St Albans, England, United Kingdom
Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and Lead for Postgraduate Programmes at Hertfordshire Business School with extensive experience in postgraduate student engagement, curriculum enhancement, and compassion-focused pedagogy within higher education. Passionate about creating inclusive, psychologically safe, and collaborative learning environments that support student belonging, confidence, and academic success. My work focuses particularly on postgraduate education, research supervision, cognitive compassion micro-skills, and building supportive research communities that enhance both student experience and learning outcomes. Alongside leading postgraduate initiatives and student engagement strategies, I contribute to the development of Compassion-Focused Pedagogy (CfP) practices across the sector through workshops, collaborative projects, and staff development activities. Prior to academia, I developed strong project, communications, and change management expertise within industry, which continues to underpin my strategic and operational approach to leadership in higher education. Recognised through both Business School and Student Choice awards, I am committed to working collaboratively across cultures, disciplines, and professional boundaries to drive meaningful educational experiences and positive institutional change.
This is a highly student-focused role; it's about listening and understanding what students are telling us about their post graduate experience in HBS and creating engagement and support strategies based on that. It's also about leadership and managing change I get to do all that within a team of colleagues dedicated to a first class service for our students which includes all the fun stuff which I really enjoy!
I manage business change for the Order Assurance department within Vodafone as part of VECTOR; a key business transformation programme supporting our UK and Global Enterprise businesses.
Following the acquisition of THUS and CWW and the automation of a number of THUS Channel systems the decision was taken to amalgamate the Sales Support functions across THUS and I was successful in being chosen to manage the teams through this transition period. THUS remained a Reseller and sold CWW products and services Wholesale to Mid-Market customers. I was responsible for reviewing the resource we had to meet the needs of this new way of working; transforming process in line with the CWW format. This meant that the teams had to conform to one way of working to ensure efficiency’s and it was my role to ensure they had the tools to do their job. During this time Vodafone acquired CWW in 2012, THUS was transitioned from Reseller and absorbed into the fixed area of the business. With this came the opportunity to work with a wider customer base and I was successful in securing a position whereby I could work with Strategic Customers rather than in Mid-Market. This was invaluable experience and I inherited a number of ‘high care’ customers to manage with a team of Support Specialists. E.g. BBC; UKPowerNetworks; Trinity Mirror, Mitie, Ladbrokes etc; . It was my responsibility to meet with them and understand their issues and agree a 'get well' plan to restore service
As ScottishTelecom became THUS and grew so did the need to support our sales people and I transitioned from Sales into Sales Support with this role; remaining within the call centre function I was tasked with setting up a team to support third parties who sold THUS branded products and services. There were not many telecoms companies at the time that were offering a ‘channel’ route to market and it was my job to recruit, train, motivate and support a team who were responsible for managing a variety of ‘Partner’ requests and query’s that were a result of selling through THUS Partner Field Account Managers. We established ourselves as a highly motivated and knowledgeable team who could navigate THUS on behalf of Partners to ensure their orders were placed right first time through to right first bill. I managed the end to end process which became very sophisticated over the years and I am most proud of the extent to which we could support the team both internally and externally. My responsibilities ranged from working with Product to establish Partner offerings and commission plans to organising Partner events to launch incentive schemes. I co-ordinated lead management, sales collateral, training sessions and content, pipeline management; order management through to billing issues, commission issues and complaint resolution.