Space Systems Coordinator

Most people read the words Space Systems Coordinator and picture a launchpad. At James Cook University, the job sits much closer to floor plans than to satellites. The distance between those two readings is the first thing any serious applicant should understand before spending time on a cover letter.

The position sits in the Estate Directorate within the Services Division, based in Townsville, full-time at 36.25 hours per week. It is classified HEWL 6, paying $90,821 to $98,369 plus up to 17 per cent superannuation, and applications close on 8 November 2026 through the JCU careers portal. Travel between campuses may be required from time to time.

Where the title misleads, the description is plain. You maintain accurate and accessible space, building and occupancy information across JCU's facilities and space management systems. You coordinate data validation, system updates, desktop and on-site audits, and you prepare the plans, reports and analysis that inform space allocation, utilisation, workplace planning and minor works decisions. The "space" in this job is every room, office, laboratory and corridor the university controls.

What the job actually manages

The core of the role is a dataset with a hard requirement: it has to stay true to the buildings it describes. Every room gets a type, a floor area, a capacity, an owner and a condition. After a renovation, a laboratory may become an office. After a capital works project, a storage room may disappear from the plans before the records catch up. The pattern drawings and the central space system disagree about what exists, and the Space Systems Coordinator is the person who finds out which one is wrong before a timetabler allocates a class to a room that no longer stands.

That is not hypothetical. A building gains an accessible bathroom and loses a store, the drawing changes, six months pass, and a timetabler places 45 students into a room recorded as holding 30. The classes begin, the room cannot cope, and the error traces back to a database nobody owns. The coordinator exists to close that lag.

The day-to-day work runs through data validation, system updates and audits, then turns that material into reporting used for space allocation decisions. You also provide systems support and training to staff across the university, resolve complex data and workflow issues, coordinate requests and inspections, and make sure records and activities meet university requirements, building information standards and workplace health and safety obligations.

Systems matter here. The Tertiary Education Facilities Management Association, known as TEFMA, has previously recorded James Cook University as using FM Systems for space management and Celcat for timetabling. You do not need to have used those exact tools. You do need to understand how a room moves from a CAD drawing into a space management system and then into the timetable. The advertisement flags experience with CAD, GIS, building information modelling or space visualisation tools as highly regarded.

The cost of stale data

A university that runs a room it cannot use is paying for it twice. TEFMA's 2020 Benchmark Insights Report, which covers facilities for 1.15 million equivalent full-time students across Australia and New Zealand, found room utilisation commonly between 10 and 35 per cent depending on room type. That range is not an accounting curiosity. It is the gap between what a campus planned for and what it actually uses, and cleaning, air conditioning, maintenance, security and depreciation continue whether or not a room is booked. The coordinator supplies the numbers that turn those recurring costs into decisions. Read the 2020 TEFMA Benchmark Insights Report for the fuller picture.

A multi-campus estate

The scale of the job is shaped by JCU's geography. The university runs major campuses at Townsville, where Bebegu Yumba in Douglas is the largest site, and Cairns, where Nguma-bada sits at Smithfield, alongside a Cairns City campus, a Brisbane operation and an international campus in Singapore. Study centres in Mackay, Mount Isa, Thursday Island and Rockhampton stretch the physical estate further into regional and remote Queensland. Open Spatial, a supplier that has worked with JCU on campus mapping, describes the institution as serving approximately 20,000 students across this footprint. For the person in this Townsville-based role, the footprint means occasional travel. The Cairns campus is not the same estate managed at a distance, and the study centres change on their own schedules.

Who should apply

The person JCU is looking for has administered an information, facilities, space management or comparable corporate system long enough to respect data integrity without treating it as an abstraction. The advertisement asks for strong analytical and problem-solving skills, written communication, consultation and customer service, and each of those words carries specific weight on a campus where the room you reclassify is someone's office.

What the listing does not spell out is that the role sits at an intersection of timetabling, property, academic operations and the tail end of capital projects. You do not need to be an architect. You do need to read a floor plan, query a database and stay calm when a head of school emails to ask why their room vanished between the draft timetable and week one of semester.

This is also a relationship job. You will need cooperation from academics who think of a room as theirs, from facilities teams who know the building changed, and from IT staff who control the integration. The technical side is learnable. Keeping people moving toward accurate data is the harder skill.

Money and Townsville

HEWL 6 stands for Higher Education Worker Level 6, a standard professional staff classification under Australian university enterprise agreements. JCU's band of $90,821 to $98,369 sits in line with the sector. Swinburne, as one comparison, lists HEW 6 rates starting around $94,050 with a top step above $101,000. The superannuation deserves more weight than candidates often give it: at the top of JCU's band, a 17 per cent employer contribution adds about $16,700 on top of salary through a scheme administered by UniSuper.

The other side of the equation is where you live. Townsville has become considerably more expensive to rent. PropTrack figures reported by realestate.com.au put the median weekly rent around $550 after a 10 per cent annual increase, while local market data from mid-2026 put the rental vacancy rate below one per cent. For a candidate relocating from outside North Queensland, the salary band has to be measured against that market rather than against the idea of cheap regional housing. The full rent data is covered in realestate.com.au's reporting on Queensland's record high.

How to apply

Applications close on 8 November 2026 via the JCU careers site. Follow these steps:

• Create an applicant account on the JCU careers portal.
• Complete the application form.
• Upload your current resume.
• Upload a cover letter that addresses the key requirements and shows how your experience will secure your success in the role.

Enquiries about the role go to Nathan Shepherd, Associate Director Planning and Capital Development, at nathan.shepherd@jcu.edu.au. The listing states that all applicants will be contacted once the recruitment process is finalised. Apply through the JCU careers portal.

The university says it encourages people from all backgrounds who meet the role requirements to apply. Read that as more than boilerplate if you come from local government property, a health service estate, a facilities management firm or a timetabling office elsewhere in higher education. The systems names differ. The core skill of holding a dataset up against reality does not.

The measure of this job will be taken later. In year two, after the first full audit cycle, the successful candidate will face a question the advertisement cannot capture: whether the data stays trustworthy when the audits age and the rooms keep changing. Every space system drifts toward fiction unless someone's routine keeps pulling it back. That routine belongs to this role.