Corporate role at a University vs Civil Service

[Internationalpony]

Hi all,

I’d love to hear your experiences of what it’s like to work at a University and even more so if you have experience of both universities and the civil service!

I’m in my thirties and I’ve been a Civil Servant for most of my career but have done a couple of secondments, one to the third sector and one to the UN. I’m in a fairly senior (SCS1 role).

I found working at the UN and third sector roles very slow paced by comparison and I know the UK Civil Service isn’t exactly a tech start up but honestly the other organisations felt much more old school by comparison! I’m in one of the smaller policy Departments which has a great culture, young workforce, high performing, collaborative and it’s fairly easy to get things done.

I’ve been in my current role for a couple of years now and I’ve recently been offered a role at a Russell Group University. The role is similar to my current role but the scope of the role / size of the portfolio is smaller although I’d have the same size team and I’d have a PA so I think the workload would potentially be lighter! The title however sounds much grander and the pay is 40k more than I’m currently earning.

It’s very tempting but I thrive on working in a fast paced political environment and I’m worried I’ll find it slow paced and old fashioned like my secondments but in reality I have no idea what university working life is like and I could be completely wrong! I’d love to hear from people who have insight into what it’s really like.

Thanks for reading!

Well, there you go @Berga If it is the same place, it's been a complete nightmare, was done by closing the old one with NO BACK UP a couple of weeks before term started! Not even running the 2 systems alongside, just in case.

Senior managers who had administrative/financial reasons for doing certain things certain ways, but these cut across very sound pedagogical practices, and threatened our ability to teach. I could go on. Even if it's a different place, the mindset is similar - we really don't need more of these sorts of managers! We need those driven by wanting to maintain our wonderful universities - they are one of the UK's best success stories in export etc etc.

And one of our lovely lovely PS colleagues on the front line with students left within 6 weeks because they felt they'd failed to handle all the problems in the first week of term. I still feel bad about them leaving as they'd been so amazing at trying to sort some issues I'd had, and I kept telling them how much I appreciated the help.

I once worked with an amazing manager who had as her principle that every single person working in a university should be able to say every day, what they had done to further the teaching and research mission of the university. And that includes sorting out student accommodation and booking research conferences in the events office!

Have you factored in the current state of university finances? Everyone is really strapped for cash. RG unis make a loss on every UK student they admit. I expect you’ll spend a lot of time making cuts.

Saying these kind of things makes me think you won't do well or enjoy being in a university environment. You will need to be able to gain consensus across a whole range of people to get anything done which will include academics, professional services staff and students.

I've worked in different universities my current and last 2 roles are in within the RG. Being a RG doesn't mean as much as some people think. If you want a fast paced environment then I'd say this isn't it the right fit. Most things move at a glacial pace apart from random reactive processes, systems and projects that are created in a knee jerk response 😉

There are lots of issues within the sector which need major changes to happen. If you haven't already you should do some research so you have a better understanding of what you will be walking into before you decide.

You sound very defensive. It’s odd to say “I’m not willing to see” the reasons universities are slow paced - I literally said I don’t know whether my perception of them being slow paced is correct because I have no experience of them.

The nature of my role means my passion is about the subject matter / policy area where my expertise lies, rather than the specific context and that will be the case wherever I work but I’ve pursued roles in organisations that I feel contribute positively to society and that includes the research and teaching universities do. Ultimately professional services roles are “enabling” roles which exist to support teaching and research as the ultimate purpose so of course it has to be something you value to want to work in a university but if research and teaching were my main driver in life I’d be pursuing academia, which I’m not.

I have a very very similar professional background to you (we have probably crossed paths!) though mine ended at a grade lower than you, a couple of years ago.

Im now at a lower grade at a (non Russell) university in professional services. Honestly, it is so frustrating compared to central civil service. No one wants to do or change anything. Well, they do, but only their pet projects. People just totally ignore work they don’t want to do, and no one ever calls them out on it. It’s a very weird culture to someone with a background where a minister tells you to jump, and while you might grumble and negotiate, at the end of the day you jump! The level of bureaucracy is comparable to the UN.

Id echo everything about university sector being difficult for promotion, very unhappy, lots of redundancies.

I would agree that handling internal politics is worse than handling actual politics. It’s hard to get a handle on people’s motivation - which is primarily around personal gain or around subject matter gain, which amounts to the same thing - and your levers are few. At least with a minister you know what drives them.

Obviously this is my view of my university, but talking to colleagues and friends, we are not unique.

I am where I am because it’s convenient, flexible, has the hours and the location that I need at this point in time. Most of the people I work directly with (the professional services team) are lovely, it’s the wider contacts, particularly academic, who are hard work. The pension is good. But if I could make it work I’d be back in the civil service before I could blink.

Is there any chance of you negotiating SUPL or a career break? Bear in mind if you leave you lose your continuous service for any redundancy calculations.

OP- I am not sure whether you have enough information to make a decision, but if you are still thinking about it, I wonder whether it might be worth clarifying the timescales over which you would need to show results. Presumably the university is bringing you in from the outside and paying a high salary because they want you to bring about change (which may well be needed and have been attempted before).

I think you need to go through a full academic cycle to understand the environment, even at a high level. The quickest way to lose credibility will be to expect action from particular departments at a time when everyone is dealing with Exam Boards, or it’s the busiest time of year for funding deadlines, or during confirmation and clearing. I have seen consultants do this- they think that because the VC is behind them, they’ll be able to require work from people but it’s sometimes just not possible.

Senior management will be in touch with the coalface to varying degrees, and they may not appreciate operational constraints themselves. Are there relatively discrete things you can do in three months to prove your value, and take longer to listen and get under the skin of the institution before starting work on wider change?

This would also give you time to learn the networks of influence. I am not sure I was clear enough about this in an earlier post, but it’s not enough to get all the Heads of Department in a time and have them assent to your plans- they’ll go back and ask their senior technician (who might have been there for 20 years and is the only person who can get experiments to run on a multi-million-pound piece of kit), or their Director of Student Experience (who may be two grades below you but is a well known expert and n your project area), etc.

I would completely agreed with @OnceICaughtACold .
I am in finance and change is painful and incredibly bureaucratic. In our institution, prof services are not really valued and are now facing massive cuts due to finances.

An analogy- in term of research, a university is not like a departmental store, it’s like a marketplace with lots of individual traders (academics) having their own stalls and coming together when it suits them. The university aims to put good governance around the whole thing to allow them to operate safely, ethically and legally.

Teaching is different and much more regulated, but this academic freedom to operate underpins some of the culture- for better or worse.

20 years at universities (including RG) up to assistant director level. Now in civil service. Took a demotion and pay cut to G7 but retraining in a skill set that would work outside too.

I never thought I’d find somewhere that made universities look dynamic, flexible, and exciting places to be, but my the civil service is proving that HE is “modern”. I’m glad to be out of HE (for a while, at least) - my specialist area was increasingly difficult and political and hard to get things done - but I find the department is crazy in its approach. No one seems to work much - it’s all about hours worked rather than stuff completed - which is probably my biggest culture shock. Whilst HE seemed increasingly over managed with over promotions, it feels threadbare compared to what i see in the CS. Also it tickles me pink that working somewhere people literally can (deservedly) earn a title for the rest of their life to signal seniority (professor) isn’t the most hierarchical place I’ve ever worked.

I'm finding this conversation fascinating.

I'm particularly interested in several comments about change being "glacial." As an academic, I know how long my research takes. It's slow because transcribing hand written manuscripts is slow. And thinking and writing take time, particularly if I want other people to read what I write and think with me.

And I know that when I'm teaching, I'm looking at the "slow cooking" method of getting 18 year olds to start to behave and think like moderately mature adults (it's getting more & more difficult) by the time they graduate. It's a slow process, this generation and accumulation of knowledge.

So what's the need for 'fast moving'? What are the areas where moving fast is important? If it's in changes to IT systems, or accounting systems, I can understand that (although universities generally do this really badly and subject teaching staff & students to endless bad decisions).

But as for finding universities staid - of the 3 RG universities I've worked in in the UK (I've worked in other countries HE, of course) two of them had VCs who decided to put their stamp on the place by restructuring us. Both times, we did the restructuring - which involved combining departments, dissolving departments, moving staff, forming schools, dissolving colleges, forming faculties, rearranging degrees - the list goes on - in about 18 months flat, while still delivering top quality teaching & preparing for the REF.

I don't call that 'glacial.'

So what are the areas that we do need to move fast in? It'd be interesting to know from those of you frustrated by the slowness of academics.

The other thing specifically to say to @Internationalpony is that you should never assume that academic staff work in hierarchies of line management. In RG universities, HoDs are 'first among equals' and after a 3 to 5 year term, they'll step down & be Mary Buggins again, or go on to something else. We don't operate on a command system - I am an autonomous professional as long as I get my contracted work done.

I find as a Head of Department, this is a mistake that PS senior managers make - that they assume I simply command my colleagues to implement whatever hare-brained thing the SMT has thought up.

@YellowAsteroid I said earlier that I think glacial is the wrong term and it's more like a tsunami.

What happens is that there is a decision that something needs to change - usually a knee jerk response to something like NSS. That will go round and round committees and discussion groups endlessly. At some point the principal/VC/Court will insist it has to happen and at that point everyone is ordered to make huge changes with no real details of what to change or why. And incredibly short timescales eg complete curriculum review in 18 months, set up a new VLE over the summer break etc.

It's ridiculous

For me, pace is not about how long research might take or how long it might take to see a major change of direction, it’s about pace of the role.

So in my experience, working in the Civil Service, if a PQ comes in it needs to be answered often the same day, if something is about to published in the media (there are regular leaks) press office want lines to take the same day, if a Minister takes an interest in something they’ll expect to briefing quickly and other senior leaders will want to be briefed quickly too before meetings with the Minister. At the same time you can still be managing a major project which spans several years. I personally thrive in that environment because it makes the role busy, exciting, you’re constantly being pulled into meetings at short notice and frankly you feel needed for your knowledge on a subject matter. It’s dynamic and things are moving and changing all the time. It also seems to attract people who are quite ambitious, don’t mind staying later to get things done, people move roles quite regularly so they’re highly motivated and things never feel stale.

By contrast when working for the UN, nothing much ever happened. UN rules mean staff have to move Departments every 7 years but staff usually found a way around it and many people had been in the same role for decades. I had to be very pro-active in engaging senior leaders and member states, expectations were very low in terms of delivery and everything was slow, partly because people just did things slowly and weren’t very productive and partly because once something had been done it had to go through an insane number of clearance layers and people just sat and waited. The culture was also extremely risk averse so there was huge resistance from the very top to any change.

I think this is different to what you’re referring to. I don’t know much about research but I imagine you can be focused a piece on research which spans many years and the work you do can still be pacey if you’re continually making progress, consulting stakeholders, possibly changing approach etc.

A couple of years out of HE and one thing I really hadn’t appreciated was the fact that, to survive, every single bit of operating practice had been re-thought through in the past 20 years in my old uni. Paying students (park the “are they customers” conversation; they expect a level of service and are capable of choice), regulation, and the ReF has driven this and the changes aren’t always good, easy, right or long lasting - but things have changed. In student terms, the fact that we’ve moved to a market driven approach has fundamentally changed so much of what we did this is really apparent. My CS department does not have that element of “refreshed” about it, although I’m sure others do.

@Chrysanthemum5 oh yessssss! You're right - tsunami. And ridiculous.

I think VCs go off to a summer camp each year to attend a session "How to stress out your colleagues so much that they haven't got breath to complain about your lack of vision" - but that might be just my VC. Good VCs are very rare - I've worked with a couple I've really rated, and one of the things they did was get out amongst us unwashed at-the-whiteboardface staff and listen. Treat us like the highly committed & very highly trained & qualified people that we are ...

So in my experience, working in the Civil Service, if a PQ comes in it needs to be answered often the same day, if something is about to published in the media (there are regular leaks) press office want lines to take the same day, if a Minister takes an interest in something they’ll expect to briefing quickly and other senior leaders will want to be briefed quickly too before meetings with the Minister. At the same time you can still be managing a major project which spans several years. I personally thrive in that environment because it makes the role busy, exciting, you’re constantly being pulled into meetings at short notice and frankly you feel needed for your knowledge on a subject matter. It’s dynamic and things are moving and changing all the time. It also seems to attract people who are quite ambitious, don’t mind staying later to get things done, people move roles quite regularly so they’re highly motivated and things never feel stale.

That's pretty much my experience as a Head of Department. A couple of years ago, I remember distinctly - I'd walked in to work, dictating my To Do list into my phone & sorting emails as I walked. I had a nice plan for the day to get my usual 10 hours worth of work done. Get to my office and 3 students were sitting outside (at 8am!!!!) - their housemate had been in a car accident and was in hospital with a head injury. So most of the morning was involved in dealing with the students, parents, checking re exams & assessments to be deferred (lots of group assessments to be rearranged), and so on. That kind of thing is pretty typical. One has a day planned, and then things happen which need immediate work done, so the planned work gets pushed to Saturday ...

Apart from moving roles regularly - academics and PS staff tend to stay in specific positions for quite a long time. They carry extraordinary institutional knowledge and capital.

So I wouldn’t consider that a “slow paced” role or working environment from what you’ve described, even if making significant long-term change is slow to come about.

OP- you might enjoy an Executive Officer/Chief of Staff/Assistant to the VC/Registrar role (called different things at different places). VCs are political roles, and they can have a senior person writing briefings, speeches etc- some of which is driven by the headlines that day. There might also be some “special project work”.

Unless things have changed a lot in the last few years, you’d struggle to get the salary though, and those jobs are few and far between. Also, from what I’ve heard you get a technicolour and privileged view of the university but miss out on a lot of the reality of the institution.

But we all do crisis management! Individual examples are often so weird and creative they couldn’t be quoted on social media ;-)