Our roles are very much designed to be invisible.

If we do a good job in professional roles, no one sees

the work. If you do a small error, it becomes a giant drama.

You literally are invisible. Because since 2019 it's not been

mandatory to return the numbers of people on non-academic

contracts to the HESA Higher Education Statistics Agency,

which is the datacapture mechanism for higher education.

Professional services quietly amongst ourselves are

frustrated, but don't always speak up. And my call to action

at the end of the book is very much a speak up, speak out,

because we don't do it enough.

Hello there. I'm Sarah McLusky, and this is

Research Adjacent. Each episode, I talk to amazing research

adjacent professionals about what they do and why it makes a

difference. Keep listening to find out why we think the

research adjacent space is where the real magic happens.

Hello and welcome to episode 60 of Research Adjacent. Today my

guest is Rachel Reeds. Rachel is slightly different to my usual

guest, because although she has been research-adjacent in the

past, strictly speaking, she's not research-adjacent now. But

what Rachel does know a lot about are the challenges facing

professionals, including research-adjacent ones, working

in higher education. Describing herself as a positive disruptor,

Rachel has recently published a book called Surviving and

Thriving in Higher Education Professional Services. The book

draws both on her own career, working mainly in university

admissions, and interviews with other HE professionals in a wide

variety of roles. In our conversation, we talk a lot

about the disparities between academic and professional

contracts, why professional roles are invisible by design,

and why she wants to embolden us all to speak out more. We also

talk about why Rachel is drawn towards work which supports the

underdog and works to change the system from within. As well as

the book, Rachel is developing a range of support for higher

education professionals, including free monthly workshops

if you're listening to this episode, when it comes out, the

next workshop is going to be on this Friday, which is the 17th

of January, 2025 so check the link in the show notes for

details, and even if you've missed that one, as I say, she's

doing the monthly so hopefully there will be another one coming

up very soon. Before we get on to Rachel's story I want to

remind you to sign up for the Research Adjacent newsletter.

Every fortnight, I send subscribers my top takeaways

from the most recent podcast episode. They are insights that

you won't find anywhere else. So if you want to know my thoughts

about this episode, then make sure that you're subscribed by

Monday the 20th of January. If you're listening in a podcast

app, you'll find the link in the show notes. And if you're

listening on the website, then scroll down to the bottom of the

web page for the sign up form. But for now, let's get back to

the episode. Listen on to hear Rachel's story.

Welcome along to the podcast, Rachel, thank you so much for

joining us. I wonder if you could tell our listeners a

little bit about what it is that you do. Well,

Thanks for having me. So I have been surviving and

thriving in higher education professional services since 2011

and I came out of university and decided I want to work in the

public sector. That was about as deep as my thinking got. So I

started working in local government, and the politics was

a bit too much for me. After a while, my politics did not align

with the political party that was in, that dominated in this

rural district council. So that's when I moved into higher

education, and I have spent wonderful number of years now

moving across different elements of the student journey, quality

assurance. I've worked in research administration, taught

course administration, and then laterally in admissions. And

that journey has taught me a lot about some of the challenges of

working in higher education as a professional and some of the

disparities between academics and professionals, which led me

in my frustration about the lack of development opportunities and

training and empowerment of professional staff, who can feel

very marginalized and quiet when our roles are very much designed

to be invisible. If we do a good job in professional roles, no,

no-one sees the work. If you do a small error, it becomes a

giant drama. So that led me to write my book, which is also

called Surviving and Thriving in Higher Education Professional

Services, which came out this week.

Yeah it's fantastic. It's a really

exciting week to have you on the podcast, although, by the time

this goes out, it will be, you know, slightly

slightly in the past, but but still, people can

I realized that

still go and find the book and read it. And certainly it is, it

is the book, hearing about the book that that led me to you. So

you're not a typical guest we would have on Research Adjacent

in the sense that at the moment, although you have previously

worked alongside research students, you don't currently

work in a research-adjacent role, but but certainly very

familiar with this whole higher education professional services

landscape, having moved around some different roles there. So

you mentioned there briefly some of the different roles that

you've had. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what

you do now and what some of the other things that you've done

Of course. So currently, I work in admissions.

Yeah and they do feel like chasms, yes.

over your career

I lead a home admissions function. It's not really home

admissions - it's everyone who doesn't need a visa - admissions

department. So CPD, degree, apprenticeships, further

education, undergraduate taught, post graduate taught, I don't

currently have research admissions because that's such a

specialist area that usually sits within the research

graduate school or somewhere similar. I like working in

admissions most particularly because you are at the start of

the student journey. You are the gatekeepers and also the

facilitators of bringing people into higher education and

opening up opportunities. And I've always worked in new

universities, post-92 universities as we call them. So

for me, that's a very important part of my professional

identity, is that I work in institutions that have central

to their ethos widening participation and broadening

access to higher education. So there's something very powerful

to me about making sure that I'm part of the mechanisms and the

processes and the environment that can enable people who

probably spent a lot of their life thinking that university

wasn't for them or that they couldn't necessarily achieve if

they were in that space, that it wouldn't be suited to them

culturally. So being in a position to break some of those

barriers, for me is very powerful place to be. I enjoy

all different parts of working on the student journey, but

there is something very directly impactful about the work that

you do in admissions where you can see that one conversation

can absolutely adjust the trajectory of somebody's life,

someone who thought there was a barrier that you can then help

them dismantle is, yeah, it's really powerful. But I started

in quality assurance with the structures of course approvals

and and the academic side of things. So having experience in

course approvals and course structures, in a business

school, there's lots of academics who are very good at

the theory and not so good at the accounting. Academics never

could make their credit add up to 100, which was a bit

frustrating, and going from that to then taught course

administration. So the middle of the journey means that I come at

all of the work I do in higher education in a more holistic

way, thinking about how the different bits fit together.

Particularly when I worked in the research graduate school,

that was enlightening, because it's such a transitional space

between academic and the professional, and you have to

float across it. It's, you know, that some of the Celia

Whitchurch's concepts about third space, this space between

and among and in both spaces at once simultaneously, which I

really felt when I worked in that space. But I also still

think it, I think it permit permeates higher education

altogether, you, you know, and that those who work in the

research space have to transition across those

boundaries and across those chasms.

Sometimes, depending on the situation that you're in

They do, because for all that we talk about,

breaking down barriers and third space working and transitions

between spaces, ultimately, there is an absolute binary in

higher education and in the academic world that says you are

either an academic or you are not an academic. And that's

absolutely enshrined in the contractual differences. And I

don't know that in any other industry or space, do you have

such a binary contrast? Most contracts in the in the private

sector space are focused around, you know, task, output,

responsibilities, expectations and role, whereas you are either

in the teaching, learning, research box or you're not. And

it's very strange to work in a space, and I imagine you

probably have this in the health service too, where you're

define, defined by what you are not, so you're non-academic, or

you're non-clinical, or anything like that. So and it's when

you're already defined by a negative and by a by exception

or by not being part of something that's really quite a

negative or outside space to come from. So it doesn't really

empower people in that space to to speak up and speak with

confidence. And then there's that primacy that comes from

that academic space and the freedoms they have enshrined in

their contracts. Academic freedom is enshrined in a

contract, whereas my professional contract says I

need to please keep quiet and carry on. Thank you. No opinions

required.

There's definitely things there I want

to pick up on. So just that, well, let's, let's just go with

that first one about some of the differences in the contracts

between, because that's something that you talk a bit

about in your book, the differences between. It's, it's

everything from the expectations to the actual, you know, terms

and conditions of employment. Tell us a bit more about some of

those disparities. For those who are not aware.

The fundamental distinction is around this, what

starts with this concept of academic freedom. So in a in an

academic, in a teaching, learning or pure research

contract for an academic role, there is an enshrined protection

for of freedom of speech, which goes beyond the traditional

concepts of freedom of speech and into the realm of academic

freedom, where they are in a space where they are encouraged

to and empowered to challenge, and they can speak to both

challenge in terms of their subject and their particular

area of research, but also think some of those institutional

structures within which they're operating, they can speak more

comfortably. They have an enshrined expectation that they

will enter into contract with other organizations, so they

will be an external examiner, for example, at another

institution, or they will do a consultancy project, or they

will be part of a research project. And that's encouraged

actively and seen as a real strength from their work, and it

really betters their work to be part of those other things, and

there is very minimal understanding, or total lack of

reference, to any kind of potential commercial conflict of

interest that might bring. So there'll be, there'll be

consideration of the ethical implications and those kinds of

conflicts of interest. But there is no concern that an academic

might go and tell someone another institution about I

don't know our like offer-making a strategy or something, but for

professional staff, we are contractually tied to that one

employer. Our contracts usually say that we're not allowed to

enter into contract with anyone else. So I was in breach of my

contract by entering into contract with Routledge to

publish my book. But, you know, that's a very small example of

it, but that's the that is, technically what happened. And

also, there is no expectation or no space for any teaching,

learning or research work on a professional services contract,

which is ridiculous when you consider that an academic

librarian is on a professional contract, and they are quite

actively straddling those two spaces. Or when you consider

someone who might teach academic skills, they're not an academic,

because an academic is a very conceptual space to be in,

because it is, it's about teaching and learning, but it's

not just teaching and learning. It's a specific kind of teaching

and learning and a specific framework around which, within

which teaching and learning should be done that's different

from academic skills or the work librarians in particular do, or

researcher development training that can often can be done by

academic staff, but it also can be done by professional staff,

and yet it's sits directly within, you know, one space.

Yeah it starts to fall apart. There's so many

roles. As you say, research librarians being one of them. I

used to be in a fairly strategic role in a research institute as

a manager, helping to direct the research and make decisions

about what funding applications were put in. So again, it's that

idea of of falling through the cracks between what's considered

professional services and what's considered academia, and the

more you pick at it, the less it makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely. And I have colleagues. There's a

colleague represented in the book, one of the 11

contributors, who shared their stories and their journeys

through higher education with me for the book, Dr Joanne

Caldwell, who has published work around professional services

identity. That's what she did her doctorate focus on and she

grapples, and she talks openly about grappling with people

constantly asking her when she's going to transition to the

academic space, because it's seen as an elevated space that,

of course, she must want to move into, which she doesn't. But

simultaneously, she works in a in a in a business school that

are willing to support her research interests, but

contractually can't give her time to do that, because there

is no space in a professional contract for research because

it's not seen as something that professional staff would do. And

yet, you have people working in partnership, academic staff and

professional staff. And if we want to engage in research or

write, like I did all of my book on my own time, that's what we

have to do. The MA education course leader might say, I'd

really like to hear from senior professional staff for helping,

you know, do a webinar or a seminar, sorry, for students on

MA education practice. We can do it on our own time.

Yeah

We might get a release from our time. to do it.

But we also, if you were a staff member that maybe wasn't earning

a salary at a lecturer level, you've got, they can't pay you

for the work at that level. So there's a, I don't know, lack of

recognition of of that knowledge as well.

Yeah. And also it's, it's sometimes I frustrate

myself because I'm like, sometimes we don't necessarily

have to play by the same rules. But if you look at the academic

model in the sense of how you advance subject area, is that

you do research on it, and you publish on that research, and

there are aspects of the work that is classed as professional

services. So for example, some of the ones I think of

particularly, are things like public engagement and researcher

development, where people are being encouraged to do research

and publish on that topic, you know, on do research, on public

engagement and what's best practice, and talking about

that, but still being considered professional services. And and

it's this, it's it's like a bind that that just stifles some of

that progress.

It stifles progress innovation, and is

inherently discomforting to be working in a teaching, learning

and research institution, and that be for the students, but

not for us. Yeah. And accessing that is quite challenging. But

then on the flip side, it must be very, very frustrating

working in a higher education setting, working in something

like marketing or for example, and not being able to influence

or contribute to the institutional marketing

strategies and plans and success. So there is a weird

disconnect. Yeah, it's quite an uncomfortable space to be in.

And just, you know, by publishing this book from for

me, there are people that are, I mean, a lot of professional

services community are like, Ah, this is amazing. We are we feel

unheard, we feel unseen. And they but they haven't been able

to rationalize or understand necessarily why they feel that

way. So it's giving a framework, but also giving them the

information data that backs it up. So when I explain to

professional staff that you literally are invisible, because

since 2019 it's not been mandatory to return the numbers

of people on non-academic contracts to the HESA Higher

Education Statistics Agency, which is the, the data capture

mechanism for higher education. So you literally don't exist,

because if you're not counted, you don't feature in the

research. And so when you see something like Advance HE last

week or so published some work around progression. I think it

was about the gender pay gap and thinking about women progressing

in higher education. And they unfortunately fell into that

trap of talking about the data says that in higher education.

And I had to say, I went back to them and said, I think you've

missed the word academic out a few times here, because you

can't make these generalizations, because some

institutions do return data on their people who aren't on

academic contracts, but they're going to distort the picture,

because unfortunately the 97 or so institutions that don't

bother you know, what does that say about them as an

institution, that they're not doing it and are the ones that

contribute it are? They're probably just carrying on with

what they did before, and it's sort of straightforward to do

so, but when you're not in the data, you literally don't exist

in the research. Then how can people do research and analysis

when there is no data about the the other half?

And that's an astonishing statistic. I

remember seeing you posting about it on on LinkedIn a couple

of months ago. I think it was and I didn't quite believe it,

and I went away and checked.

You have to check

because I didn't quite believe it, and it's

absolutely remarkable. But as you say, not only I mean, part

of why I started doing this podcast was because I read, I'm

sure I've talked about it before, but I read a new

strategy from UKRI, which talked about public engagement, and it

talked about the academics, and it talked about the communities

that they wanted to work with. At no point in the entire

document did it reference the people who would be in the

middle, who would actually be doing the work of pulling all of

this strategy together and actually delivering on this

strategy. And so the fact that people were invisible, even in a

document which was about their job, I found absolutely

astonishing. And I think you said to me when we were talking

beforehand, that it's almost like being invisible. If you're

good at your job, that's invisible and that's quite it's,

it's frustrating. It makes a lot of sense to me

Yeah, so professionals roles generally,

are invisible by design. So they are because of this traditional

concept of them as sort of support roles, especially when

you're thinking about the very traditional professional

services role. So for example, course administration, looking

after enrolled students, data and processing their results and

exam boards and everything. It's silent. You know, no one as a

student has any idea that someone is like doing that work.

They don't know really about exam boards and who's writing

minutes and things like that. No one thinks about that kind of

thing, and all of the process that go through to get a course

approved or to design some teaching and learning. What they

see is the face. They see the lecturer. They see the

materials. They see the output at the end of it. So when an

academic is doing their job really, really well, it's

visible because there's output, there's there's there's things

in the REF, they've got good NSS scores, that's the National

Student Survey about, you know, how good your course is and how

good your university is. They're getting good unit, module, you

know, output, things like that. They're getting good grades.

They're getting lots of first class and second, two one

degrees coming out the end. If you do your job perfectly in

course administration, everyone gets their grades processed on

time. Everything hits the deadlines. There are no

mistakes. There are no errors. Everyone thinks it just happens

by magic, and yet, when it goes wrong, it becomes this big, big

drama, and it's and it's often not resourced, because it's not

recognized, because it's done so quietly and so well that

therefore it's easy to overlook it. The analogy someone came up

with shared with me a couple weeks ago is you have to think

of it like plankton, utterly foundational and fundamental to

the ecosystem of the of the environment, but because you

can't see it, you might not think it's there or that you

need it. Yeah, and that's sometimes what it can be -

professional services plankton,

I'm not sure, I'm not sure people will want to be

compared to plankton

Well it's fundamental, but it's really

important, because I think sometimes there's dialog,

particularly in the press, particularly in the sort of like

Times Higher Education space, or in Government speak, where,

where there's this weird concept that universities in that

abstract concept and could exist if you took away all this, you

know, managerialisation is the death of HE. But let's be blunt,

if you took all the academics out of an institution, or

everyone on academic contract, between everyone who's on a

professional contract, who actually does do teaching and

learning, between all the knowledge that we have across

the board, we probably get manage all right? We could

probably rustle up quite a few courses between us. We could

cover subject knowledge. We could, there's lots of research

going on, there's lots of academic writing going on,

there's output there. We could probably muddle along for a

while, okay? If you took an institution, took all the

professional services staff out, it would all collapse. Yeah, who

would they ring if there was audio visual emergency, who, who

was going to build the learning, the virtual learning

environment, who's going to populate things, who's going to

process the result? It would just all collapse. So it really

is symbiotic relationship, and that's just totally not

acknowledged to the degree it should be.

I think a lot of people as well talk about as

being like, like the glue. And you know, when glue dries, it

dries clear. You know, you don't want to see glue. You don't want

glue oozing down the edge of something. I want it to be

invisible, but it's there holding everything together.

And, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I've certainly

been in places where a really key member of staff has has

moved on to a new opportunity, and suddenly it's like, oh, what

do we do? Who knows how to do all this stuff?

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I think though, from hearing you talk, and then even just from

the career choices that you've made, I get the impression

you're somebody who likes to challenge things, perhaps.

Oh yes, I like to be a positive disruptor. That's

what I call it. Yes. I mean, I have done that right from the

start of my career, in some ways. Going back a little bit in

my career. I so I went to a small, independent, all girls

school, very white and middle class in kind of a medium sized

town in the the East Anglia. I went to, I did history at York,

traditional choice of subject for a traditional kind of

university, lovely city to do medieval history in, but again,

quite small in terms of the grand scheme of cities and towns

and the campus university. Quite lots of people who were quite

like me, but with more accents, because I was up north, lots of

beautiful accents and and then I worked in a rural council in

East Northamptonshire District Council. So it was very sort of

samey. Everyone was quite similar. And then I, when I

started working in higher education, I worked at the

University of Bedfordshire in Luton, and it's quite sad in a

way, I suppose, but at the age of 24 I suddenly realized I did

not understand how the world worked, and that actually things

I understood like and believed in, like a meritocracy, for

example, if you just work hard, you'll get somewhere. I just

suddenly thought this, this doesn't mesh with what I'm

seeing. I'm seeing profiling of students based on race and

ethnicity. I'm seeing profiling of staff. And see I mean, and

this is back in the days before the UKVI audit, when the

international recruitment was king, and no one followed any

rules, because no one was keeping check on it. And so I

then start. I studied my masters, part time at Birkbeck

College, because it was the only place I could do Twilight

teaching, and I really wanted the classroom based experience.

And I did a Masters in culture, ethnicity and diaspora, and it

was my unlearning moment. So for me, it that masters that journey

those two years, and that starting to work in Luton was

the opening up of my eyes as to how dysfunctional the world is

and how but also, on the same hand, how government and

establishment and certain things can just carry on, oblivious to

how dysfunctional the world is and community is and how

disadvantaged some groups are. So what went into being, I want

to do something in public service with that really

galvanized me, and it made me think I don't want I want to be

part of the change, part of the positivity, not perpetuating it.

So I feel very strongly about my values working in higher

education, that I will always want to work in university that

needs my sort of expertise or my challenge and push that will

treat it, will understand that money is tight, that we haven't

got much, that we can't sit and complain. We've just got to get

on with it. And, you know, find our cowboy way through which we

did a lot at Bedfordshire, because it's a small university,

you've got to get things done. You've got to make it happen

yourself. So that's really embedded in a weird way. It's

like a second journey of learning or unlearning and then

relearning. That now is central to everything. And I am terribly

conscious of my own privilege, and always want to make sure

that everything I'm doing is, in short, is elevating somebody

else, whether that's one of my team members that report to me,

that's my approach to kind of leadership, management, whether

it's writing this book. You know, that was about like,

here's the crib sheet, guys, here's the stuff that people

aren't going to tell you. No, no one who's been here 20 years

really understands it either. So here's a quick history of why

we're here. Here's what a vice chancellor is. Here's what a

post-92 is. These things we bandy around that no one knows

what they mean. And for those that don't know what post-92 is,

it's a university. It's a polytechnic that became

University in 1992 when the divide between polytechnics and

universities was removed, structurally, but not

culturally.

No, indeed.

Yeah. So I do like to disrupt, but I try to make it

from a place of positivity.

Yeah. It certainly sounds like, as you

see, the things that you've done are looking at how you can help

other people to to get on, navigate the system. And, yeah,

Yeah, I think it's easy, isn't it, to kind of

Yeah, make the system work or subvert the

system as far as you can. Yes, yeah. And that person, when,

when I worked a course administration academic, would

be like, Oh, but the regulations say we can't do this. Like,

fetishize that if only the system was different than

there's no wiggle room. I'm like, there is always wiggle

room. We will find a way. I'd say with applicants, you know,

they think I haven't got the grades to get in. I can't go to

university. Yeah, maybe not right now, yeah, but with

information, advice and guidance, and I'm never just

everything would be fixed. But in reality, it's about what

going to turn someone away and say, No, you can't. It's always

not now. Yeah, I think admissions should never be a no.

It's always a not now, but this is what you can do to get where

you want to go.

yeah, definitely

individuals can do within the system. You know, yes, working

to change it, but also working the best you can with what it is

Fantastic. Oh, well, to get maybe to some of

the more conventional questions. I like to ask

Oh, sorry

my guests no, no, is this is fascinating. I could

now. Yeah,

rant on about this kind of stuff for hours. So yeah. Tell us

about I mean, maybe, maybe it's the book, but maybe there are

other examples, but, um, some things that you've done in your

career that you're really proud of.

Yes, I'm proud of the book, but I am proud of the

journey that I went on, and the confidence that I've built, and

the self belief that I've built that meant I could do it. So for

me, it was a very empowering experience, despite the constant

self doubt and imposter syndrome. Yeah. That represents

a journey that I've been on and represents my way of, I suppose,

articulating in a very substantial way and in a

physical way, my belief in authentic leadership and

breaking down barriers and making things as transparent as

possible. So I'm proud of the book, not for it in and of

itself, but for what it represents very much so. And as

a leader and a manager, I'm very proud of seeing team members and

people I've mentored go off and fly. I think that's that's the

most rewarding, and bizarrely, the bit I love most about my job

is not anything to do with HE or the actual work, that my

greatest joy is mentoring others and supporting them to go on. So

it was a way of, well, of spreading that. But I'm also

very proud of some of the, I suppose, the things I've done in

my career that are evidence of the resilience of our sector and

the resilience of the people that work in our sector. So my I

did exactly one calendar year in taught admissions before my

manager went on maternity leave, and they and left me in charge,

and they didn't backfill my post. I was doing my job and her

job, and I didn't know what I was doing. So making it up as I

went along. And it was leaning into the team and leaning into

their knowledge. And just start, you know, my I've always come

back to this. Just start, just get on with it. That taught me

that within myself, I have a huge amount that can get me

through most things, so I am not and it taught me that there is

never, never a barrier that can't be shifted a little bit or

negotiated with or shuffled, but also that you have to protect

yourself, otherwise no one else will do it for you. My anxiety

during that time went through the roof because of the pressure

and everyone was I was always maybe a bit too proficient.

Probably should have dropped a few more balls so they might

have got a bit more support. But yes, it was a journey of

resilience. But yeah, so I don't think I'm proud of very specific

achievements. For me, it's more about the journey, and the book

has been a really nice marker of that.

And I think from what you've said there about

that sense of mentoring others. It's almost like that's the

intention behind the book, isn't it? So it's almost that's more

important than the physical your journey, and then the intention

behind it, yeah,

Yes. And I say quite early on the book that I

think that one of the biggest frustrations I have is there is

so much knowledge in higher education, particularly in

professional services, and it is just not handed on, because

there are no or very limited mechanisms to do so. So whereas

if you've become go and get your first like junior lecturer job

or become a you know researcher, there's, there's so much,

there's so much resource out there, because your professional

community that are surrounding you are structured, is

structured in a way that encourages that knowledge to be

quantified, to be perpetuated. There's probably someone

actually paid someone to write some of that stuff, you know, or

it came out of a research project and one of the

associated like public engagement elements, was that

there needs to be, you know, something built on this that's

about passing on the the project side of the work, rather than

just the actual content and output. So it's about breaking

down that barriers. But I also think silence is what impact

what I was gonna say, something I was kind of saying silence is

what keeps us down, which this is not a revolution, but it it

is true that we professional services, quietly amongst

ourselves, are frustrated, but don't always speak up. And my

call to action at the end of the book is very much to speak up,

speak out. Because we don't do it enough. We let things happen.

I think we can be guilty of that too. So there is a need for us

not to just sit and be frustrated, but to speak up and

to challenge some of those, those norms around knowledge

creation and dissemination.

I think certainly you might say it's not a

revolution, but I can't help think we need a little bit of

revolution, and that's definitely part of what I'm in

this this for, as well

Positive disruption.

Absolutely. Well, I think that's a really nice

place to lead on to question I like to ask all of my guests,

which is, if you had a magic wand. How would this world look

different?

Well

It is a magic wand.

A magic wand. It can do anything. Yeah. So, I

mean, I would ditch the binary about an academic and a

professional, and think about structuring an entire, the

higher entire, HE sector around much more agile, so that we

could draw strengths from people, so people could have

predominantly more in the professional space, or

predominantly more in teaching, learning space. But there is far

too much lost in the inbetween and in those binaries that that

could really make it the most wonderful sector. And when you

see what's happening in Australia in terms of the way

they. The the professionalization of higher

education professionals is about, I don't know, 10-20 years

ahead of in the UK. One Australian university just

appointed their first vice chancellor, female vice

chancellor that came through a professional route. Not

something you can even envisage happening in the UK. I can't

even imagine there being a professional services Vice

Chancellor, let alone a female one. It. It's really distant

from what we can think about. And I would ditch the league

tables,

Yeah

and it would, it would all be about distance

traveled, because the entire league tables would then be

inverted, because the applicants that I work with come in with

very small aspirations and life chances, and the what they go

out with is so much more of a journey than what you know a 3

As student from a grammar school comes in with and goes out with,

the distance traveled and the impact on their life is so much

more substantial. So we I would invert them all together, but

also I would reverse some of the narrowing of academic divisions.

So even my masters was in interdisciplinary space, and I

did a module in the Department of History, and I got my my

assignment for that downgraded by the external examiner because

there was too much theory in it. And I thought, Well, that's all.

That's what's wrong with your discipline, sir. But anyway,

didn't say that totally, but it made me, you know what these

they're so artificial, all of these boundaries. So I would,

yeah, disrupt them all together and think about more as

assemblages of expertise, rather than divisions, departments,

schools and boundaries in the same way,

Nice. I like the idea of that vision for the

future. Fantastic. Well, I think we should think about wrapping

up our conversation, but just remind people again, the name of

your book, and we'll put a link in the show notes where they can

find it.

Yeah, it's Surviving and Thriving in Higher

Education Professional Services A Guide to Success, which makes

it sound even more distinguished. It's basically a

guide to, it's a call to action to stop waiting for unicorn to

land in your lap and that no one is going to hand you career

opportunities that you necessarily might be waiting

for. You have to get up, go and do them for yourself. It's all

things that you can do for yourself, to take the reins and

to be bold and speak up.

That's a fantastic message. And where can

people track you down?

I'm always talking too much on LinkedIn, so I'm

quite keen to engage there. But I also have a website which is

just my name, rachelreeds.co.uk, which has got my contact details

of someone wants to contact and I've committed myself for 2025

to do like a monthly free webinar and workshop on

different sort of skills and things, because CPD so hard to

access. So I like doing anything where I can talk and use a few

unicorns or astronauts or something fun. I like a theme.

Excellent and well, as I say, we'll put links

to all of those things in the show notes. So thank you so much

Rachel for coming along.

Thank you

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