By Cathy Fussell, a Sir Roland Wilson PhD scholar at the Australian National University
Under APS Reform Priority Two, the Australian Government has committed to building genuine partnerships and engagement—including with academia—to help develop policies and services that reflect the needs and aspirations of the people they affect.
One way to build those deeper partnerships and bring expert knowledge and skills directly into APS teams is through academic fellowships. As previous Public Service Commissioner, Peter Woolcott AO, noted ‘The APS must be more permeable and mobile in order to foster diversity of thinking, the contestability of ideas and assist in capability development’. The APS Mobility Framework highlights that bringing an expert into an existing team can help to review or address a complex problem.
Fellowships are a win-win for fellows and host agencies. Both parties can increase their capacity to work together and deliver on shared goals. Fellowships provide an engagement at an individual level with fellows generally working within the host organisation, often as part of an in-house team. This embeddedness has the potential to enhance communication, responsiveness, and shared learning between academia and government. Given fellowships are at an individual level, they are perhaps simpler to administer than a research project or grant that tend to involve larger teams and organisation-to-organisation arrangements.
Two examples of fellowship programs for hosting academics within the APS are set out below: the Australian Science Policy Fellowship and the Australian Research Council (ARC) Industry Fellowships.
Australian Science Policy Fellowship Program
The Australian Science Policy Fellowship Program provides a pathway for early-to-mid career academics with science degrees to undertake placements in the Australian Public Service (APS) for up to twelve months. Currently up to twenty fellowships are placed each year across participating APS agencies. Fellows undertake policy roles and receive training and mentoring.
Fellows are placed at the APS 6 level and may have the opportunity to be permanently placed in positions within the APS after 12 months. For those that return to academia, they do so with new perspectives, understanding of government processes and insights into how science, and the scientific community, can inform government policy.
More information is available about these fellowships.
Australian Research Council Industry Fellowships
The Australian Research Council (ARC) recently established a fellowship program for academics to undertake research in partnership with industry, including government. The fellowships support early, mid, and late career researchers establish careers in industry or government, and industry/government-based researchers to work in university settings. The aim is to increase two-way mobility and skill-building in research collaboration, translation, and commercialisation.
The Early Career Industry Fellowship, for example, provides a salary contribution for up to 3 years and project costs up to $150,000. The Mid and Laureate Fellowships provide salary contributions for up to 4 or 5 years, and project costs of up to $290,000 and $1.5m, respectively.
More information about the fellowships, including how to apply and leverage and build partnerships, and lists of successful projects is available.
Please reach out if you have been a fellow, are an APS team that has hosted a fellowship, or are aware of other opportunities for establishing great Australian Public Service and academic partnerships. We would love to hear about it. Contact the Academy
This article is part of a ‘How to…’ series aimed at increasing awareness of APS-academic partnership opportunities.
Thank you to the Department of Industry Science and Resources and the Australian Research Council for their assistance in preparing this article.