Scheduling Services Officer

James Cook University has posted two fixed-term Scheduling Services Officer roles at its Townsville campus, and applications close on 8 November 2026. One contract runs until August 2027, the other until January 2028. Both are full time at 36.25 hours a week and sit at HEW Level 5, with a salary band of $78,740 to $89,310 per annum plus up to 17% employer superannuation.

The title sounds like diary management. The actual work is closer to maintaining one of the few pieces of university infrastructure that touches nearly every enrolled student at the same time: the timetable.

JCU's Bebegu Yumba campus in Douglas is about 13 kilometres from the Townsville CBD and teaches more than 10,500 students, including more than 1,500 international students. When those students log in to register for classes, the screen they see is built and maintained by the kind of person this advertisement describes.

The work, broken down

The advertised duties line up around a single output: an accurate, integrated timetable. That means drafting and publishing it, updating it through each study period, coordinating student class registration, and managing room bookings. It also means working as a partner to allocated academic areas, negotiating competing requests and using specialist scheduling systems.

A colleague who held a similar role at another North Queensland institution once described the job in two halves. The published timetable is the public half; the exception queue is the real workload. Staff request room changes, subjects overshoot enrolment forecasts, a lab gets booked for a workshop, and someone has to decide which request moves first.

That decision rarely has a perfect answer. The job is to find the least-bad answer, document it, and hold the line when the same academic emails a week later asking why their favourite theatre is now a tutorial space.

The listing does not name the software. The procedure suggests you will work in Syllabus Plus and related platforms, but the more durable skill is learning whatever system is in front of you quickly.

The system behind the timetable

JCU's Timetable and Class Registration Procedure names Syllabus Plus as the rule-based timetabling system that turns constraints into a coherent schedule. The procedure sets hard limits: no more than four consecutive class hours without a one-hour break, no more than six hours of class contact in a day, and walking times between consecutive classes capped at ten minutes for the same staff or substantially the same students.

That is the base rate of the job. You are not moving coloured blocks around a grid; you are feeding a constraint engine and then defending its output against reality. The exception is the manual adjustment queue, the unplanned booking, the late enrolment surge that arrives the week before teaching starts.

JCU publishes two timetables per calendar year, one for each Teaching Period. The teaching calendar itself is layered: Semester 1 and 2 run 13 weeks, Trimesters run 10 weeks, and Block periods run six to seven weeks. Each layer has its own start date, census date, and withdrawal date. An officer maintaining this is not maintaining one grid but several overlapping grids.

The full Timetable and Class Registration Procedure runs nine pages and is worth reading before you apply, because it tells you exactly which constraints you will be asked to enforce and who escalates disputes when they arise.

Money, leave and what Townsville costs

The salary band looks modest from a capital-city vantage point but reads differently against local housing costs. REA Group data from March 2025 put the median weekly rent for a dwelling in Townsville at $510, with houses at $540 and units at $430. The vacancy rate has sat under one per cent in some recent reporting, which makes the rental market tight and competitive.

On the employment side, JCU adds up to 17% superannuation, five weeks of annual recreation leave plus leave loading, 15 days of paid sick or carer's leave a year, flexible working options, and staff study assistance.

For anyone weighing the move, median house prices in Townsville have been reported in a range from roughly $570,000 to $680,000 depending on the quarter and data source. Brisbane's median has been closer to $998,000. The local rental vacancy rate means finding somewhere to live can take longer than expected. The Douglas campus sits in a suburb with good access to the university but still 13 kilometres from the city centre.

Salary on commencement is normally paid at the minimum point of the classification. The head of work unit can authorise a higher start based on experience, qualifications and skills, and salary advancement within the level follows JCU's performance management framework. Professional staff at HEW levels 1 to 5 on a fixed term longer than 12 months face a three-month probation period.

The latest Townsville rent figures, including the March 2025 breakdown, are published by realestate.com.au. JCU's Townsville campus page details the Douglas location and the name Bebegu Yumba, which means place of learning in the Birri-Gubba language.

What this means for your application

The selection criteria don't ask for a degree in scheduling. They ask for demonstrated scheduling and coordination experience, organisational and administrative skills, effective communication, and the ability to learn specialist scheduling systems. If you have run rosters, coordinated rooms, managed allocations, or handled competing stakeholder demands, you have the raw material.

The panel will be reading for evidence of judgement under a deadline, not for a list of software names. A hiring manager in a similar role once told me they hired a candidate from an emergency-services rostering background because the candidate could show, with specific examples, how they resolved conflicts and prioritised competing requests under pressure. That is what transfers.

It is not an events job. It is not a project manager title. The core deliverable is publishable timetable data that survives contact with week one.

The cover letter should address the role's core words: accurate, integrated, responsive.

• Name one scheduling system or process you have used, however small, and how you learned it.
• Give one specific instance where you resolved a conflict and state what you traded off.
• Show your Microsoft Office and data-entry comfort, because that is the daily medium.
• Say how you kept stakeholders informed while you could not give everyone what they wanted.

One concrete next step

Applications close on 8 November 2026. Before you open the form, write down one scheduling problem you have solved: what the constraint was, whom you consulted, and what changed for the people affected. That one paragraph, adapted into your cover letter, will do more than five pages of generic claims.

Then submit your current resume and cover letter through the JCU careers portal. The university says every applicant will be contacted with an outcome once the recruitment process is finalised.