Pressure and burnout during change in higher education professional services

Change is constant, but pressure isn’t shared

Change in higher education isn’t new, it has become the ongoing norm rather than a one-off event. We are often told that it is necessary, unavoidable, and part of working in a complex sector. There is the expectation that people will simply adapt, learn, and keep things running.

What people don’t talk about is how that change is experienced by real people day to day and what impact it has on them. It appears in their workflows, timelines, decision-making and relationships.

When change is constant, it is at the expense of stability, and this means that the cognitive and emotional effort just increases, even before any real work is added. The strain accumulates with each restructuring, process, or system change. Nothing is ever finished, and there is no time for recovery or rest before the next thing comes along.

Most people continue to function, the work still gets done, and deadlines are met. From the outside, things continue to work.

However, coping isn’t the same as having capacity. What’s really happening to people is the buildup of cognitive, emotional, and energy debt.

This is the context that many people in higher education are working with, right now, even as I write this.

Where the pressure actually goes

In reality, at a university, most of the impact of change ultimately falls on people working in professional services. These are the people called on to make new structures work and implement new systems, whilst absorbing shifting priorities and keeping everything running as the organisation reshapes itself.

Programmes are redesigned, courses are consolidated, teams are restructured, and processes are redesigned. Professional services staff often just inherit these changes and the complexity with little choice or input. Their roles change to accommodate these new demands, yet their authority to influence what’s changing rarely keeps pace.

They become the pressure point where competing expectations meet. Academic priorities, leadership decisions, regulatory requirements, student needs, and financial constraints all land with professional services.

Most of this is invisible to the outside world. Planning, coordination, problem solving, risk management and emotional labour all just happen quietly in the background. Typically when it works, this goes unnoticed, yet when it doesn’t, it becomes highly visible, very quickly.

Put simply, responsibility increases. Accountability increases, but control does not.

This imbalance isn’t always intentional, it’s structural and cultural. Yet its impact is felt personally, especially over time.

Why does this cost neurodivergent staff more?

For neurodivergent people with ADHD, autism, and other neurodivergent conditions, this kind of working environment comes with additional cost. Most neurodivergent people rely on structure, clarity, and predictability to function well at work. It acts as a prop and a safety net, taking some of the emotional effort off your shoulders. If something is predictable and stable, you don’t have to think about it too much. Remove this, and the effort required just to stay on track ramps up rapidly.

Constant change means constant reorienting. New priorities, new expectations, and new ways of working. All this requires additional cognitive processing, planning, and emotional regulation, even before the job is actually done.

This same overload often peaks in January, when routines reset but pressure does not. This post looks at how that shows up for neurodivergent professionals.

Many neurodivergent professionals are highly capable and deeply conscientious. Finding ways to adapt, masking uncertainty, and managing overload internally. They keep delivering, and from the outside, this often appears to be reliability or competence.

But underneath all this, the adaptation takes energy. Relentless change and limited control mean that there isn’t time or space to recover that energy. A debt is being built up, and that cost is being paid internally.

Over time, this can show up as exhaustion, shutdown, anxiety, and burnout. Not because the person cannot do the work, but the conditions require sustained effort.

This is often misunderstood and framed as a lack of capacity or resilience, rather than the environment that makes coping necessary in the first place.

Why this matters for universities, not just individuals

When all this pressure is absorbed by the same groups of people, the impact doesn’t stay with one person, it spreads, and it shapes how institutions function over time.

The work keeps getting done, but often at great personal cost. People are stretching themselves, compensating for gaps and quietly holding things together. This makes systems look more resilient than they actually are.

The problem is that this isn’t resilience at all, it’s fragile, ready to topple over like a house of cards. It depends on people absorbing relentless strain without breaking. When these people leave, burn out or step back, the underlying weakness surfaces very quickly.

Universities then lose more than capacity, they end up with an escalating spiral of lost experience, institutional memory, and trust. The work becomes harder for those left behind, and the cycle repeats.

In the moment, the cracks are invisible, they don’t show up in dashboards or performance metrics, they only show up later in sickness absence, turnover, disengagement and failed change programmes.

At that point, it’s too late and the organisation focuses reactively on resilience training, workload management, individual support or even performance management. These things may help, but they don’t address the cause, they put a sticking plaster over the symptoms.

This is why the question of where pressure sits isn’t just a moral issue, it’s a very practical one, and it sets up a very dangerous feedback loop into the very problem that started the process. In simple terms, the impact isn’t just individual, it’s ultimately damaging to the very viability of the institution.

What gets missed when we talk about change

When universities talk about change, the focus is often on structures, strategies and outcomes. What gets missed is the ongoing human cost of keeping these changes afloat.

Pressure doesn’t magically vanish just because the work continues to get done. Like snow, it sticks, accumulates and becomes a real problem. And it’s often carried by the same people, year after year.

Professional services staff, especially neurodivergent staff, are rarely resistant to change. More often, they are absorbing it, making it workable and holding together broken systems that were never designed to keep changing at this pace.

From the outside, this can look like resilience or commitment, yet the reality is that inside, it often feels like running on ever-diminishing reserves.

Until the conditions that create this imbalance are named and addressed, the cycle continues. More change, more adaptation, more pressure pushed downwards. Less capacity to recover.

None of this is about blame or bad intent. I have lived this, and this isn’t the case at all. What we need to do is notice where the strain and pressure is really being felt and what the cost is when coping is mistaken for capacity.

If universities want change to be sustainable, they need to pay attention not just to what is changing, but to who is actually bearing the burden of it.

If you work in higher education professional services and this feels familiar, you are not alone. Many people in roles like IT, registry, student services, and central teams carry this pressure quietly for years. I have pulled together more detail on the kind of support that can help reduce this load here:

Support for higher education professional services staff.