Manager training course – Winter 2026
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 6 November to 4 December, then a final day on Thursday 10 December
10am to 11:30am
Online for the first 5 weeks, with a full-day finale on Thursday 10 December in Birmingham
£750 + VAT - early-bird price until 25 September
Only 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 6 November and 4 December, followed by an in-person finale event on Thursday 10 December 2026.
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 is a university professional with experience as a director of student recruitment, widening participation, schools liaison, marketing, and outreach.
Raffaella (Raffi) has a varied professional background, with experience spanning the corporate sector, the charity sector, and higher education. She began her career in marketing before moving into roles supporting mission driven organisations, and has spent the past 13 years working in higher education.
Raffaella is currently Director of Global Student Recruitment and Development at City St George's, University of London, where she leads UK and international student recruitment, events, marketing, and conversion activity. She has played a key role in shaping marketing and recruitment strategy at City and was instrumental in the merger with St George's, overseeing the integration of student recruitment functions across the newly combined institution.
She is an active volunteer within the sector and has served as UK Vice Chair Partnerships for HELOA. Originally from Italy, Raffaella holds a first degree in Economics and Business, has studied in Wales, and completed an MBA in London. She is passionate about education and supporting students to make informed choices and build fulfilling careers.
Fran is the Chief Marketing Officer/Prif Swyddog Marchnata at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University, where she has executive responsibility for the global marketing and student recruitment, and external relations portfolios.
Having previously held posts at the University of Hull, the University of Sunderland, Buckinghamshire New University, and Brunel University of London, Fran has expert knowledge of practice across the sector. Fran has led significant change projects, transformed institutional strategic approaches to growth and diversification, and uses a range of leadership styles to shift culture, build bridges with a broad community of stakeholders, and overcome institutional challenges to make things happen!
Fran is a passionate advocate for widening access and participation – and the EDI agenda – and has previously served as senior institutional champion for the Advance HE Aurora development programme for aspiring female leaders – and institutional champion for a staff network with a focus on race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage.
Helen is Director of Marketing and Advancement at Loughborough University, where she leads the strategic and operational development of the University's regional, national, and global reputation, brand presence, and market position in support of its strategy, Creating Better Futures. Together. She oversees six teams within the Marketing and Advancement directorate: Strategic Marketing; Global Engagement and Recruitment; Future Students and Marketing Operations; Brand, Digital and Creative Production; Corporate Communications; and Philanthropy, Alumni and Supporter Engagement.
Helen brings extensive experience in higher education marketing and communications. Before joining Loughborough, she was Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at the University of Nottingham, providing strategic leadership and overseeing the External Relations department. She previously served as Director of Marketing and Communications at the University of Warwick, where she established the University's first marketing function, and held senior roles at the University of Leicester, culminating as Head of Marketing Communications.
Helen is an active member of several influential sector bodies, including the CASE Universities Marketing Forum and the CASE Communications and Marketing Commission. She has co-chaired the marketing, communications, and recruitment track at the CASE Europe Annual Conference three times and served as a Faculty Tutor for the CASE Marketing and Communications Institute.
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.
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 25 September 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.