UniTasterDays training for outreach teams
Inspiring, insightful, and interactive training for your student recruitment, outreach, widening participation and school liaison teams
Inspiring, insightful, and interactive training for your student recruitment, outreach, widening participation and school liaison teams
UniTasterDays is now offering bespoke versions of our popular University Training Days as an in-house option on your very own campus. The sessions are based around key themes, but are tailored and flexible to suit your requirements.
UniTasterDays has run a series of successful university training days in our home region of the West Midlands. These events have brought together practitioners from all corners of the country in a central location.
Our attendees grew their knowledge and network, before leaving with newfound energy and expertise to take home to their universities.
Each event has delivered interactive, insightful sessions over a full day. We pride ourselves on a fascinating and feel-good event.
In a sector overwhelmed with conferences, our approach has always prioritised smaller events, typically with a maximum of 50 attendees. It has allowed a greater level of attendee participation, with an emphasis on training and development, rather than sit-and-listen talks.
Rest assured, our quarterly University Training Days will continue. We love bringing together different universities for shared learning. However, we also wish to bring the training to you...
Simon and the team took the time to truly understand our needs and designed an away day that felt completely tailored to us. The training was engaging, energising, and genuinely meaningful, and not just a tick-box exercise. Every member of the team came away with something valuable. It was a day really well spent. Can we book the next one already?
Simon supported our Uni Connect partnership day for all the teams across Yorkshire, Humberside, Greater Lincolnshire, and the East Midlands. He was undaunted by being faced with so many professionals, and delivered an entertaining, energetic, insightful, and informative session on empathy, emails, and engagement. His delivery was perfect – inclusive and motivating. Thank you Simon for such a great session. I’m sure all my team, like me, have already adopted a number of your key messages into our work style!
Simon took the time to understand our team before designing our training day, and it showed. The session was engaging, relevant, and delivered with real enthusiasm. Our colleagues gave genuinely positive feedback, and the whole team came away with something valuable. We’d absolutely work with UniTasterDays again.
We are now offering our successful approach to training as an in-house option for universities. It would allow you to upskill your student recruitment, outreach, and widening participation teams all at once, and from the convenience of your very own campus.
Your training day would be delivered by our UniTasterDays team, who each have direct experience working in student recruitment, outreach, and widening participation roles at a range of universities.
My favourite training event in 16 years of working in HE Recruitment. Engaging, exciting, and fun - it was genuinely lovely to be in a room full of laughter all day! I'd highly recommend UniTasterDays training if you're looking to enthuse and motivate your team, we can't wait to put our learning into practice.
The training session delivered by Simon for our partnership away day was exactly what was needed - engaging, informative, energetic, and delivered with humour and enthusiasm! Simon spent time understanding who was 'in the room' and tailored the activities to ensure it benefitted everyone.
We offer a selection of themed training days. Each is designed specifically for student recruitment, outreach and widening participation professionals working in higher education.
We would also add further tailoring to your specific university following an exploratory conversation before your event.
Our themes are:
You can find further details about each theme at the bottom of this page. We can also discuss the potential for making something bespoke, and choosing between two themes during the day.
You might also be interested in our ambassador training for new and experienced student ambassadors
We collaborated with Simon to develop a team away day session. The UniTasterDays team listened to our needs attentively, then designed and delivered a high-quality training session focused on overcoming imposter syndrome. The session was well received, with positive feedback from colleagues.
We are very grateful to Simon who developed and delivered a thoroughly enjoyable and beneficial training day for colleagues in recruitment, widening access, and digital marketing. He took the time to understand the needs of the team and customised the sessions to our institutional strategy. A particular favourite was the empathy-mapping session which really helped us to understand the needs of our varied audiences. Thank you so much, Simon!
Our training costs £2,500 + VAT for a full-day training session. This includes around 5 hours of interactive learning and development activity, built around refreshment breaks during the day. This fee is fully inclusive of all delivery content and expenses.
We also have a half-day option costing £2,000 + VAT. This allows around 3 hours of learning activity. Again, this is fully inclusive of all delivery content and expenses.
The UniTasterDays team delivered a great training day, covering a few different priority areas for our team. The sessions were engaging and insightful, delivered with just the right amount of humour and interactivity, and were suitably tailored to our institution and the colleagues in the room. The sessions were well-received by the team, providing practical tools to take forward.
Simon's training day for the HELOA Anglia regional conference was incredibly interesting and interactive! I thoroughly enjoyed it and still put into practice the things he taught us. The delivery of the UniTasterDays training sessions is always brilliant and done in a engaging way.
Communication isn’t a skillset owned by our colleagues in marketing. We all need to be expert, engaging, inclusive communicators. This is especially true for outreach professionals. We must communicate with a vast range of internal and external audiences, with diverse ages, professions, wants, needs, and channels.
This training day will teach you how to communicate with the right balance of care and flair. You will learn simple and vital ways to increase your readability. You will discover how to craft emails that are genuinely read and actioned. And you’ll learn how to create engaging professional and personal social media content.
Sessions will include:
Presentations are essential in our role as outreach professionals. We deliver them on and off campus, online and offline, to a wide range of prospective students and their supporters. We share advice, guidance, and insights about everything from personal statements to our life-changing campus communities.
This training day will supercharge your presentation skills. You will discover how to create outstanding and inclusive slides. You will explore how to deliver with impact, adopting a confident and charismatic style. And you’ll learn how to manage a challenging audience with challenging questions.
Sessions will include:
Outreach professionals are often the unsung heroes on our campuses. We can be unfairly dismissed as travelling salespeople. However, we know we are having meaningful interactions across the country that change lives, recruit students, and protect the future of our universities.
This training session will help you increase your visibility and credibility, both across campus and across the sector. You will develop the confidence to champion your projects and successes. In doing so, this newfound awareness and appreciation of your activities will help you secure buy-in, resources, and roles moving forwards.
Sessions will include:
Stories are an inspirational way to engage our audiences: prospective students, their families, their teachers. As outreach professionals, we don’t gather around a campfire. Instead, we tell our stories in the classroom, at a UCAS fair, during an open day campus tour.
This training day will teach you how to become a compelling storyteller and form an emotional connection with your prospective students. In doing so, you will inspire them to register for a summer school, submit their UCAS application, make you their Firm choice, and more.
Sessions will include:
It can be easy to lose sight of the big picture. Handing out prospectuses, repeating funding advice, packing away crayons after a classroom activity... it’s natural to pause and ask ourselves, "Why are we doing this again?" This training day will help you refocus on the "why" and develop your strategic mindset and skillset.
You will practice embodying your university values, mission, and objectives in your outreach activity. You will learn how to demonstrate this to your senior leaders, through impactful reporting. Your new appreciation of strategy will also help you empathise with your leaders, and ultimately engage them for future initiatives.
Sessions will include:
We need students. Our outreach projects wouldn’t succeed without them. We need mentors, vloggers, podcast guests, student ambassadors, campus tour guides, summer school helpers... However, we can't just use any willing student. We need the right students for each role.
This training day will help you find, recruit, and train your required quantity and quality of students. You will learn to trust your students with new responsibilities, drawing upon their unique perspectives, talents, and networks. You will also become an expert in empathy-mapping models to aid student engagement.
Sessions will include:
Outreach vs marketing. It’s one of the most problematic divisions found within universities. It’s also one of the best opportunities. Both departments are tasked with student recruitment, yet each follows their own approach. Two teams, one purpose. Two sides, one coin. And if we play that coin right, then we can win big.
But as outreach professionals, you may struggle to understand your marketing colleagues. They have a different strategy, different mindset, different jargon. Or maybe your team is beginning to absorb marketing tasks as part of a restructure, and you don’t know where to start. Never fear, our marketing crash course is here.
Firstly, we’ll unpack common marketing lingo – CMS, CRM, UTM, UX, WCAG – to help you navigate your next marketing catch-up. Secondly, you’ll learn fundamental marketing concepts, older than our universities, but as vital as ever. These include features vs benefits, the 7 Ps of marketing, and the Boston Matrix.
Finally, we’ll venture into social media strategy, a stalwart of any modern marketing mix. You’ll discover the value of a channel plan, the nuances of hashtags and emojis, and critical accessibility considerations. You’ll also learn the spectrum of social media impact, from reach to engagement to conversion.
Would you prefer to mix and match from our listed sessions? Or perhaps your team requires training and development in an area different to those offered?
Or maybe you’re looking for something outside-the-box for a unique and memorable away day? Sustainability? Inclusive language? Wellbeing practices?
We’d be happy to help. Please do email our Support Team or call 01746 769269.
