The Importance of Technicians

My last post discussed the ecosystem for those who consider themselves researchers and where it can go wrong if the incentives turn out to be perverse, however logical they seem on the surface. Today I turn to consider the technicians, who make many a lab run smoothly, keep the equipment running and often are the primary source of pastoral care for students who may be struggling. They frequently fall beneath the radar of decision-makers in a university yet can be the people who ensure the undergraduate teaching laboratories function and that the equipment gets fixed when a heavy-handed student has broken something vital. Their funding may be insecure: one fixed term contract followed by another, totally grant-dependent. Relatively few are supported centrally any more.

When I was a PhD student, the group I was in – not particularly large, but with several electron microscopes as their core research tool – there were three technicians, each looking after a different microscope, and a fourth overseeing the equipment needed for sample preparation. There was a workshop technician and a photographer (these were the days when slides were needed for talks and expert wet processing to produce high enough quality photographs for papers; in other words, long before digital processing, Photoshop and the like). All these technicians were there to help and several of them were an integral part of our evenings down the pub. As far as I recall none of them had degrees, although I don’t know what their qualifications were.

I interacted with all of them. One in particular stood out for me, not because he was the most sociable or outgoing, but because he was the one who kindly and patiently fixed the delicate piece of apparatus I kept breaking. I was embarrassed by my clumsiness, whereas he never seemed to express any criticism of my failure as an experimentalist. I have no idea what his background was, what his formal qualifications were, but he was an absolute wizard at putting things back together in his workshop. Some years ago, I went to his funeral.

Many years later, by which time I was running my own research group and had put behind me the dangers of actually touching equipment most of the time, I was interviewing for a mechanical technician to join our group. When I came to appoint the successful candidate, I realised he had the same surname as the hero from my PhD days. Sure enough, he turned out to be the son of the technician who’d looked after me so well all those years before. Subsequently, the son’s son also turned up in the department, although in a less skilled role. Three generations all skilled, all feeling this was a worthwhile career and that the work environment in the Cavendish Laboratory was somewhere they were comfortable.

However, technician posts like these can be hard to fill. It’s not a route that schools particularly highlight when discussing options (the paucity of school careers’ advisors is a problem in its own right). Historically, just as teaching was seen as an aspirational career for a woman who wasn’t going to go to university but could go to a teacher training college, so acquiring HND and HNC (higher national diplomas and certificates if the acronyms are unfamiliar) from your local technical college or polytechnic was seen as a good career move for men for whom university wasn’t an option (and I fear those are the correct gender stereotypes for, say, the 1950s).

That was back when perhaps only 10% or less of the population could get a university place. Times have changed, but the need for technicians has not. Some people will enter the technical workforce with a degree, sometimes even a PhD under their belt. This is not necessarily a satisfactory solution, as Paul Lewis highlighted in his 2019 report. He concluded that often a graduate does not have the correct skillset to complete a job, having too often got good at passing exams rather than ‘doing’ stuff. Additionally, a graduate may rapidly become dissatisfied with the role, feeling that the undoubted skills they do have are being underutilised. Career progression may be limited, which is also a disincentive to stay in the role.

The problem is not going to go away. The Talent Commission was specifically set up to look at the position of technicians in universities and research establishments (disclosure, I was one of the commissioners). Their report, published in 2022, highlighted that the university technical workforce was substantially an ageing population: around half of the technician population in universities were over the age of 50. Of these, almost half had worked at the same institution for twenty years or more. This means that, as these take retirement, a very substantial amount of knowledge will be lost. People like the technicians I worked with are in danger of becoming a disappearing breed.

In order both to celebrate technicians and to encourage institutions to support, mentor and promote the technicians they do have, the Technician Commitment was introduced in 2017, with over 120 signatory and supporter organisations to date. Of the different actions they want to see organisations undertake, one was to give technicians due recognition and a voice in decision-making. When I look at these expectations placed on employers, I feel guilty in particular that almost never did the technicians who did so much to enable a piece of research to come to fruition get included in the author list of papers I wrote.

A notable exception was one electron microscope technician who joined us upon retiring from industry: he had a PhD. I don’t believe the mechanical technician I mentioned earlier (long retired) would have had any expectation of becoming an author, but perhaps he should have done. His contribution to many a paper – by making all the sample holders that were so vital for the synchrotron experiments we carried out – was invaluable and not something the students could do. Furthermore, he made his contribution with few complaints, despite the fact that students almost invariably left things to the last moment before we had X-ray beamtime, so he would suddenly be inundated with requests instead of being able to pace things appropriately.

I hope PIs reading this will think harder about the recognition angle regarding any technicians they employ, as well as the wider terms of the Technician Commitment their institutions may have signed up to. I suspect it is not widely enough disseminated across institutions, so that those who work most closely with the key individuals in a research group know what is implicitly placed on their shoulders. If the technical role is to attract a healthier supply of incoming workers, it is in everyone’s interest that the job is made attractive.