Alumni Engagement Officer – Cardiff Business School

17922BR

Development & Alumni Relations

Managerial, Professional and Specialist Staff – MPSS

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Alumni Engagement Officer

Development and Alumni Relations are seeking a dynamic, organised, and highly motivated Alumni Engagement Officer, to serve in this newly established role, to co-create and support the Cardiff Business School in their new phase of development of its Public Value strategy. 

In this role, you will: 

• Help create a vibrant and thriving Cardiff Business School alumni community that interacts with the School and University in a variety of different, productive ways 

• Manage and support the Business School’s Alumni Advisory Board 

• Facilitate opportunities that strengthen the lifelong connection between Cardiff Business School and its graduates 

We’d like to hear from you if you: 

• Have strong interpersonal and communications skills, coupled with events management experience 

• Are a super-connector and understand the power of building networks 

• Thrive working in a fast-paced multicultural environment 

We can offer you the chance to work in a vibrant organisation, with great benefits and opportunities for progression. We are a proud Living Wage supporter. 

This role is eligible to be offered on a blended working basis, meaning that as well as spending time working on campus you may spend some time working from another location, e.g. your home. The University is committed to offering this flexibility, wherever the role and business need allows, supporting work-life balance.
Please contact Barry Sullivan ([email protected] ) for an informal, confidential discussion about the role.
This post is open-ended and full-time.
Salary: £32,332 – £34,980 per annum (Grade 5).
It is anticipated that interviews for this post will be held on 06 March 2024. Please confirm your availability to attend the interview in your application.
Date advert posted: Friday, 9 February 2024

Closing date: Friday, 23 February 2024

Please be aware that Cardiff University reserves the right to close this vacancy early should sufficient applications be received.

Cardiff University is committed to supporting and promoting equality and diversity and to creating an inclusive working environment. We believe this can be achieved through attracting, developing, and retaining a diverse range of staff from many different backgrounds.  We therefore welcome applicants from all sections of the community regardless of sex, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, trans identity, relationship status, religion or belief, caring responsibilities, or age.  In supporting our employees to achieve a balance between their work and their personal lives, we will also consider proposals for flexible working or job share arrangements.

Job Description

Duties and Responsibilities 

Key Duties

• Provide expert advice and guidance to a range of colleagues within the Business School, including senior managers and academic leads, in order to develop and deliver impactful, relevant and attractive alumni volunteering opportunities, including (but not limited to) student employability, recruitment, curriculum development, and strategy setting. Using judgement and creativity to execute the most appropriate course of action to resolve complex and conceptual issues. 
• Utilising Development and Alumni team resources (University database and communication channels and platforms), identify relevant alumni, approach and build relationships with them and look to bring them into a mutually beneficial partnership with the School.
• Collaborate with others across the University to establish and develop alumni systems and processes within the School, ensuring that toolkits and best practice documents are aligned with the needs and expectations of all stakeholders.
• Establish and manage the new Cardiff Business School Alumni Advisory Board in line with relevant Business School external accrediting body requirements and University regulations.
• Manage the delivery of flagship Business School alumni relations events and support the delivery of wider University alumni events.
• Lead collaboration between internal stakeholders and alumni volunteers on specific requests, offering guidance and using judgement and creativity to facilitate mutually beneficial alumni engagement opportunities.
• Produce high quality copy and content for various channels of communication that reflects, motivates and inspires a wide range of stakeholders to engage audiences effectively.
• Design, develop and deliver an effective recruitment and training scheme for a team of student interns (Cardiff Connectors) to support the Business School’s alumni relations activity, acting as line manager to set objectives, provide supervision and monitor progress.
• Gather and analyse alumni volunteer data to conduct complex data analysis and identify trends for the School and University to inform operational and strategic decision making.
• Establish excellent working relationships with key internal and external contacts to help improve service levels and create beneficial communication links.
• Engage directly with existing and new alumni contacts and their organisations and being a professional and effective external representative of the School and wider University.
• Raise awareness within the School of the value of the alumni community and supporting the development of impactful and interesting volunteering opportunities, such as: the chance to deliver guest lectures, participate in executive education, offer student placements, participate in industrial research projects, and help to shape the School’s curricula and research strategies.
• Support activities to increase the number of quality, valued opportunities that the School’s alumni have to engage with the University, including lifelong learning, executive education and Summer schools. You will promote lifelong learning opportunities to external stakeholders; identify and recruit volunteers to support the delivery; and seeking external leads for business development.
• Actively recruit alumni and key stakeholders to support student recruitment and to provide careers expertise, internships, work placements and global opportunities.
• Manage all aspects of the work programme including liaising with internal colleagues, maintaining and updating toolkits and best practice documents, organizing events and seminars and ensuring that the relevant databases are up-to-date.
• This role will be responsible for supervising small projects

Person Specification

To start your Supporting Statement, simply copy and paste the next section into a separate document, writing your answers and examples at each point.  Save the document with the title YOUR NAME – BR NUMBER – JOB TITLE and attach it to your application on the recruitment system.
Essential Criteria

Qualifications and Education

Degree/NVQ 4 or equivalent relevant experience.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

Substantial experience of proactively developing positive, mutually beneficial, customer relationships with a range of external stakeholders including senior executives.

Substantial experience of events management.

Ability to work effectively across teams to set up new systems and procedures, monitor their effectiveness (including gathering customer feedback) and to proactively make improvements and adaptations as appropriate to ensure a quality service is delivered.

Experience of/an understanding of working in a multicultural working environment.

Customer Service, Communication and Team Working

Ability to communicate specialist and complex information effectively and professionally to a range of customers with varying levels of understanding.

Ability to produce high quality content/marketing material that reflects a wide range of stakeholders to engage audiences effectively.

Proven ability to represent professionally an organisation at external stakeholder events and with individual, including senior, external stakeholders.

Planning, Analysis and Problem Solving

Proven ability to work unsupervised to deadlines, planning and setting priorities for own work and the work of others.

Proven ability to solve problems using initiative and creativity; analyse data and create management reports and to identify and propose practical solutions and resolutions to situations where there are a range of potential options available.

Desirable Criteria

Degree or an equivalent qualification or equivalent work-related experience.

Experience of working in a Higher Education environment and/or of the business and management disciplines.

Fluency in Welsh, written and oral.

Additional Information

Cardiff Business School is entering an exciting, ambitious, new phase of the development of its Public Value strategy. Relationships with its alumni are key to its future success, particularly in support of the areas of accreditation, programme design and development and student recruitment. We are therefore looking to build new and enhanced pathways to facilitate life-long learning and engagement between the Business School and its international alumni, and this post will be key to these endeavours.

Based in the friendly, ambitious, professional Development & Alumni Relations team, you will have with specific responsibility for supporting the development and delivery of a new Cardiff Business School alumni engagement programme.

Reporting to the Head of Alumni Relations, you will work in close collaboration with the wider University Development and Alumni team. The post will also have a dotted line of responsibility into the School to facilitate partnership working with the School’s staff and student communities.

You will provide comprehensive and professional advice, guidance and support to develop, nurture and engage with the School’s international alumni community, for the benefit of the School and its current and prospective students.

Firsthand experience of Cardiff University, or a leading research-intensive university, will be an advantage as will knowledge of the business and management disciplines.

General Duties

• Undertake a variety of appropriate duties to support the team and School.
• Ensure that an understanding of the importance of confidentiality, data protection and adhering to brand guidelines is applied when undertaking all duties.
• Abide by University policies on Safety, Health, Environment and Wellbeing and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
• In partnership with your line manager, identify personal and professional development needs in line with objectives and ambitions.
• Perform other duties occasionally which are not included above, but which will be consistent with the role.
• Flexible working is essential for this role, as there are often events taking place during evenings and weekends.
• This role may involve both UK and overseas travel – a valid passport is essential.

Job Category

Marketing, Media and Public Relations