New to Leading

Aurora is Advance HE`s leadership development initiative for those who identify as women. It is run as a unique partnership bringing together leadership experts and higher education institutions to take positive action to address the under-representation of women in leadership positions in the sector.

The Diversifying Leadership programme is designed to support early career academics and professional services staff from black and minority ethnic backgrounds who are about to take their first steps into a leadership role.

Research Team Leadership is designed to develop the skills of Research Team Leaders at a time when they may be new to leadership. The programme will enhance your capabilities as a research leader and nurture your career potential. This programme has been designed for those who have recently been appointed into research positions with a leadership dimension and is also ideal for those who have thus far had little or no leadership development.

Over the course of a three month timeline, Transition to Leadership will explore your personal leadership, your team leadership and your change leadership styles. By understanding your own resilience and how you can influence and inspire others you will learn new approaches to manage difficult situations and enable institutional change to happen.

With teaching excellence still such a major focus of the HE sector, our workshops provide practical guidance on improving your teaching practices while working alongside peers from a range of institutions and disciplines. These workshops are appropriate across a range of career levels, but their focus on driving toward teaching excellence will be of particular relevance for those working towards their Senior Fellowship application.

Our symposium events offer staff a useful forum to encourage the exchange and dissemination of different ways of thinking about key challenges and new approaches. Practitioners are invited to participate in each symposium through submitting an abstract on their work as a fifteen-minute stimulus presentation and case study to support the discussions.

Throughout the year, we run a number of writing retreats designed for those working on their Senior or Principal Fellowship applications.

These workshops will offer practical advice, guidance, policy information, frameworks and toolkits to support positive change within departments, schools, faculties and institutions in areas such as race equality, challenging privilege, and dignity and respect.

Having an understanding of the basic concepts of finance in the context of HE is beneficial to those working in any academic or professional services role and more so in posts which require elements of financial planning and budgeting.