Professional Services - Career progression at UoR

As Professional Services staff, this page sets out the routes and resources that are available to you, when looking to progress your career at the University of Reading. Whether you are looking to enhance your current skills and experience, make a sideways move into a new team, or to seek training opportunities for career development, you’ll find relevant links and pages to help support this.

Learning and Development opportunities

People Development offer a wide range of learning and development opportunities including classroom and online training, tailored development support, apprenticeships, research staff development, leadership and management development, coaching and mentoring to encourage Professional Service staff development and training. Please see the links to the right for more information.

A Development Pathway Framework has been set up for Departments to use to develop particular skills where it is needed to address recruitment and retention issues. It can introduce a visible career pathway for professional services staff where it is implemented. This approach can also form part of succession planning within a team, department or Directorate or School where team members showing potential can be nurtured and developed. 

Some ideas to boost your skills...

Develop new skills by being part of Staff Forum.

Employee Representatives of the Staff Forum actively discuss and seek practical solutions to improving the University employees' working experience. As part of this, they bring forward questions, ideas or concerns that have come from the employees to senior management.

Staff Forum also helps the University to inform and consult with employees grades 1-5 but is not a trade union.

What does an Employee Representative do?

• Voice ideas, questions and concerns at termly meetings
• Provide updates on projects and committees they attend
• Influence and challenge management on staff related matters
• Comment on University proposals and policies that impact staff
• Provide support to colleagues via e-mail, 1-to-1 meetings or group sessions

Employee Representatives meet frequently to:

• Build and maintain consensus for a unified approach
• Work on projects or consultations
• Attend training events (e.g. ACAS)
• Promote the value of the forum

To find out more about being involved in Staff Forum and/or becoming an Employee Representative click here

Join a Professional Development Network

The Women's Springboard Network was set up in 2019 by a cohort who attended the Women's Springboard Programme from April-July 2019. It's purpose is to maintain the momentum of the programme and meet on a termly basis to continue learning and to network with each other.

The Network aims to give an opportunity for Members to:

• Reinforce your learning of the key principles of the Springboard programme
• Continue your personal and professional development and build confidence to progress to new roles or manage your current role more effectively
• Tap into a network of peer support from colleagues across different roles, grades and sectors of the University
• Hear inspirational guest speakers, who have attended the Springboard Programme share insights from their career and life journey

The Women's Springboard Network, is facilitated by Julie Farwell, supported by Tracy McAuley and Rachel Franklin. For more information and to join the group, please contact Springboardnetwork@reading.ac.ukor sign up via the Women’s Springboard Network Team.

Success Stories

Following the focus groups that took place in the summer of 2023, the HR Advisory team are working on gathering some success stories of colleagues and their career progression at the University. These will be posted here soon for colleagues to see what others have done to progress their careers at the University.