Difference Between Faculty vs Staff

Different educational establishments have different standards of training and grooming their students and pupils. These standards are managed by people who are employed by the school in different roles. There are some teachers who have academic responsibilities, and there are others who take care of the administration of the establishments they work for.

These persons, as long as the school is concerned, belong to one body. But there are times when they are classified into different groups for easier identification and according to their job description.

In this post, we will discuss the difference between faculty and staff and which of these classifications people fall under. We will be looking at the meaning of the terms, the titles, as well as other properties that can help you tell them apart as easily as possible.

Definition of Faculty

A faculty is a group of academic professionals — usually professors of various ranks. It may also be defined as an academic division that consists of a group of professionals who are dedicated to one subject area. This is typically the case with a lot of universities; they usually have a variation of such academic divisions, which when put together, makes up the total academic body of the establishment.

One difference between staff and faculty is that the latter is employed to train learners under them for a specific duration, while the former is not involved in any academic capacity at all.

Before they can be hired to train others academically, they are expected to have undergone academic training of their own and to have qualified as teachers in the university. The academic qualification level of a university teacher determines what position he or she is assigned to.

Definition of Staff

A staff member is defined as everyone employed by an organization, be it academic or administrative, to help with the day-to-day running and events of the school as required.

Sometimes, the non-teaching workforce of an academic organization is referred to more as staff compared to the teachers, but in the strictest sense, the term includes everyone employed to work in the institution.

The non-academic staff members are hired based on their experience and professional ability; their educational history may not be required. This means that their educational requirement depends on their work designation. They have regular working hours, and their job description is mostly to perform administrative and support functions in the organization.

Main Differences Between Faculty vs Staff

In this section, we will make a staff vs faculty comparison to see how they relate to one another. We will highlight their key differences, starting from their definitions, to other factors that point out how they differ from one another.

Difference Between Faculty and Staff: Conclusion

While these terms are used to define academic persons, the former is not used when referring to the academic staff at the secondary and primary education levels. It is only used when referring to a tertiary institution. Putting faculty vs staff side by side in the table above, you can see that there are clear differences between the two.

While one refers to every person employed to help run an organization, the other refers to persons that have the academic responsibility for teaching the students. The former is more of a general term used to describe employees, both within and outside an educational organization, while the latter is used to specifically describe employees whose job description is to impart academic knowledge to students of that university.