Dundee College has begun seeking volunteers for its severance scheme as it tries to fill a hole in its budget.
Staff have until mid-March to apply and those who are selected will leave before the end of July. A college spokesman said no target had been set for the number of staff to leave.
Principal Christina Potter announced the scheme late last year, after receiving confirmation of the grant coming from the Scottish Funding Council, which doles out public money to universities and colleges.
Like most colleges across the country, Dundee was hit with a more than 10% drop in its main teaching grant in its case, around £2 million for the 2011/12 term.
Combined with rises in VAT and employers’ National Insurance contributions, that has left the college needing to make savings totalling £4 million over the next couple of years.
Salaries and associated staff costs are a big slice of the college’s budget, which made a reduction in headcount an option management felt they could not ignore.
Dundee University has already been down this road. It has seen scores of academic and support staff take a pay-off to leave and has lately been seeking almost 200 further job cuts.
It is understood that how many staff the college will need to shed to meet its financial target will depend upon who volunteers. For example, one highly-paid senior manager might be the equivalent of several cleaners.
One lecturer, who asked not to be identified, said, “We’ve all heard that the college is looking at 100 redundancies. We don’t know which departments they are going to be from but everybody is worried, obviously.”