Events officer training course – Spring 2027
A 6-week training course for events officers working in student recruitment, widening participation, schools liaison, marketing, and outreach.
A 6-week training course for events officers working in student recruitment, widening participation, schools liaison, marketing, and outreach.
Every Friday from 16 April to 14 May, then a final day on Thursday 20 May
1pm to 2.30pm
Online for the first 5 weeks, with a full-day finale on Thursday 20 May in Birmingham
£750 + VAT
early-bird price until Friday 26 February 2027Only 10 places available
Are you an events officer working in student recruitment, marketing, school liaison, widening participation, or outreach activity?
Our new events officer training course will help you grow your knowledge, network, and confidence to allow you to secure and succeed in your role.
It is designed for:
Events are often the make-or-break moments within the student recruitment cycle. It’s a lot of pressure, attracting a lot of scrutiny. Rest assured, this carefully-crafted training course will give you the confidence, resilience, and brilliance to succeed in your university events role and beyond.
The course will take place every Friday, plus a final Thursday, over a 6-week period between 16 April and 20 May 2027.
Weeks 1 to 5 will take place online between 1pm and 2.30pm on Teams. Week 6 will take place 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 setbacks about their career journey.
The course is intimate and interactive, with a high level of group discussion. For this reason, there are only 10 places 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, workplace challenges, and expectations for the weeks ahead.
Weeks 2 to 5 will each focus on a different skill, with insights from a guest speaker. Each guest is a head of 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 another guest speaker, followed by a celebratory lunch and a social activity. All activities are included in the cost of the programme, except for your travel to and from Birmingham.
In this first week, you will meet your fellow participants. It is an opportunity to begin building relationships with the people who will support you throughout the course, and potentially the years ahead too.
We’ll discuss expectations for the course, share our career origin stories, and reflect on the workplace (and headspace) challenges we wish to overcome.
This first week will end with the launch of the course WhatsApp group where you can seek connection, camaraderie, and counsel in between the weekly sessions.
The big picture can get lost when you’re in the thick of event planning. Your university mission, values, and strategic objectives may get sidelined by the sheer shedload of room bookings, access requests, and inbox enquiries. Rest assured, our first guest speaker is here to share their expertise and experience.
You’ll learn that strategic perspective is a powerful asset when juggling an event workload. It offers motivation, inspiration, and a guiding star if required to pick priorities. Better yet, strategy can provide valuable context when reporting upwards, allowing you to share memorable stories about the impact of your event success.
We live in an age of big data. Everything is monitored and measured. It should be easier than ever for you 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 you 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.
Everyone knows the Events Team. It’s an open day thing. The professors, the switchboard, the gardeners, even the VC... They’ve all got your name, your number, your email address. It’s a daunting prospect, but also a superpower if you use it wisely.
Our guest speaker will discuss your unique potential to build relationships across all corners of campus. This will help you secure success for your own events, but also the wider student recruitment activity outside of your remit.
As such, your mannerisms and messaging must inspire confidence in your full spectrum of stakeholders (and their contrasting wants and needs). This session will help you embrace this responsibility and the rewards it can bring.
Time management has never been more important. Our sector is constantly trying to do more. Open days, offer-holder days, campus tours, online equivalents, the dreaded mop-up events… It’s a lot to juggle. How do you keep the plates spinning? How do you find time to deliver amidst the endless meetings and inbox fire-fighting?
Our guest speaker will offer two solutions. Firstly, working smart: you’ll gain a toolbox of tips and tactics to allow you to work more quickly and efficiently. Secondly, working less: you’ll learn how to identify high-priority events, then professionally decline low-impact events in a way which is appreciated and approved.
Leadership is more than a job title. As an events officer, you already lead staff, volunteers, and ambassadors. You lead projects, processes, and policies. You lead upwards, downwards, sideways. Even so, you might be overwhelmed by the concept of leadership. Perhaps an inner voice is whispering, "Imposter…"
Our final guest speaker will help you silence that voice. You’ll learn how to overcome your imposter syndrome, embrace a leadership role, and inspire others to follow you. You’ll discover a range of game-changing leadership skills and how to put these into practice, including how to master the most essential ability of them all: listening.
Each guest speaker is a university professional with experience as a head of student recruitment, widening participation, schools liaison, marketing, and outreach. Two more guest speakers will be added soon.
Jim Calcutt MCMI is Head of UK Student Recruitment at the University of Winchester. He leads the university's UK recruitment function, covering school and college engagement, open days, campus events, and applicant conversion at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Data is at the heart of how Jim leads. He developed Winchester's evidence-based approach to targeting and segmenting schools and colleges. He's also the university's institutional lead for HEAT (Higher Education Access Tracker). His team uses UCAS, HESA, CRM, and event data to decide where to focus time and budget, and what to stop doing.
Jim regularly delivers sessions for HELOA on making strategic decisions and using data to do so. These sessions draw on six years in schools and colleges roles at Royal Holloway before he joined Winchester. Jim has no formal background in maths or data analysis, so he's passionate about showing recruitment professionals at every level that using data well is about asking sharper questions, not crunching numbers.
Jess Stott has worked in student recruitment for over 15 years, having worked her way through the ranks of the school liaison circuit across various Russell Group universities before becoming Head of Student Recruitment Lead Generation at Sheffield in 2022.
In 2025, Jess moved from leading the Schools Liaison/Lead Generation side of the team to leading the Recruitment Events Team. She now leads all on-campus and online student recruitment events. She brings experience in successfully leading, managing, and motivating high-performing, diverse teams with responsibility for developing and implementing student recruitment strategies within a large complex Russell Group organisation.
Jess has been fortunate enough to receive valuable personal and professional development opportunities over her 6 years at the University of Sheffield. This has made her truly passionate about development and keen to support development opportunities for others.
Amy is Head of UK Student Recruitment (Events and Outreach) at Bath Spa University, leading a team of 14 across three key areas: Schools and Colleges Liaison, Access and Participation, and Student Recruitment Events.
Having worked in student recruitment since 2013, Amy brings extensive sector experience from both Bath Spa University and the University of Bath, where she was International Recruitment Manager. Amy is a proud Bath Spa alumna, and she holds a degree in Media Communications and an MBA in Leadership.
Amy is passionate about leading teams, developing people, and ultimately creating opportunities for prospective students to make informed decisions about their future.
The early-bird price for the course is £750 + VAT. The early-bird deadline is Friday 26 February 2027. 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.