I am one of those people who ‘fell’ into university administration by accident. I have worked at King’s for 14 years and I’ve never really had much of a career plan beyond being in roles which interest and stretch me, but at some point I realised that working in Higher Education could become a really interesting career choice, and I’ve never left the sector. I’ve worked in various departmental, quality assurance, administration and managerial roles at different universities - I find roles with breadth really energising.
I love the mix of strategy and operations in my role, and having a small team of 11 means I’m much closer to the action than I’ve been in previous roles with larger teams. I also really enjoy the partnership of working with a senior academic leader (Professor Frans Berkhout, Assistant Principal for King’s Climate & Sustainability) and the intellectual stimulation this brings. I’m working in an area where there is a huge amount of energy, enthusiasm and buy-in and I find the subject matter personally interesting and relevant to my own life.
One of the things I most enjoy about a role like this is that there isn’t really a typical workday – I am involved with a broad variety of stuff and there absolutely no room for boredom. Throughout the day, I will likely with colleagues in my team, draft papers, review reports or plans, and maybe attend one of our working groups or a meeting about a specific initiative we are working on with colleagues across or outside of King’s. I work with such a huge variety of colleagues from across the University, particularly Estates & Facilities, Procurement and RMID, so there’s always a range of perspectives to keep things interesting. It can be challenging to do the strategy and thinking part of my role, so I try my best to factor in specific time for this. I am very fortunate to have a flexible working arrangement in place which means that I am able to do the school run several times a week, though I find it endlessly tricky to fit everything into my 4-day part-time working week.
When you are working on a whole-organisation transformational change programme like King’s Climate & Sustainability, you have to be able to work with a wide variety of people to get things done. It’s important for me to understand different perspectives and work out how to enable, support and connect colleagues to deliver our ambitions. Communication skills are an important part of this, as well as supporting people through change. I think it’s also important to be pragmatic rather than idealistic, which probably comes from working in departments and faculties for over twenty years.
I have been so fortunate to be able to build an incredibly talented team in King’s Climate & Sustainability. They are such a motivated and committed bunch of people and I feel inspired by their passion for making King’s (and the world) a more sustainable place. I find King’s such a collaborative and supportive community. I am someone who likes to have their fingers in lots of pies as well as plates spinning, so working with so many faculties and directorates is brilliant (though sometimes a little overwhelming).
A positive aspect of working in a sector with such a lot of professional mobility is that I have worked in many different academic disciplines. However, that brings with it the need to have some understanding of those disciplines and this has morphed into developing an understanding of professional or technical areas of expertise. In my current world of work, this includes scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, the various arguments associated with offsetting or how to embed sustainability throughout a curriculum. While I found this daunting at the start of my career, I have now become much more comfortable about the concept of working in an area in which I may not have a lot (or indeed any) subject matter expertise. HE is such a collaborative sector and there is always another university to borrow and learn from, globally as well as in the UK.
Looking to the future, I am looking forward to continuing to develop my subject matter expertise. We are working on some pretty serious topics, such as offsetting, internal carbon pricing and carbon budgeting, which are complex and very technical! I would also really like to complete the KEATS Sustainability & Climate module – I have enrolled but (slightly embarrassingly) have not had time to attend all the seminars or complete the assessment. Ideally, I would love to complete some more formal qualifications, but I am realistic about what I can manage with a full-on job and a young child, so that will have to wait for now. A particularly valuable nugget I have learnt during my time with KCS is that every role is connected to sustainability in some way, and this is something I intend to incorporate throughout the rest of my career, whatever that may bring.
There are lots of ways to get involved with climate and sustainability initiatives at King’s!