Manager training course – New Year 2027
A 6-week training course for aspiring university managers working in student recruitment, widening participation, schools liaison, marketing, and outreach.
A 6-week training course for aspiring university managers working in student recruitment, widening participation, schools liaison, marketing, and outreach.
Every Friday from 8 January to 12 February 2027
10am to 11:30am
Online for the first 5 weeks, with a full-day finale on Friday 12 February 2027 in Birmingham
£750 + VAT
early-bird price until 4 December 2026Only 10 places available
Are you interested in becoming a manager of student recruitment, marketing, school liaison, widening participation, or outreach activity?
This new manager training course will help you grow your knowledge, network, and confidence to allow you to secure and succeed in a management role.
It is designed for:
Managing people and projects is a significant commitment, but this carefully curated training course will help you survive, thrive, lead, and succeed in your university role and beyond.
The manager course will take place every Friday between 8 January and 5 February, followed by an in-person finale event on Friday 12 February 2027.
Weeks 1 to 5 will take place online between 10am and 11.30am on Teams.
Week 6 will take place in person in Birmingham between 9.30am and 4pm. This is a celebratory finale, allowing all participants to gather for a final day of learning and socialising.
Meetings won’t be recorded to allow participants to feel fully comfortable when sharing personal stories and sensitive challenges about their manager journey.
The manager course is intimate and interactive, with a high level of group discussion. For this reason, there are only 10 spaces available.
There won’t be any slide presentations. Instead, we will facilitate learning through peer-to-peer networking, access to senior leaders, sharing (and solving) challenges, ongoing self-reflection, and takeaway tasks.
Week 1 will bring all participants together, without a guest speaker. It is an introduction, a safe space, where we will each share our career journeys, manager challenges, and expectations for the weeks ahead.
Weeks 2 to 5 will each focus on a different management topic, with insights from a guest university director experienced in student recruitment, widening participation, schools liaison, marketing, and outreach. These weeks will be structured as follows:
Week 6 is a full day in Birmingham, with guest speakers, followed by a celebratory lunch and a social activity. All activities are included in the cost of the manager programme, except for your travel to and from Birmingham.
In this first week, you will meet your fellow participants and aspiring managers. It is an opportunity to begin building relationships with people who will support you throughout the course, and potentially the years ahead too.
We’ll discuss expectations for the course, share our manager origin stories, and reflect on the manager challenges we wish to overcome.
This first week will end with the launch of the optional course WhatsApp group where you can seek connection, camaraderie, and counsel in between the weekly sessions.
The clue is in the name: managers manage. Often without easing-in, you will suddenly find yourself responsible for individuals or teams, each with diverse wants, needs, and remits. Enthusiasm and common sense is a solid starting point. But is there more to it?
In this session, our guest speaker will recall their own manager origin story, sharing their wins and wobbles along the way. They’ll also offer their director-level perspective now that they oversee entire departments of managers.
In doing so, they’ll reveal the actions and attitudes which allow successful managers to inspire the best results from their teams (and themselves).
With great power comes great visibility. As a manager, you’ll find yourself in high demand, with meeting requests coming from all corners of campus (and beyond). You’ll need to offer winning contributions and secure trust from stakeholders in mere minutes of a packed agenda. And then dash to the next meeting. It’s a lot.
This session will help you maintain your composure despite your exposure. You’ll learn how to show up and speak up with confidence through preparation, practice, and professionals. You’ll also discover the superpowers of listening, relationship-building, and maintaining stamina throughout a day of back-to-back meetings.
Four figures, five figures, six figures, more? As a manager, the budget is yours to hold and harness. However, it can be intimidating to keep expenditure on track, especially within the heightened scrutiny of a cost-of-living crisis.
Never fear, this session is designed to reduce your anxiety as a newfound budget-holder. Our guest speaker will help you shift your thinking about protecting the bottom line, with reassurance and strategies to stay in control.
You’ll gain valuable advice on how to balance competing budget requests, respond to curveballs and shifting priorities, and perfect the art of saying yes-no-maybe. Ultimately, you’ll learn that a robust budget is more about networking than numbers.
We live in an age of big data. Everything is monitored and measured. It should be easier than ever for a manager to make an informed decision. We have a treasure trove of numbers and graphs at our fingertips. Surely, we can settle any dilemma or disagreement within (and between) our teams without hesitation?
If only. The deluge of data means anything can be evidenced with enough filtering, therefore managers must proceed with caution. Our guest speaker will help you rethink your relationship with data. You'll learn how to gather, seek, and interpret reliable quantitative and qualitative data, both internally and elsewhere in the sector.
Most critically, you’ll discover that data must be considered alongside opinion, experience, and instinct in a complex, political university. "Computer says no" is a mindset that managers cannot afford, so we’ll also explore the risks and rewards of rolling the dice...
As responsible managers, we will always protect the wellbeing of our teams. But what about our own wellbeing? Do we allow ourselves the luxury of a lunch hour, or do we fill that time with meetings? Do we catch our breath when the laptop closes, or are we checking our inbox on our phone? Do we ever put ourselves first?
For our final week, we’re going to discuss how to protect our wellbeing alongside a demanding manager workload. Our guest speaker will share their own wellbeing practices as a director, and how we can find a rhythm and routine which works for us. We’ll also master the art of declining meeting requests to reclaim our calendars (and sanity).
And of course, we’re absolutely going to put our wellbeing first by gathering in person for a day of self-care. This will be an end-of-course celebration packed with food, fizz, and feel-good festivities. Expect graduation gifts, emotional speeches, and an unforgettable darts party at Flight Club Birmingham.
Each guest speaker brings a wealth of experience from senior leadership, marketing, and communications roles, both within and beyond the higher education sector.
Dawn is an accomplished senior leader with over 20 years of experience in marketing and communications. She has strategic responsibility for a wide range of mission-critical services that drive applications, student conversion, and global engagement.
Having progressed from Marketing Officer to Executive Director of Marketing, Brand and Voice, Dawn has led award-winning teams across three West Midlands universities. She brings extensive expertise in marketing and recruitment at a senior level, with a strong record of developing and delivering complex, multi-channel recruitment strategies to achieve ambitious KPIs.
An innovative and award-winning communicator, Dawn is a strategic thinker who combines creativity with an evidence-based approach to decision-making. As a qualified coach, she is known for her clear, dynamic, and confident leadership style that inspires and motivates teams to success.
A Chartered Senior Manager, Dawn has proven experience in leading teams through change and transformation. She also brings Board-level expertise as a Trustee of a Multi Academy Trust, contributing to strategy development, financial stewardship, compliance, performance management, and service delivery.
Pamela Agar leads the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Europe as Co-Executive Director alongside her job-share partner, Caroline Davis.
Prior to joining CASE in November 2022, Pamela and Caroline served as Co-Directors of External Relations, Communications, and Marketing at St George’s, University of London for three years. They oversaw a team of professionals responsible for communications, marketing, digital, design, development, and alumni relations.
Pamela has over two decades of experience in the education sector, having held senior roles in communications and marketing at institutions including Imperial College London and The Francis Crick Institute. In addition, she was the Managing Director of content strategy agency Pickle Jar Communications, and she has worked with a range of schools and universities as a freelance digital strategy and brand consultant.
Jack Clare has more than 13 years of experience working in higher education across four different institutions in a diverse range of roles covering student recruitment, marketing, communications, admissions and partnerships. In his current role as Director of Student Recruitment and Marketing, Mr Clare oversees global student recruitment, marketing and admissions activity at Teesside University.
Deon-Nadine Butler is Director of Marketing and Communications at London Metropolitan University, where she leads the university’s award-winning Marcomms function.
Deon is a qualified marketing leader with more than 18 years’ experience across higher education, government, and housing. She is known for transforming teams, building standout brands, and delivering high-impact campaigns that drive reputation, engagement, and student recruitment.
At London Met, Deon has led the university’s integrated marketing transformation, including the acclaimed "The Real London" campaign, while significantly growing digital engagement across platforms including TikTok and YouTube. Under her leadership, the university won Gold for Marketing Team of the Year at the 2023 HEIST Awards.
Kenon was the Director of Marketing and Student Recruitment at Imperial College London. Prior to this, he held digital and recruitment roles at the University of Nottingham and Swansea University. He has a keen interest in all things digital and content marketing, and how digital tools impacts on organisational culture and behaviour.
As a music graduate, Kenon has previously worked in the Arts sector where he was involved in widening participation arts projects and outreach work to help diversify participation in the arts.
Born and raised in the Welsh Valleys, Kenon is 1st generation Chinese and was involved in the Race Equality Charter assessment team at Swansea University. Kenon was also the inaugural recipient of the CASE Europe Emerging Marketing and Communication Professional Award.
This course was the right step for my career. It gave me the confidence to handle work challenges professionally and the right insights to communicate effectively at a director level.
This course is a great stepping stone for anyone thinking about, or is ready to take, a management role in HE. Simon and Jon have so much extensive knowledge and experience of the sector to learn from as well.
The course provided a great, fun, and open space to develop insightful and useful skills. Hearing from a range of guest speakers on their different journeys has increased my confidence and made me feel a lot more equipped to move into a managerial role.
The course was stimulating, well-organised, supportive, and fun. The course gives you the best opportunity to be put in an environment to share and reflect on similar experiences with professionals in similar career positions across the sector.
The course has been brilliant. It has been really insightful to hear and learn from leaders in the sector, who each passed on their own wisdom. Jon and Simon were great facilitators and the other delegates were brilliant too.
The early-bird price for the course is £750 + VAT.
The early-bird deadline is Friday 4 December 2026. After this date, the cost will increase to £900 + VAT.
This includes:
Simon has almost 20 years of experience in the higher education sector. This includes student recruitment, marketing, and events roles at four different universities in the UK: Nottingham, Birmingham, Warwick, and Coventry. Simon has also worked as a content strategy consultant for the international education sector.
Simon has a particular flair for designing engaging training sessions. Currently, he leads the training portfolio for UniTasterDays, including their quarterly training days in Birmingham, on-campus training for staff, on-campus training for ambassadors, 6-week leadership course, and 6-week manager course.
Past recipients of Simon’s training include AccessHE, Bath Spa University, LiNCHigher, Liverpool Hope University, London Higher, Queen Mary University of London, St Mary’s University, Study Higher, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Bristol, the University of Essex, the University of Salford, the University of Sunderland, and various HELOA regional groups.
Simon is an international speaker. He has spoken at a variety of conferences, including CASE, ContentEd, EFMD, IDPE, FindAUniversity, HELOA, HighEdWeb, PSEWeb, SU Digital, SU Marketing Conference, Utterly Content, and the UK Ghost Story Festival. He was Chair of the Newcomers Track at CASE Europe Annual Conference from 2020 to 2023.
As a published author, Simon is particularly interested in storytelling in the education sector. He spends his free time reading, writing, running, and finding new ways to make his children laugh.