“Being in a job share is really quite special. There’s always someone who understands the challenges you face and who celebrates every success with you.”
We are jointly the Deputy Director of Student Admin (Graduation Events), a role that we undertake as a job share partnership, working with our amazing team to deliver Imperial’s enormous graduation events. We joined Imperial as a ready-made job share, applying, interviewing and being appointed together as a double act.
We’d previously been a job share for three years at the Prince’s Trust, where Susie covered Jo’s maternity leave before Jo returned part-time and we became a duo. Applying together for a role was new for us, and it was an especially strange experience as we did it during the pandemic, writing our application and doing the interviews remotely on Teams. Having known each other for so long, we read each other very well in a room but it felt strange to formally invite each other to take each question in interview because it was online! It can’t have been that odd for the panel since we managed to get the job though, initially as Head of Institutional Events before a structure change took the team into different divisions and we moved with the Graduation Events team into Registry.
Being in a job share is really quite special. There’s always someone who understands the challenges you face and who celebrates every success with you. You have a ready-made sounding board for your ideas and someone to check you when you go a bit off-piste. It does take time for others to get used to working with a tag-team, but we share an email address and have an overlap day each week, which enables us to keep things relatively seamless. The biggest challenge is technology, with Microsoft and others not really set up to accommodate such a highly dependent working relationship.
Job sharing enables us each to work part time for Imperial and gives us flexibility to also focus on other aspects of our lives, in particular for Jo to raise her son and Susie to run her consultancy business. We both really enjoy the balance that job-sharing brings and would highly recommend it.
We are both passionate event managers and every career highlight has involved us watching the fruits of our labour, and that of our colleagues, unfold into spectacular events. From thousands of people setting off on bike rides, to events with royals and celebrities, or the sea of smiling faces that look to the stage on graduation days, our energy and our love for our job comes from so many highlights that all involve successful events that bring people joy.
The challenge we were set when we joined Imperial was to offer every person who missed graduating at the Royal Albert Hall due to Covid the opportunity to do so. We are enormously proud that our team has done that, and it’s certainly a career highlight. It does possibly struggle to compete with getting hugs from Idris Elba at a star-studded event we delivered at Buckingham Palace, but it’s not too far behind!
We are really looking forward to Imperial getting its third annual graduation day at the Royal Albert Hall next year and the scope this will give us to continue developing ceremonies into even better celebrations of our graduands’ achievements. We are also looking forward to the spring events moving to June so we can enjoy the May Day bank holiday weekend to the max!
