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 September10 spaces
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 will be a university professional with experience as a director in student recruitment, widening participation, schools liaison, marketing, and outreach. We haven’t yet confirmed the guest speakers for this course. However, to offer you an indication, we welcomed the following dream team of directors for a similar course earlier this year.
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.