Esther Hazel Palin

• Year in Industry Scheme: Supporting the Placement Director and students. This includes working with placement providers for example Amazon, L'Oreal, Police, Bank of England. Ensuring key paperwork is in place, including Risk Assessments and Placement Agreements; arranging placement visits, scheduling follow-ups and pastoral care where necessary. This role requires a high level of confidentiality and the ability to effectively communicate with students, external companies, and other UEA departments.
• Alumni Database: Collecting and securing former students' personal information to GDPR standards. This has involved some tricky discussions with academics about how the data is used. This does mean that I have to negotiate and explain clearly why some requests for access are not granted.
• Student Workers: Using in-house software I carry out Right to Work checks; produce and process contracts of employment; process timesheets to deadlines to ensure payment in line with UEA regulations.
• Coordinate cross-departmental meetings, facilitating better collaboration within the Placement group - this included 3 other Schools and senior members of the UEA management team.
• Mentoring Scheme - Using the Alumni Database to identify potential mentors and match them to current students. Streamlining the process reduced the impact on academic time and decreased the number of matches rejected by mentors/mentees.
• Maintain detailed records of placement activities, ensuring transparency so that UEA partners are able to see where each student is in the placement programme. Key improvement was to implement a follow-up system checking in with placement students for their wellbeing.
• Start of Year Induction: Arranging key induction events for new Masters students. This requires negotiation/working with lots of different departments across the UEA to make sure that the events come together successfully - success is vital as the final product is our students' first impression of the School and the UEA.

Personal assistance to the Head of School and School Manager. The role of PA required the ability to juggle multiple tasks at the same time, to prioritise effectively and to remain calm and patient at all times

Key Tasks:

• Developing an extensive knowledge of the School and UEA as the first point of contact for internal/external services and customers, including students, UEA internal support services and the general public.
• Team Leader: Supervising 2 full time members of staff including their appraisals, CPD, work allocation
• Diary management for the Head of School and School Manager
• Health and Safety: Making sure that Risk Assessments were available for overseas Field Trips.
• Ethics: Processing student and staff Ethics Applications for research projects – making sure that they were reviewed/signed off correctly. Accuracy and confidentiality was essential as not having the right ethics approval would be hugely detrimental for students and academics.
• Maintained confidentiality of sensitive information by implementing strict file management systems for HR records held in School when used for Academic Promotions.
• Coordinated travel arrangements, resulting in smooth business trips. This included the arrangements for overseas field trips which were incredibly complex and required significant negotiation with overseas suppliers and internal UEA Finance. Ensuring strict compliance with budgets and guidelines.
• Finance: Received and processed staff business expenses, maintaining excellent cash flow and budget management. Explaining effectively when expenses couldn't be paid or explaining UEA regulations that pertained to the claims. Controlling spend on non-pay items like travel, field trips, stationery etc.
• HR Support: Covering recruitment, appraisals, academic promotions and study leave. Strict confidentiality was required due to access to personal data.
• Committee meeting support, preparing papers to deadlines which involved negotiating with academics in key roles. Minuting accurately and distributing them promptly to avoid task drag.
• IT: Daily use of the MS suite of programmes, Excel, Word, Teams, Power Point and in-house web design.
• Budget Control: oversaw the budget for our Associate Tutor contracts, monitoring and analysing spend and ensuring compliance with HR procedures, Right to Work, and legal frameworks, ie Tier 4 students had restricted work hours.
• Exam Papers: Ensuring exam papers were correctly formatted, complied with UEA regulations and were delivered to strict deadlines. This took considerable negotiation with academics to achieve successfully.

• Two periods of Secondment to the School of Law as School Manager.

Key Tasks:

• Budget Control: Significant budget control over millions of pounds. Building excellent relationships quickly with our finance team to ensure that the year-end spend came in on budget
• School Support: Developing new corporate giveaways which included commissioning a piece of bespoke artwork for use in overseas student recruitment drives.
• Estate Management: Earlham Hall refurbishment was completing as I joined the School. There were some significant works left to be completed that included unresolved health and safety implications. I successfully negotiated with our Estates Team to complete these items to the satisfaction of all parties involved.
• I took part in the cross departmental discussions for the renovation/development of the another property close to Earlham Hall. Once complete I was responsible for re-organising the room accommodation for the academics, again negotiation skills were need on my part to impart some bad news but ensure the moves happened with minimal upset.
• IT Competency: Responsible for producing the Teaching Allocation for the School. I had to quickly pick-up how the teaching load was timetabled and feed that into a complex spreadsheet to assess how the teaching load was spread over the team; identify over/under loads and suggest ways around this in discussion with the Head of School. This was done via a MS Excel spreadsheet and in-house software.

Administrative Assistant for the primary grade teacher training programme. Responsible for liaising with over 130 schools each year to ensure that each student received 2 placements over the duration of the course. This work involved considerable negotiation with schools over what placements they might be able to offer. The ability to communicate effectively and persuade schools to offer placements was essential.

Key Tasks:

• Attention to detail was vital to ensure that each student received the correct and complementary placements in the right key stages.
• Using Word and Excel on a daily basis including mail merge to great effect to speed up the transmission of information to schools.
• Maintaining on-line resources to partner schools, keeping the information up to date and relevant.
• Use of in-house software and MS and Access for their database capabilities.
• Problem solving to resolve placement issues arising over the year which required patience and tenacity to secure the right placement.
• Responsible for ensuring payment was made to each school participating in the placement process to a total of £160,000 per year.

Working at the Erith office for the Marine Director. This role involved looking after specific bid projects for multi-million pound contracts.

Key Tasks:

• Organising Staff Recruitment Open days for new projects which included writing and placing adverts in nationwide industry publications. Acting as front of house at these events and bringing them in on budget.
• Business Development: Researching new markets and producing marketing literature about completed projects for use in bids.
• Personal Assistant to the Project Manager: Single point of contact for all site correspondence, ensuring that project critical information was fed through to the right personnel. The role combined time sensitive work with the management of general office issues and staff management. I identified a problem with the flow of critical design information within the site office and so designed and implemented an electronic file and archiving system enabling all site staff to access and search for key documents via a central database. I completed my NEBOSH General Certificate enabling me to participate in the site inspection rota, completing monthly Safety, Health and Environmental reports for Head Office. This was not necessary for my role but gave me additional flexibility in supporting the site office.
• Health and Safety Presentations to staff updating them on new information.
• Reviewed and updated Site Health & Safety Plan.
• Carried out CSCS card audits ensuring compliance and registration of Costain staff.