Opportunities for administrative roles

[Alloway]

This is a WWYD?

My school is undergoing a restructuring, which means that all administrative posts have been vacated and they’re advertising for applications. I’m happy that I’ve escaped from my current position as equality, diversity & inclusion officer, but I’m left wondering about 1) whether to replace it with some other administrative role, and 2) if so, what would I want to do. I’m curious to hear what people would do/choose in this situation? If I’m going to do anything, I want it to ‘count’ (ie be recognised as doing an important role). But I also want to do something that is vaguely enjoyable. It’s a large school covering the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The options are:

• Admissions/recruitment
• Quality assurance
• Research/knowledge exchange
• Research ethics
• Career development/training
• UG programmes
• PG programmes
• Overseeing pastoral support
• Discipline officer (overseeing general stuff about teaching/admin/quality assurance for my discipline).

The restructuring is apparently going to improve interdisciplinary research and teaching, and they want to merge

The School structure is the big question mark here. Presumably a lot of the work goes on in the actual disciplines, which raises the question of whether you'll actually have that much to do in some of these roles, and whether you'll be in the position of trying to harmonise practices when it doesn't always make sense to do so. That can be a bit challenge, as the disciplines can end up pushing back. Some of the roles (e.g. Research Ethics, pastoral) lend themselves better to a School role than others (e.g. UG and PG programmes, also Research can be problematic when several REF UoAs are involved). A lot depends on the School culture and how cognate the disciplines are.

A couple of comments on the roles:

The Discipline Officer role will involve a lot of fire-fighting. Does it come with line management responsibility, though? That can be good on the CV.

I avoid pastoral support roles on principle as it annoys me that it's always women who pick this stuff up.

Admissions / recruitment - pressure when the course is under-recruiting (though, again, would you be overseeing this across the School but with individual admissions tutors in charge of specific courses, in which case you wouldn't be the one under the cosh?)

Re: The restructuring is apparently going to improve interdisciplinary research and teaching

Restructurings never do what academics are promised they will do. They are exercises purely for the convenience of University senior management. I'd be very wary of thinking that this is going to yield a wonderful new interdisciplinary culture.

Also beware of how the professional services team will transition to the new structure. It will likely take a few years to iron out their new processes (which won't be helped with difficulties recruiting to administrative roles at the moment). If you're going to be relying on them in any way (e.g. as Discipline officer, UG director), you may well find yourself taking on basic admin tasks while they sort themselves out.

Perhaps I'm jaded though! Having done big admin roles for nearly 20 years because I've had no choice, I wouldn't be sticking my hand up for one!

I wouldn’t volunteer for any

Yep. That's pretty much what I was getting at, but with far too many words!

Obv the risk is you will then be stuck with the big ones (academic integrity or something) but if you’ve just finished an admin role I would keep your head down

I think there’s possibly progression mileage in quality assurance, or knowledge exchange.
less likely in other areas in my view

well I think knowledge exchange sounds like it could be (a) interesting and (b) have a reasonable amount of autonomy without crazy deadlines.

have a think about whether there are any roles on the list that you would hate, and then if it is worth volunteering for a not-so-bad role to avoid the hated ones.

It's interesting how different things to be at different places, I did quality assurance for ages in my department, and I found it to be a lot of time and effort for nothing: it's pure drudgery, the progression opportunities are doing more drudgery but at a higher level, and at my level it counts absolutely nothing for promotion because it's not the sort of position where you can impact "strategy" (I mean, at the end of the day it's about implementing rules and regulations coming from above, and at most finding ways in which some tasks can be made minimally more efficient).
For ages I wanted to do a research-related role, because I see my strengths in research. Problem is, there's too many people wanting these roles so I only got to do one for about a year, covering for someone else. To be fair I was a bit disappointed: whereas with other areas such as UG or PG programmes you might actually get to influence what people do, in research in the Humanities people normally decide themselves what to research, and so the research convenor ends up mostly drafting innumerable 'research strategies' which are just basically about putting together what people are already doing in a somewhat coherent form that ticks the right boxes. If there's an element to the role of helping colleagues with their research (to apply for grants, for example), then it can be somewhat more enjoyable.
PG programmes is a role I might want to do in the future, and in my place one of the most likely to get you the kudos, although I suspect that with it will come also the pressure to drive up recruitment numbers.

In my dept only research-related and ‘learning and teaching’ ones count for anything. They are the roles that go to the ‘favoured ones’ who get promoted.