Manager training course – Winter 2025
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 7 November to 12 December 2025
10am to 11:30am
Online for the first 5 weeks, with a full-day in-person finale in Birmingham on Friday 12 December from 9:30am
£750 + VAT
Early bird price until 30 SeptemberFully Booked
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 over a 6-week period between 7 November and 12 December.
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.
And one of the UK’s largest Christmas markets is just around the corner...!
Each guest speaker is a university professional with experience as a director in student recruitment, widening participation, schools liaison, marketing, and outreach. The following dream team of directors are already confirmed. Two more will be added very soon!
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.
Ashar Ehsan is an experienced international business leader within the higher education context. He has a 25-year track record of developing ambitious and effective strategies to promote learning opportunities within the domestic/global education context, and delivering significant impact on key regions in UK, Australia, South America, Africa, and South and East Asia (India, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Timor Leste).
Ashar has worked at Cass (now Bayes) Business School (Marketing Manager), University of Bradford (Section Head)), University of Wolverhampton (Director), Ravensbourne University, London (Director), Charles Darwin University, Australia (Pro-Vice Chancellor), University of Law, London (Director), and is currently Director for Global Engagement, Marketing and Recruitment at the University of Aberdeen.
Commercially astute and student-focused, Ashar has extensive experience of invigorating higher education and vocational education programme portfolios and culture, and generating learning and skills outcomes through change and repositioning curriculum areas, nurturing new markets, developing government and business networks, and forging strong industry and community (regional and remote) partnerships.
Emma Jubbs leads the Marketing and Recruitment division at the University of Lincoln, where she plays a pivotal role in both strategic outreach and student recruitment. With extensive experience hosting virtual open days and public-facing events, Emma has been at the forefront of developing innovative engagement strategies to support prospective students and parents.
In her current strategic capacity, Emma champions the institution’s mission to broaden access to higher education. Her work helped Lincoln achieve a clean sweep in the Whatuni Student Choice Awards 2024, with Emma commenting: "Delivering the best experience and opportunities possible to our students is of paramount importance"
Emma has contributed to the 2025 Parents’ Guide to University as a featured "My Parent Story." Her inclusive approach and ability to translate institutional strategy into memorable experiences make Emma a compelling speaker for current and future students and their families.
Ula Tang-Plowman is Executive Director of International Student Recruitment (UK) at Global University Systems, supporting both Arden University and the University of Law. She leads international business development, agent strategy, and market expansion initiatives.
With 18 years in the sector, Ula has held senior roles across multiple UK universities and serves as Vice Chair of BUILA. She was an international student from China and is passionate about sustainable, student-focused international education.
Rebecca has 15 years’ experience working in higher education in a variety of roles covering admissions, recruitment, outreach, marketing, alumni development, PR and communications, policy, and business engagement. Rebecca is practised in working with college and education partners, policy organisations, industry and sector partners, prospective students of varying backgrounds, parents/carers of prospective students, external associations, and local government.
Rebecca is the Director of Student Recruitment at Birmingham Newman University. She previously worked as the Director of External Engagement and Communications at University College Birmingham where she provided strategic leadership for PR, media and communications, alumni engagement and development, and driving sustained growth of the university brand and reputation.
The early-bird price for this course is £750+VAT.
The early-bird deadline is 30 September. After this date, the cost will increase to £900+VAT.
This includes:
Simon has approaching 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 at Pickle Jar Communications, a content strategy consultancy for the international education sector. He helped schools, colleges, and universities share their stories through digital communications.
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, and Utterly Content. 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.