Mark Charlton

Could you tell me about your role and remit at your university?

Being Associate Director of Public Engagement is quite a broad remit. So, primarily you could say I look after the majority of public-facing work that goes on by academics and students in the University. So, this can be how the public engages in a research activity that we’re doing, it could even be how the public engages in an initiative that the University is leading in the city and it could be students volunteering and giving their time to local community groups.

It extends even further down into things like widening participation, which is an initiative which tries to get young people who wouldn’t necessarily go to university to engage in the idea of universities and view it as a possible place where they might want to come and study one day. So, there’s quite a broad remit to my work but, bluntly, it’s public-facing stuff which people outside the University can get involved in.

No two days are alike. I know we’re in unusual circumstances in the coronavirus outbreak where we’re all staying at home but actually the need for my work is still very high. I suppose I’m quite fortunate in that respect in that I’ve been kept continually busy because the University has tried to develop a strategic response to the coronavirus in Leicester which, like every major city in the country, is currently facing lots of challenges around medicine deliveries, food banks and strategic ideas at the local authority level.

And I’ve been trying to mobilise members of staff and students appropriate to those causes so that the University as an anchor institution for the city with a civic mission is there for the City of Leicester at this time of great need. So, I guess that shows how on a day to day basis it’s hard for me to predict what’s going to come into my inbox and I’m going to have to deal with and it’s certainly been heightened at this time of corona crisis.

How did you come to work in higher education?

I started my career as a journalist. Almost from leaving university I became a trainee journalist at a newspaper called The Lincoln Jericho and from there I worked my way up. You start as a junior reporter, then a senior reporter, then you might get the chance to work on a news desk and then work your way up the management ladder and over the course of several newspapers that’s what I was able to do. I worked also for some national news agencies and also for some national newspapers along the way and got some good experience.

Ultimately I ended up at the Leicester Mercury as one of the senior managers there and at that time things were really changing. This was about ten years ago. Things were really changing in the newspaper industry and newspapers were looking more to online development and things like that and at that time there had been several waves of redundancies and eventually one came to me and I was 38 years old at the time, so I decided that I would take voluntary redundancy and I would look for another career.

So, taking voluntary redundancy, for anyone who reads this, is actually quite empowering. It’s quite frightening in a way. You don’t know what you’re going to get at the end of it, other than redundancy, but you kind of take matters into your own hands and that’s what I did. I was fairly convinced that if I didn’t get made redundant this time, I would get made redundant again and I didn’t want to go through that whole process.

So, I sort of took control of the situation and I wrote down a list of things that might be applicable to my skill set and when I wrote down higher education. I wrote down several things that I cared about, like the NHS, for example, I was quite interested in. I had become a press officer for the NHS. Or I was quite interested in some charities that were close to my heart. And Amnesty International in particular, I was really interested in their work. Maybe I could get a job again doing PR for that kind of mission.

But the university, I thought, well, I could become a university lecturer. That would be quite interesting. And that’s when I started probing around higher education websites and I looked at some jobs. So, I live in Leicester, so I looked at, obviously, the two Leicester universities and there was nothing really there for my skill set. There was something in Coventry, Coventry University, that was quite close but, again, not really the sort of news experience that I could really teach, that wasn’t really relevant.

Then eventually someone who works at De Montfort University said they had a public engagement project they were starting and my skill set would fit and I took this role of being a public engagement manager for this very small-scale project at the time and if you had put that job amongst all the different jobs that I was looking at, I would never have applied for it.

At the newspaper I was involved in some management skills but I was also doing a little bit of design and a little bit of sub-editing and a little bit of writing. So, my head was in this I need to do something where I write things. That was my main strength. But what this job showed me was that actually those skills that I had, if you flip them on their head, I could develop my management strengths.

So, I managed around 40 people in my department at the newspaper. If I could focus on what I was good at in a management sense and the experience I had of working with HR, legal issues, project planning, staff development, all of these different aspects, marketing and things like that, so all these different aspects of your day to day job that you don’t think is the core of your job, so I started focussing on that and less on the writing element of it.

When I joined the University I was just a really good fit for that. Obviously I had to learn to work in a new environment which is very different from a newspaper office where I have to say working amongst a bunch of journalists is brilliant and it’s exhilarating but we’re not necessarily polite to each other and we’re very open in our views about the stories that we’re working on or the types of things that are getting published whereas in a university context you need to really use your diplomacy skills a little bit more and talk to people a little bit more politely in order to get things done. So, there was a complete cultural transition personally into how I behaved in a newspaper office compared to how I behave in my office towards my current staff.

So, I think that’s how I ended up working in higher education but I think the key take-away from it was to look at your whole skill set and not just focus on one area that you think that you’re particularly good at because now, eight years into this role, I wouldn’t necessarily say my strength is in writing and journalism anymore, it’s in how I run my department for the University.

Would you say your role is rewarding and meaningful?

The purpose of my job is to demonstrate the impact of a university on its community and it has really three stakeholders in that in that it has the students who learn at the university, the staff who teach and research in the university and the general public who engage with the activities that we’re doing, and on all three of those levels my job is rewarding.

There’s even an extra tier to that in that students and staff who I haven’t had any interaction with, when I see them on graduation days and there’s such an atmosphere around the University that 3,000 or 4,000 students are graduating with good degrees and they’re going to go out into the wider world and do positive things, that alone is incredibly rewarding, to be part of that process. Even if my part of the process is just another cog in a huge wheel, it feels very unifying as a place to work, that we all came together, and we delivered the opportunity for these 4,000 students to graduate.

In my day job I have to deliver impact around how, to give an example, work we do in primary schools to try and support young people into one day coming to university, we often do lots of really enjoyable things, like we have a game that one of our accountancy academics, Aaron Toogood, devised called Playdough where he gives a series of primary schools a fictional £1,000 to play the stock market with and the idea is they’ll learn about percentages and mathematics as they follow a 12-week plan to beat the stock market with their investment.

That’s a really rewarding thing to follow through, not only because the schools and the young children find it hugely rewarding and it’s part of our university mission but actually the purpose of the game is to teach mathematics and it’s to teach mathematics in advance of SATS tests and we actually had data back that shows that this work that we’ve been doing boosts outcomes for children in deprived areas who are taking SATS tests.

So, there are lots of little things that are really rewarding particularly in public engagement. There are a lot of headaches, like it’s not always rewarding. You have to put a lot of effort in to get the rewards but there is the underlying feeling of a positive purpose of the University and I think everyone who works at the University does feel that sense, that they’re doing something really positive for society, particularly around creating a space where lots of young people come and they learn and they develop their citizenship and they go on to be good graduates and excellent employees and generally good citizens of the future. So, there is a real sense of mission in that, I think.

Please could you highlight the standout development opportunities you’ve had

So, the University’s been very good, at investing in not only my personal development but the development of my team. So, to talk about my own personal development, when I came to the University there were lots of things that I had to get to grips with in a university environment, even just some of the language that’s used in universities and there were lots of what you would call localised training sessions and inductions for staff, which really gave me the foundations to develop in higher education.

So, there was a suite of things like that that has got everyone grounded to work in that environment. And then beyond that there’s been lots of really useful pieces of work that I’ve done around my own personal development. So, public speaking. In my previous job I was primarily a journalist who only wrote up things. I didn’t really speak to people about things or issues. So, I wasn’t particularly very confident that in my new management job I would be presenting lots of PowerPoints to large audiences.

So, I did some public speaking training which was really useful. I have done some training around boundary training and things that make sure that I’m protected and young people are protected if there are issues of vulnerability, which I think is really important and really helps develop an understanding of the breadth of young people who come to university and their needs and their challenges, which I think is really important.

I’ve done social media training, which is incredibly useful. Even though I’d worked in a media environment, there’s lots of different ways of communicating by social media and it’s quite a powerful tool, particularly in my realm of public engagement, that some people will say if it didn’t happen on Facebook, it didn’t actually happen.

So, it’s a kind of thing you’ve got to get to grips with whereas ten years ago, in my previous job, social media was an alien concept. So, there’s been lots of different bespoke pieces of development and one of the biggest pieces, still ongoing, is that because my work involves working with researchers, and researchers speak and behave in very different ways or have different expectations about how data’s collected and how data is used.

When I started at the University, working with researchers was a big part of my job but I didn’t wholly understand some of the language that they were using or the necessity to gather data in certain ways or frame things in a certain theoretical way and I was there to get a job done, bluntly, and they were speaking to me, you can’t just do it like that, and initially I couldn’t really develop a strong working relationship with this group and then ultimately the University thought a useful solution to this would be if I started to develop my own academic career concurrent with my job, that I would work better and stronger with a group of researchers.

So, I started a PhD, focussed on the work that I’m doing at the University and since I started that, I’ve obviously got a greater understanding of theoretical frameworks and research demands and data gathering and ethics and all of these other things that perhaps day to day a typical project manager wouldn’t necessarily think were relevant to delivering a good project.

So, I’ve been really grateful for that, actually, and I’ve got about another year to go to complete my PhD, which I’m really excited about. It’s been very demanding but it’s been very rewarding and very crucial to my career at the University.

How do you think the opportunities differ working in higher education compared to working in a commercial environment?

There have been several opportunities, I think, at the University that I would not have had certainly in my former job. So, I regularly travel overseas, either on student trips or to present at conferences. Whether that’s all going to change now with this new remote way of working, it will be quite interesting but fundamentally I have an international network of colleagues who are focussing on public engagement and civic missions of the University in central Europe and beyond.

So, the idea that I would have this collegiate community of people in my previous job would have been unimaginable, really. So, that’s been a big opportunity for me. The career development actually in my previous job, typically everything led in the direction of going up the management ladder to one day become editor and there’s only one game in town.

If you’re good enough you might become an editor one day but if you’re not, you’re kind of in this management glass ceiling, I suppose. And so I think in the University there’s actually so many different directions you can take your career because universities are quite big places, with lots of people, lots of distinctive roles and lots of significant leadership structures.

I don’t actually think the position of vice chancellor is open to me on my current academic skill set anyway but that would have been the equivalent, in my old job, of the editor, the person at the top who it might be your aspiration to try and be but actually most university structures, have a vice chancellor and then a tier of pro vice chancellors or deans and then below that another tier of assistant or deputy deans and other supporting staff and concurrent to that you have a similar sort of structure for professional services with senior directors, directors and deputy directors. So, there’s more opportunity and more jobs to aspire to, I suppose you would say.

So, I suppose the linear structures of lots of corporations possibly don’t lend themselves to career development in the same way as working at the University. Universities are huge entities that invest lots of money in their community by developing new buildings for their students or developing research initiatives which their staff engage in, means there’s always usually something that’s quite high profile and interesting that cuts across lots of people’s different jobs and you learn lots of things about different processes and different requirements of initiatives.

So, I think just the breadth of activity within a university and the sheer number of people who work in universities make it quite a unique thing compared to a typical office environment.

Please tell us about your experience of the facilities on campus for university life/wellbeing?

So, university is a very social place because there are departments, there are directorates, there are faculties. So, there are lots of different groups of people working together and then, outside of that, you have lots of people working on projects that cut across all of these departments. So, you get to know a lot of people with a lot of different skill sets quite quickly. In terms of a social environment, the University works hard to bring people together, to support common causes, to celebrate things that would be deemed a success for the University.

So, there’s lots of social interaction. We’re also very inclusive, so we don’t always base our celebrations around drinking alcohol and partying necessarily because we have a huge number of staff who culturally don’t drink. So, we look at different ways that we bring people together to celebrate and share our successes. We make a big deal of events throughout the year, from different cultures and make sure that we encourage everyone to participate in that. This ranges from the Black History Month Festival that we do really well at the University, to Diwali, to Christmas activities.

So, there’s lots of opportunities that bring people together and develop that interaction. We do have some really great facilities on campus that staff do have access to. We have a fantastic sports centre and I know it’s fantastic because I walk around it. I don’t actually use it. Some people may say I should use it a little bit more but the staff and the students use the Queen Elizabeth Sports Centre which is on the edge of campus. It’s an £8 million development. It has a gym, a swimming pool and lots of other leisure facilities within it.

So, that’s a really great resource for the University and there are other resources within the University that staff can use and these are available to be booked for staff groups, so spaces that can be used. Obviously the majority of spaces have AV and things that people can host events and I know there’s several staff clubs that meet together. I know there’s quite a famous public speaking club that meets on a Monday night at seven o’clock to which all staff are invited to, where they just do debating sessions and things like that which have been a hugely popular social activity over the years.

So, the infrastructure and the actually physical layout of the University lends itself to allowing staff to interact or to improve their health or just to get together and do things in a social context. So, yeah, again, that probably is another unique thing about universities, in that they tend to have magnificent campuses with lots of interesting spaces in them.

What have been your career highlights whilst working in higher education?

So, there’s two or three things, really. Not long after I started out, I was a couple of years into the job, I won a Guardian award for community engagement. I’m sure it had a flashier title than that but broadly that was what it was for. So, that really made me feel more confident and that felt really rewarding. A couple of years ago I was able to work with an organisation called CARA, which is the Council for At Risk Academics, and we were able to bring three Syrian scholars to De Montfort University to study PhDs and I’ve always been really proud of that, how staff united behind this idea and we were able to support and integrate those three students into our community and all three of them now are within one year of graduation.

So, that might be a proud moment in a few months’ time. The thing that really stands out for me at the moment is as part of my work I lead on the United Nations Global Hub for Sustainable Development Goal 16 and that’s a really huge honour, that the United Nations has chosen De Montford University and the work that we have done in the past around social justice and equality and our public engagement and has recognised our work and has given us the title of SDG16 hub.

The hubs are, I believe, on a three-year cycle and we’re halfway through that. So, I’m very proud to be working on that and it was a career highlight, to have been able to, one receive the opportunity from the United Nations to take it forward but actually I’m very honoured to be leading on that project for the University and working so closely with the United Nations, I think that is really exciting.

Professionally and on a personal level I’m learning so much about approaches to sustainable development and issues around the world where communities are held back by a lack of sustainable development and issues related to climate change and to displacement of people and a whole plethora of issues that perhaps I wouldn’t have stumbled across if I wasn’t working closely with the UN. So, I think that stands out for me.

What are your tips or advice for those considering a career in professional services?

My tip, really, is to understand the different gradings that the jobs are at. So, at De Montfort University I think it starts at Grade A which is quite low level and skilled and it goes up to Grade H which is a senior management level and understand the salaries that each of those gradings represent and see where you personally pitch yourself at. Because you don’t want to be coming into a job you can’t do because the way it’s graded typically means that the responsibilities of that job are reflected in the salary. So, that’s quite a useful thing to learn and actually my salary at the newspaper was very similar to the salary I started on at the University and I think that’s possibly one of the reasons I was a good fit, in that those two levels of salary matched.

The other thing is, as I mentioned earlier in the interview, think about the skill set that you have rather than the job titles you’ve held. So, at the University, lots of those job titles are very unique to the university environment. So, really, look at a job that you may think you might be attracted to but also look at other jobs and what they’re asking and what type of skill set they’re looking for.

So, if you’re a manager in a bank, could those managerial skills be transitioned into a university environment? Because you might be managing a research project but actually the demands of managing the research project might be very similar to working in an external office environment where you’re looking at finances, HR, project management and that kind of thing.

So, kind of just drill beyond the initial job titles because I think job titles are not necessarily restrictive but sometimes they don’t necessarily tell the whole story of what the job is. On the personal level think about the strong skill sets you have and the type of work that you want to do. So, I would guess that would be my approach. If I had to go through it again and look at whether higher education was an option for me, I would certainly look for the job descriptions as well as the job titles.