Vice Chancellor Brigid Heywood said the university would close the circle of industry, producing not just "job ready graduates, but also the genesis of higher value jobs".

The University will soon announce the "precinct without walls" model, she said.

Professor Heywood pointed to the $203 million new Baiada "poultry cluster" in Westdale as an opportunity to create a globally significant research sector - and hundreds of new jobs.

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"That would be building around the capabilities of that kind of a development," she said.

"We are connected with Baiada, but we also have a relationships with other poultry producers.

"We look at the research that needs to take place into different kinds of avian species that are relevant in the poultry industry. There's a whole breadth of R&D that will add value to the Australian industry and make it world-leading."

By connecting the towns of Armidale, Inverell, Moree and Tamworth the region can develop the sort of "competitive critical mass" necessary to create economies of scale, in a single industry.

She can imagine a world where people are trained up in Tamworth to work in high-tech high-paid robotics jobs, in a local world-beating industry.

"If you think about robotics in the broader context, you think about logistics, you're also enhancing the broader capabilities of Australia in terms of some of the levers that enhance manufacturing for example more generally.

"You're developing skills that can easily stretch across into other applications. That's the resilience factor, that gives you sustainability, it gives you job resilience and it creates the higher value employment that we're all hoping for. That's the graduate-ready jobs, as well as jobs-ready graduates model."

Baiada last week won state government approval to double the size of its Westdale chicken facility.

The processing facility will employ an additional 679 staff on top of its existing small army of 1,029 workers. The facility will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week and process three million chickens a week.

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The Tamworth UNE campus will start teaching classes as early as March this year - before breaking ground or even starting design work on the new campus.

The campus masterplan and design will be completed in the next 12 months, with a view to break ground in 2022 to 2023.

Students will be taught in university 'hubs' dotted across the city for work-integrated learning, at places like the Sports Dome and the hospital. According to the "hub model" the university will partner with local industry to offer degrees in specialised fields.

The university campus is anticipated to cost $100 million and create more than 320 local jobs by 2031.

It is still waiting on a $10 million cash injection by the federal government to get works underway.

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