Student ambassador training
Empowering and inspiring training for new and experienced student ambassadors
Empowering and inspiring training for new and experienced student ambassadors
We are now offering student ambassador training, as part of our expanding portfolio of UniTasterDays training services. This will build on the success of our university training days for staff held in Birmingham, and our equivalent in-house training which can be delivered at your very own campus.
Our student ambassadors deserve game-changing training too. As university staff, we’ve all said the famous words: "Ambassadors are our greatest asset." Yet, how often do we invest in our ambassadors, beyond their wages and mandatory training?
Our student ambassador training is here to help. We offer a choice of themed training days, depending on how you use your ambassadors. Each day is built to be energising, empowering, and enjoyable, and will equip your ambassadors with the qualities and abilities to truly aid your recruitment.
The training Simon delivered for our student ambassadors was engaging and enthusiastic! The students loved the session and even commented on how much they took away from the training that they can implement while working ambassador roles. Simon was such an entertaining presenter and created a fun inclusive environment that made everyone feel comfortable participating in the day
The hands-on training provided by UniTasterDays has been invaluable in preparing our student ambassadors to confidently represent St Mary’s University. The engaging and practical approach truly makes a difference!
We go beyond the basics and further still.
Ambassador training can often become a tick box exercise: CMA, GDPR, manual handling, child protection training, shadowing an experienced ambassador on a campus tour... You know your policies and campuses best, so we’ll leave these foundational fundamentals to you.
Instead, we offer an expansion pack of next-level training to upskill, uplift, and upgrade your ambassadors from hired hands to robust recruiters. Through our practical exercises, with a sprinkling of theory, your ambassadors will leave our training as an extension of your own student recruitment team.
You have hundreds of ambassadors, who will speak to thousands of prospective students, alongside tens of thousands of supporters and influencers, with the potential to secure millions of pounds worth of tuition fees.
If you invest in their potential, they’ll help you deliver a wealth of powerful recruitment messaging at every touchpoint within the applicant journey: on campus, online, on social media, in the classroom, and in the exhibition.
We offer a selection of themed training days. Each is designed specifically for student ambassadors working in higher education. We would tailor each training day to your own university following an exploratory conversation before your event.
Our themes are below – just click to expand each one and find out more.
You can find further details about each theme through the drop down at the bottom of this page. We also offer a pick-and-mix approach which allows you to choose sessions from two or more themes. Equally, you are welcome to request a topic not featured below, and we’ll explore whether we can deliver to your needs.
Open days, offer-holder days, campus tour afternoons... They wouldn’t be possible without your student ambassadors. But they are more than hired hands. Your ambassadors are the front-line champions of your university, with the full attention of your visitors. You need to give your ambassadors the tools to do more than register, signpost, and push cages of materials. You need them to sell your university.
In this game-changing training day, we will upskill your ambassadors through a series of practical exercises to empower them to promote your university at your flagship campus events. They will learn how to go beyond the tired old campus tour script to promote benefits, not features, then go further still by bringing their student experience to life through the art of storytelling.
They’ll learn how to make every interaction count, practice positivity in the face of negativity, and gain confidence when handling challenging questions and visitors. In doing so, they’ll inspire prospective students to apply, motivate their families to support them, and leave your visitors with a multitude of compelling messages to ponder on their journey home.
Sessions will include:
The need for online university research is greater than ever. In our cost-of-living crisis, not everyone can afford to visit a campus in person. Besides, online has always been the necessary option for prospective students living overseas. It’s no wonder the student ambassador remit now includes digital duties, such as managing inboxes, monitoring messaging platforms, and assisting with virtual open days.
However, digital skills are often underappreciated and overlooked. This training day shows the theory behind typing digital exchanges with high readability, accessibility, and memorability. In doing so, they will be read, actioned, and remembered long after the browser closes. We will also show your ambassadors how to show warmth and personality through online interactions.
This training day will also address the elephant in the Zoom: the woeful quality of webinars, online chats, and virtual open days. We’ll show your ambassadors how to master world-class basics for bringing their best selves to online video calls, with simple yet essential considerations such as lighting, sound, environment, connectivity, and voice.
Sessions will include:
In a sector of decreasing resources, our ambassadors are increasingly an extension of our staff team. Many are trusted to venture into the classroom in schools and colleges to deliver talks and workshops. But that’s a lot of responsibility. What if they get cold feet? Stage fright? Imposter syndrome? What if their audience is disengaged, disruptive, disrespectful?
This training day offers a lifeline to your classroom ambassadors. We’ll build them up through meaningful, motivating exercises. They’ll gain the confidence, charisma, and connectivity to master any classroom environment, diffuse challenging behaviour, and raise aspirations. We’ll also cover the art of designing and delivering a powerful, perspective-changing presentation.
Sessions will include:
UCAS, UKUS, careers evenings, university fairs... So many exhibitions, so many invitations, so little availability. Thankfully, our student ambassadors are the perfect allies to help meet the demand to attend these events. But exhibitions are an overwhelming experience. We must equip our ambassadors with more than a tablecloth to make the most of these critical recruitment opportunities.
This training day will help your ambassadors survive and thrive in the exhibition environment. They’ll learn how to maintain their enthusiasm and energy throughout a long day (or month) of enquiries. They’ll also discover how to make a meaningful impact through a fleeting interaction by mastering networking nuances, reading body language, and projecting their voice in a noisy space.
Sessions will include:
Social media platforms offer vital channels to reach prospective students. The online world favours authentic, relatable, peer-to-peer content. As such, our student ambassadors are the perfect choice to champion our universities in the feed. But social media influencing is a skillset and mindset that needs careful cultivation, especially in the public forum of the Internet...
Never fear, this training day will give your ambassadors the tools, techniques, and tips to become compelling content creators. We’ll help them understand the subtleties between personal posting and professional posting, despite the need for authenticity. We’ll also teach them how to craft accessible social media posts – words, images, videos, hashtags, emojis – to maximise inclusivity.
Sessions will include:
A senior student ambassador scheme is a promising way to invest in your ambassadors. It offers a development opportunity for those who have impressed you. Senior duties allow them to gain new skills and improve their employability. You might even secure them as a new colleague after graduation.
But there are challenges too. Your senior ambassadors will have more responsibility and a wider remit. You might ask them to manage other student ambassadors, and maybe even staff members on occasion. And you might expect them to lead in a crisis when your team is unavailable. It’s a lot.
This training day will prepare your ambassadors for their hard-earned seniority. It will help them embrace the opportunity with a can-do mindset, with exercises to overcome feelings of overwhelm and imposter syndrome. They’ll also learn how to inspire as leaders and stay calm in a catastrophe.
Sessions will include:
Clearing. A word that sends shivers down the spine of any student recruitment team. It’s an integral time to achieve our student numbers. The endgame, the boss level, the now-or-never… And on the front-line, armed with scripts and headsets, you’ll find our trusty student ambassadors. But do we prepare our ambassadors for a day (or week, or month) when every phone call is critical?
This training session will give your ambassadors the confidence and resilience to commandeer Clearing conversations towards a positive outcome. Through extensive role plays, which marry your scripts with our "objective response" scenarios, they’ll learn to steer the callers from confusion to conversion.
We’ll also demonstrate how every phone call should embody your university’s brand, drawing upon principles of experience design (XD). Finally, we’ll examine overlooked mental and physical practices that will sustain your ambassadors (and yourselves) through an exhausting period of relentless ringing.
Sessions will include:
Our training costs £2,000 + VAT for a half-day training session. This fee is fully inclusive of all delivery content and expenses.
Our training offers approximately 3 hours of interactive learning and development activity, built around refreshment breaks during the day. We are happy to deliver at a time that is most convenient to you and your students, whether that be morning, afternoon, or evening. We are also happy to deliver training sessions at the weekend.
We purposefully design our training as a half-day format. This allows you to use the other half of the day to deliver your own in-house activities. For instance, you might require your ambassadors to attend a campus tour demonstration, undertake mandatory internal training, or complete onboarding documentation. All of these are best delivered by your own teams.
Simon has almost 20 years of experience in the higher education sector. During that time, he has led student ambassador schemes at four different universities in the UK: Nottingham, Birmingham, Warwick, and Coventry.
Throughout his career, Simon has supported ambassadors in a wide range of duties, such as on-campus events, classroom mentoring, exhibition staffing, phone-calling campaigns, online messaging, and social media activity. Prior to this, Simon participated in the mass recruitment and selection of student-staff at two students’ unions.
Simon has a particular flair for designing engaging training sessions, developed through his previous consulting and volunteering roles. Currently, he leads the training initiatives for UniTasterDays, including their quarterly training days in Birmingham, on-campus training for staff, on-campus training for ambassadors, and 6-week leadership course.
Past recipients of Simon’s training include AccessHE, London Higher, Manchester Metropolitan University, Queen Margaret University, Queen Mary University of London, St Mary’s University, the University of Salford, Zurich International School, and various HELOA regional groups.
Finally, 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.
To book your student ambassador training day, or arrange a call to find out more, please email Simon Fairbanks, Head of Community Engagement, at [email protected] or call us on 01746 769269.
