Technical Officer – FabLab: Inside Bond University's Digital Fabrication Workshop

The question I keep hearing about Bond University's Technical Officer – FabLab vacancy is the blunt one: what does that person actually do all day? It's a fair question. The title is vague, and the position description runs to pages of machinery lists.

The short answer is that this is a maker's job in a working workshop. The officer runs the space where architecture students turn drawings into physical objects. They keep the machines running and train students to use them safely. Wood machining and prototype assembly, plus architectural model making, sit at the centre of the week.

The appointment is part-time at 0.6 of a full-time load, continuing rather than fixed-term, and it sits in Bond's Faculty of Society & Design (FSD). One thing separates this vacancy from a standard workshop officer post: it deliberately bridges two precincts. There's the FSD Fabrication Laboratory, known as the FabLab, and there's the film and television production area. The person appointed supports digital media equipment as well as digital fabrication, which is why the advertisement asks for media-editing knowledge alongside CAD and CAM.

For the right person, that breadth is the appeal. You won't be supervising the same machine every day. You'll move between the wood shop and the robotics lab, then across into the screen studio, with the job built around helping students move an idea from screen to object.

What the role actually involves

Most weeks start with the machines. The officer provides training and supervision, plus day-to-day support, to students on conventional woodworking machinery, power tools, hand tools and air tools, and on file preparation for CNC routing. If a student has drawn a model in Rhino or Revit and needs it cut, the officer checks the file and loads the stock, then runs the job.

The equipment list is long, and that matters more than the title. Here's what you'd be working with day to day:

• CNC routers for cutting timber, foam, plastics and architectural site models
• Laser cutters in fibre and CO2 configurations, plus a rotary attachment
• 3D printers spanning FDM and SLA resin systems, as well as SLS powder-bed printing
• Industrial robot arms in the adjacent RobotLab
• A CNC wire bender and vacuum thermoforming machine
• CAD and CAM software such as Rhinoceros, Revit, Cura and SprutCAM

Alongside the making, there's a maintenance and housekeeping rhythm: routine inspections, the tagging and lockout system, stock management and selling materials to students, and monitoring equipment sign-out. The position description also mentions producing signage and 3D-printing components, plus building jigs and mounting plates for the robots. This is real fabrication work, not standing at a doorway checking inductions.

The role reports to the General Manager of FSD Technical Services, Ryan Wirth, and sits inside a technical team that has quietly turned the FabLab into one of the best-equipped teaching workshops on the Gold Coast.

A workshop built around robots and laser cutters

The FabLab lives inside the Abedian School of Architecture building, the sculptural concrete structure designed by CRAB Studios, the London practice of Sir Peter Cook and Gavin Robotham. It's a fitting home: the lab's equipment includes a high-end CNC router, a large-format CO2 laser cutter, vacuum forming machines and 3D printers that handle PLA and ABS, plus newer thermoplastic extrusion materials such as nylons and terracotta.

The headline machine, though, is in the RobotLab next door. In April this year Bond installed a fully integrated ABB fabrication robot that it describes as the first of its kind delivered to Australia and one of the first off the production line, with counterpart systems going to operations such as Tesla and Ferrari. It has a force-control sensor that lets it physically feel objects, and a quick-change system that swaps between up to 20 tools. Bond's newsroom quotes the Head of the Abedian School of Architecture, Professor Paul Loh, saying students are "learning the workflows behind automation – not just pushing a button."

FabLab General Manager Ryan Wirth, the named contact on the vacancy, put the scale of it plainly: "To have something like this in a teaching institution in Australia is unbelievable." Associate Professor Kim Baber is using the same robot to turn small trees that would otherwise be chipped or burned into durable structural elements with complex, craftsman-level joints.

The word FabLab itself has a pedigree worth knowing. The concept began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Bits and Atoms under Professor Neil Gershenfeld, who launched the course "How to Make (almost) Anything" and seeded a network that, by MIT's count, now spans more than 2,500 labs across 125 countries. Bond's FabLab is a faculty-run teaching workshop rather than a registered node of that global network, but it shares the same DNA: tools for turning a design file into a physical thing, with people who know how to run them.

Who Bond is actually looking for

Forget the idea that you need a degree. The advertisement asks for a Certificate IV in a relevant technical field or equivalent industry experience. In Australian vocational education, a Certificate IV sits at roughly trades level, and Bond explicitly accepts equivalent hands-on experience in its place. If you've run a cabinet shop, done joinery, built sets for film and television, or worked in a makerspace, much of this spec will read like your current job description.

The essentials break down like this:

• Experience operating and maintaining a wood machinery workshop, including CNC routers and laser cutters
• A strong working knowledge of CAD and CAM software — the ad names Rhinoceros, Revit, Cura and SprutCAM
• The ability to support and develop 3D printing and robotics programs
• Strong skills in architectural model making and other timber-based fabrication
• An understanding of equal employment opportunity and workplace health and safety, plus the communication skills to train students who are often using these machines for the first time

The desirable list is shorter and entirely optional: a commitment to sustainability and recycling, for example, or metalworking and electronics experience. Time spent teaching or working collaboratively is welcome too. None of it is required, but together the criteria signal where the lab is heading.

Pay, hours and the fine print

The money is published upfront, which is rarer than it should be in university hiring. The salary commences at $44,457.97 a year for the 0.6 full-time-equivalent load, a full-time-equivalent rate of $74,096.61, plus 12 per cent superannuation. At Bond's standard 36.75-hour week, 0.6 of a load is around 22 hours — roughly three days, though the exact roster is one to confirm with the hiring manager.

Because the appointment is continuing, there's no end date to plan around. The benefits are the usual Bond package: free staff parking, parental leave of up to 18 or 26 weeks, salary packaging, 17.5 per cent leave loading, a wellbeing program, an employee assistance program, study assistance for staff and dependants, corporate health and finance discounts, an onsite medical centre and counselling service, and an onsite sports centre with a gym and pool.

For benchmark purposes, it's worth knowing how the wider market prices these skills. The University of Melbourne's Fab Lab has recently advertised a Fab Lab Lead Technician at UoM level 5, $86,943 to $99,864 pro rata plus 17 per cent super — a lead role in a larger city with a higher super rate. Bond's part-time officer post sits below that, as you'd expect from the title, but the skills transfer cleanly between the two markets.

Why a workshop job matters right now

Australia's construction pipeline has a people problem, and it's why hands-on technical staff are in demand far beyond campus gates. BuildSkills Australia, the industry's jobs and skills council for building and construction, estimates the sector needs roughly 90,000 additional workers to have any realistic chance of meeting the national target of 1.2 million new homes over five years. At the same time, automation and robotics, along with advanced manufacturing, are beginning to reshape how buildings are designed and made.

University research puts the gap in sharper focus. A Monash University study published in the Journal of Innovation and Knowledge in November 2025 found that while building information modelling and drones are gaining ground in Australian construction, technologies such as robotics and 3D printing remain underused or siloed, held back in part by digital skills gaps. The people who close that gap are exactly the kind of technicians this role is built around: they know the software and the machine, and they teach others to connect the two.

That's the quiet significance of a job like this one. The officer does more than maintain equipment; they pass on the workflow knowledge — file preparation and material selection, and the safe operating habits that go with them — that an industry short of 90,000 people will need from the next generation of architects and builders.

How to apply

The application is a two-document job: a current resume and a cover letter that addresses the selection criteria in the position description, point by point. That second document is where candidates win or lose these roles. Don't summarise your career; take each criterion and answer it with a concrete example from your workshop history.

You submit through Bond's candidate portal — click Apply Now and create an account, then upload. Current Bond University staff apply through HR Connect instead. The position is also listed on AcademicJobs if you want the advertisement and selection criteria in one place. Applications close at 11:59pm on Sunday 8 November 2026.

Two practical details are worth taking seriously. First, the named contact is Ryan Wirth, General Manager – FabLab, on 0409 209 348 or rwirth@bond.edu.au. A phone call before you apply is normal in this field and can clarify the roster and the film-and-television side of the role. Second, the pre-employment checks include working rights verification, reference checks, a certified copy of your highest qualification and, in line with the National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence 2025, a declaration that any offer is conditional on Bond's review.

You'll find the full advertisement, salary details and application link on Bond's jobs page.

If I could hand the FabLab team one thing to do this month, it would be small: put Ryan's name and phone number in the acknowledgement email every candidate receives. It reads as permission to ask questions, and in a market where skilled hands are scarce, that generosity is often the difference between a shortlist of three and a hire who stays.