a general remark, salaries paid by US colleges/ universities tend to vary significantly for very similar kind of jobs depending on the prestige and location of the institution. I don't know how 'fancy' the institutions you worked at are but your userid specifies the San Francisco bay area which is well known for massive salaries for anyone who knows about computers. So I would expect if you replace UK by for example Montana, you would perceive the 2 or 3 times higher salary in the bay area when compared to various other parts of the US. – quarague Feb 23 '23 at 10:28
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    Terminological note: in the UK, "academic staff" usually means faculty members. The group of people I think OP is talking about might be called "academic-related staff" or "professional services staff". – Daniel Hatton Feb 23 '23 at 12:10
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    @DanielHatton I didn't want to edit, but I'd just call them "staff" in the US. – Azor Ahai -him- Feb 23 '23 at 14:59
  • @DanielHatton Whether postdocs count as "academic staff" seems to depend on the context, but we're never grouped in with professional services. There are rather a lot of us. In an even more uncertain place there are research technicians with PhDs, with responsibilities overlapping those of postdocs, lower salaries, and no longer much better job security. – Chris H Feb 23 '23 at 15:15
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    @ChrisH I would assume that the sort of position that the OP is talking about would not include postdocs. "supporting researchers with technical and domain specific knowledge" does not sound like a postdoc to me. – Ian Sudbery Feb 23 '23 at 15:33
  • @IanSudbery I've seen quite similar wording in postdoc job ads - but the use of the word "researchers" in the quote, instead of a reference to supporting the PI fits your reading better than mine. – Chris H Feb 23 '23 at 15:39
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    Anecdotal: because I wanted to do some "non-evil" work for a bit. I could get double the salary in private industry, but chose not to. – OrangeDog Feb 23 '23 at 17:19
  • @OrangeDog: ‘non-evil’? – A rural reader Feb 23 '23 at 20:20
  • As a software developer with work experience in UK/EU and aware of salaries in the US, i can tell you that i haven't tried moving across the pond because i value the work-life balance, the healtcare system and more in general the difference in culture. About academic/non-academic positions... well they don't pay enough to attract me :P – bracco23 Feb 24 '23 at 18:29

3 Answers3

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I think the answer to this very much depends on the sorts of role you are referring to.

If you are talking about positions such as Research Software Engineers, Scientific programmers, or Scientific Officers/Staff Scientists that might, or for example, running a core facility, a large part of the answer is "we don't". Firstly, we make far less use of this sort of people than many other countries do, often relying instead on that most English of ideas of the interested amateur muddling along as best they can. But when we do have such positions, we struggle to recruit to them and turnover is high.

If you are talking about research technician type roles then my experience is that people are either young (and don't stay long) or for the people that do these jobs, it's often the household's second income.

In all cases, it's getting increasingly difficult to recruit and retain good people.

Why do people do it? There is a combination of motivations. Partly, we do rely on the whole "vocation"/"mission oriented". Partly, we rely on the fact that for many specialties, industrial positions are pretty concentrated on a small (expensive) part of country, whereas academia is fairly well distributed and people have a variety of reasons for wanting to live away from where the industrial jobs are. Partly, I think people have a (misguided) idea that an academic job is more secure than an industrial one. Partly, it is the case that salaries for everything, from waitstaff to CEOs, are higher in the US. I don't know about academic staff, but the pay of a senior lecturer at a research-intensive Russell Group university is in the top 10% of salaries in the country, although this varies for other categories of university.

Ian Sudbery
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  • Agree with this, filling/retaining staff in these roles has been extremely difficult at my institution. On one occasion someone from industry actually applied to one of our laboratory support roles and they would have been great. However, HR would only approve a salary a fraction of what they were currently earning. They essentially laughed at us and walked away. Now we have no lab support staff... – atom44 Feb 23 '23 at 09:52
  • @atom44 Its difficult when paying them what they are paid in industry would mean paying them more than the head of department or even the head of faculty is currently paid! – Ian Sudbery Feb 23 '23 at 10:05
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    +1 for that last paragraph. I chose a "career" as a teacher instead of staying in industry, and I keep getting asked why I chose the "low-paying job". The answer is that I enjoy being a teacher much more than the "desk job" I had before, it's one of those things money can't buy... – Sabine Feb 23 '23 at 10:44
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    I would observe that what finally seemed to work for retaining people in my current department was a change in management (head of school) from not ideal to very very good. It seems to have stopped the turnover tsunami. I knew that the academic salaries were decently above average where I am, but didn't realise they were in the top 10% in the country? Wow. – penelope Feb 23 '23 at 11:17
  • @penelope Grab https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1059906/Table_3.1a_1920.ods and your spine points table and you can check where things line up for you. Typical starting salaries for jobs with a PhD are enough to put you above median. – origimbo Feb 24 '23 at 11:50
  • @origimbo Oh that's cool, thank you. Okay so at least at my University, Senior Lecturer pay falls in between the top 23% (low end) and top 13% (high end) of salaries in the country. The next step up, Associate Prof, just about hits the 10% mentioned in this answer (top 13% on the low end of the range, and around top 9% for the high end). So all this makes the "top 10% in the country" claim by this answer quite a bit misleading in my eyes... – penelope Feb 24 '23 at 15:01
  • @penelope Its fairly rare for a university to use both Senior lecturer and Associate Prof titles. At my university, which uses SL, SL goes from point 46 (£57k) on the national scale to point 55 (£74k). This is more or less the same at Bath, Exeter and Liverpool as comparators I have to hand, within a couple of points. According to https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/datasets/ashe1997to2015selectedestimates, 90th centile for gross pay was £55k all workers or £60k full time workers. – Ian Sudbery Feb 24 '23 at 18:35
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    I suspect the difference between the two data sets is connected to the difference between "pay" and "income". – Ian Sudbery Feb 24 '23 at 18:37
  • Here we use Lecturer/Senior Lecturer, followed by Associate Prof (used to be Reader, which they're phasing out as a title now), and finally Full Prof on top. SL goes from point 35 (£41k) to 43 (£52k) – penelope Feb 27 '23 at 09:51
  • @penelope Your SL covers almost the points as our L. Which is interesting. I wasn't aware of such a large diversity amongst institutions. As I say, Bath, Exter and Liverpool all use very similar scales to us. Many places have made this non-public in recent years, but last time I had access, I think Leeds, York and Oxford, and pretty much any other research-intensive, pre-92 I looked at used more or less the same definitions as us as well. I am aware that post-92s did things slightly differently, but even then, I wasn't aware of differences as big as yours. – Ian Sudbery Feb 27 '23 at 11:08
  • It seems very likely that the difference is indeed about post/pre-92 Unis. While I don't have any other examples at hand except my own Uni, and I don't want to single any institution out right now by naming it (I'm sure a dedicated somebody could dig that info by looking into my activity over the last few years, but if they really want to, whatever)... our scales are L: points 30-35 (this is shared with postdocs), SL: points 35-43 (the lower point overlaps with L), AP: 44-49, P: 50+. So, put differently, your SL is most similar to our full professorial positions. – penelope Feb 27 '23 at 15:14
  • Our progression is also automatic from L->SL (for academics; postdocs get capped forever at 35), while you have to apply for an internal promotion to go from SL->AP, or AP->P (and provide appropriate evidence about securing research income, publishing activity, as well as involvement in school/dept activities etc). – penelope Feb 27 '23 at 15:15
  • With all this info in the comments, and the fairly large pay difference between institutions that you were not aware of when writing your answer, do you maybe think it'd be a good idea to edit some of this info into your answer (i.e. that you answer only holds for pre-92 Unis) and possibly clean up some of the comments? – penelope Feb 27 '23 at 16:40
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    @penelope I can alter the answer to make clear that I'm talking about research intensive, RG universities, and that there is variation between institutions. I'm not sure how much the detail is relevant as the question is about facilities technicians/staff scientists, not faculty. What would really be good I guess is some actual data on staff scientist like salaries, and where they sit in the distribution, but I don't have that data to hand. – Ian Sudbery Feb 27 '23 at 16:55
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Partly it's because universities in the UK tend to have quite generous employee benefits. Annual leave is typically greater than average (40+ days in total for long serving staff isn't uncommon). Pensions traditionally have also been pretty good. For technical and administrative staff in particular, the work environment can be less demanding, working weeks can be as little as 35 hours for full time employees and there's generally not massive pressure to be constantly busy. There are also usually a lot of other perks and discounts to take advantage of if they so wish.

You also have to remember the UK generally has lower salaries than the US across all sectors. This is somewhat made up by things like socialised healthcare, higher sick pay and annual leave regulations. The cost of living is also generally lower.

Crazymoomin
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    Pensions have been eroded but are still better than much of the private sector. Although not many people actually manage to take all their annual leave, that's partly because it's often not necessary to take a day off for appointments/deliveries etc. as occasional working from home is usually possible (he says while failing to do this and taking annual leave) . – Chris H Feb 23 '23 at 15:19
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I looked hard at returning to industry after my PhD, before going for postdoc roles.

I would have been on about ⅓ more salary in the private sector, and saved another 10% of my postdoc pay that goes on my commute. But financial motivation isn't everything; especially in academia plenty of people are content to make enough to afford a decent lifestyle, rather than trying to be rich.

The working environment would have been very different - academia suits a lot of people, though of course not everyone. There would have been a lot more travel and a lot less flexibility in the industry roles I looked at - not great with a young child. Having worked in both, the pressures are very different in industry.

Chris H
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  • Chris, I feel like this answer doesn't consult the original question. The question seems to be about non-faculty roles without a fixed term, which postdocs aren't really under. –  Feb 23 '23 at 17:57
  • @AnonymousM "seems to be" is right. I read it differently. And now a lot of technical staff are on fixed term contracts too – Chris H Feb 24 '23 at 07:56