Associate Director HEDS (Development & Planning)

About us

This is an exciting opportunity to work at one of the world’s leading universities (ranked 9th in the 2024 QS World Rankings), and to help develop, and shape a new Institute. UCL’s Strategic Plan (2022-2027) includes a vision for an ambitious and distinctive ‘futures focused’ education for our students. It prompts us to look at how the future can be influenced and shaped by UCL students, staff and graduates through our teaching and research. One aim of the Strategic Plan is to enhance the holistic student experience and support students’ futures. To that end, the new ‘Higher Education Development & Support’ (HEDS) Institute is being established. HEDS brings together UCL Arena (UCL’s Centre for Research-based Education) and UCL Careers Service, sitting within the Office of the Vice Provost (Education & Student Experience).

This is a chance to work at the heart of UCL’s education endeavour, progressing UCL’s founding principles of excellence and inclusion. Colleagues within HEDS support academic programme design, ensuring a high quality and inclusive education provision; they provide responsive and collaborative pedagogical professional development and recognition; and they lead on employability related activity both within and outside the curriculum, co-creating initiatives with students and faculties to enhance UCL’s education provision and student leadership capabilities.

UCL Strategic Plan 2022-2027: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/strategic-plan-2022-27/ucl-strategic-plan-2022-27

UCL Arena Centre for Research-based Education: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning

UCL Careers: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/careers

About the role

As part of the HEDS Senior Leadership Team, you will work with the other Associate Directors, the Deputy Director and Director, to help shape the development of the Institute, ensuring that it provides the support and expertise that UCL requires to enact the education vision within the UCL Strategic Plan, ensuring that HEDS is responsive to the requirements of academic faculties, students, staff and employer stakeholders.
Working with your three direct reports (Head of Business Development; Head of Staff-student Partnership and Head of Research, Analytics & Curriculum Planning), you will bring together these areas, looking for synergies across their work, to maximise the coherence and efficiencies of the team, developing activity to support UCL’s co-curricular offering and the wider education experience of UCL students. In addition, your team will provide analytic, administrative and employer-led support for HEDS, as well as UCL Senior Education Team and other sen ior managers within UCL.

About you

You will have a background of leading strategic projects, engaging with stakeholders and delivering impactful proactive and reactive solutions, related to higher education and the student experience. You will understand the importance of working with employers and how the provision of global labour market information supports the development of the holistic education experience. You will understand how staff-student partnerships can create innovative solutions to challenges faced within higher education. And you will understand how quantitative and qualitative data can be used to monitor activity and support continuous quality improvement of activities. Importantly, as an experienced manager you will have the ability to bring people who support these functions together, and your leadership skills will demonstrate how you empower staff to establish a collaborative working and supportive team environment.