
As you can see I have a StaffMember class and trying to make a list of StaffMember objects, but when I go to get them out of the list I get errors. What could be causing this (Or java lists are different from other languages).
Since you're not using a generic List variable, the compiler has no way of knowing what type of objects the List contains, and so you'll have to cast the object returned by the get(...) method to the type you believe it to be.
A better solution is to declare your list variable to be a generic List<StaffMember>.
public class StaffList {
private List<StaffMember> list;
List variable and assign it an ArrayList object since the ArrayList class implements the List interface, and in fact this is the preferred way to do it.List<StaffMember> with ArrayList<StaffMember>.