Head of Global Mobility

Position description

The King’s community is dedicated to the service of society. King’s Strategic Vision 2029 sets out our vision for the future, shaped around five priority areas: educate to inspire and improve; research to inform and innovate; serve to shape and transform; a civic university at the heart of London; and an international community that services the world. Our ambitious Education Strategy sets out the actions that we must take to transform how we teach, how and where our students learn and how we support them during their time with us. 

The Global Mobility Office is a student-facing and external-facing professional services team of eleven. This is an opportunity to join a small, close, centralised professional services team providing inbound and outbound study and work abroad lifecycle support and reporting, mobility partnership agreement negotiation and management, and administration of Erasmus, Turing and the Staff International Exchange Programme, in pursuance of the university’s Education and International strategies.

We are part of the Students & Education Directorate, a collection of wide-ranging professional services in place to support King’s students and their education. As a directorate we manage the student lifecycle from application to graduation and beyond, to ensure a coherent and seamless student experience and effective administrative processes, working closely with King’s faculties to do so. 

About the role

 

The Head of Global Mobility will lead and manage a team and be a subject matter expert in the key operational service area of Global Mobility, ensuring the senior team, and wider Directorate, are fully supported with effective processes and systems across a wide range of business and operational workstreams.  

The Head of Global Mobility will have operational responsibility for a defined portfolio of education and student professional services, as a departmental lead within the Students and Education Directorate.

The Head of Global Mobility will work within and across teams and functions, engaging with a wide range of colleagues across King’s. They contribute and lead on activities which positively impact the student experience. This includes ensuring:

• Close working with their Associate Director, and across organisational boundaries, to identify and action opportunities to improve efficiency and consistency of service (or project) delivery
• Efficient resource utilisation and organisation of work resources within their department (or project)
• Proactive engagement with service users and stakeholders to facilitate mutually effective working relationships
• Their department (or project) embeds a culture of service, transparency and continuous improvement

The Head of Global Mobility will have an understanding of the priorities, cultures and pressures of a research-led university and of academic processes and the structure of the academic year.

The Head of Global Mobility provides senior operational management for all in the team, line-managing four Officers as well as providing counsel to the other Officers and Senior Officers.

This is an exciting opportunity for candidates looking to work in a close, centralised team that is both student- and external-facing and who wish to utilise their skills and expertise in student mobility programme administration, international relations and team leadership. This is an opportunity to grow your skills in managing in a complicated, necessarily reactive but collaborative environment.

We encourage applications from candidates who have experience from both within and outside of the Higher Education sector where they can demonstrate the skills needed to succeed in this role.

This is a full time post (35 Hours per week) and will be offered on an indefinite contract.

About You

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. Relevant work experience and/or education: We think a wide range of different work and educational experiences could support you to be successful in this role. Relevant work experience might include work in other universities or any other large, complicated organisations, or else in roles with a diplomatic sensibility. Relevant educational experiences might include higher education in a related discipline, professional qualifications or other training.
2. Ability to demonstrate a meaningful and visible commitment to Diversity & Inclusion policies and practices.
3. Experience of working in a federated environment where collaborative working, facilitation and networking skills are core to resolving complex cross-departmental problems for academic, professional services and student communities.
4. Ability to identify service areas for systems development or process improvement and the skills to lead on resolution.
5. Excellent interpersonal skills and line-management experience with ability to communicate a clear vision of what is to be achieved within an environment suitable for meaningful two-way feedback.
6. Ability to foster a cohesive team ethic and train team members whilst engaging in own appropriate personal learning to retain and develop knowledge base of the higher education sector.
7. Ability to manage the workload of self and others in the team in a fast-changing environment, including to meet challenging deadlines, maintaining progress on multiple agendas and projects simultaneously.
8. Ability to synthesise complex, strategic, high-level ambitions into digestible, relatable and practical information for consumption by others.

Desirable criteria

1. An understanding and working knowledge of governance in the higher education sector, and the regulatory and legal arrangements for UK university governance.
2. Expert knowledge of study abroad, exchanges, partnership challenges and related Higher Education procedures.

Full details of the role and the skills and experience required can be found in the attached job description which is provided on the next page.

Application instructions

Please be sure to indicate you saw this position on globalvacancies.org