Kathryn Myhill

Hello.

I’m Katherine Myhill and I work in IT Services at the University of York. My role is Portfolio Manager, I’m responsible for delivery of the University’s portfolio of technology and business change projects.

 

Please tell me about your role at the university.

So my role at the university is really varied and diverse. I’m responsible for the delivery of our portfolio of technology and business change projects, so really that has two aspects and the first is facing into the university and supporting decision makers in how to invest our time and our funds, so which new technologies do we want to invest in, which business changes would best support our strategy, and then once those decisions have been made then I bring those back into the project delivery team and I lead that delivery. So I have a team of project managers and business analysts based in IT services who are making good things happen.

How did you come to work in higher education? Please tell me about your career background.

Coming to work in higher education was really unexpected, I’ll be honest. My degree was in languages and European politics, so I think I had a dream of being a European politician. I’m quite glad I didn’t go down that route, given where we are now. But I didn’t know at that time, when I was a university student, that working in higher education was a career, I didn’t know that was a thing and I certainly never anticipated working in technology.

You know, I was pretty good at working with systems but I didn’t realise until much later that was something I wanted to pursue. So at university, I got a part-time job working in the accommodation office over the summer, and then I extended that throughout the years, I used to do a bit of evening and afternoon work as well, and that gave me a really good grounding in customer service, the student journey from start to end and also working with systems and data, I was very much part of the team. And then after graduation, I decided to settle in Yorkshire and I was able to use those skills that I’d acquired to get a job in the accommodation office at the University of York, so it was a direct transfer over and really from there I learned everything that I know about technology on the job and I progressed to a variety of increasingly technical roles focused on management and leadership and then I became portfolio manager in 2018, so a couple of years ago now. So it was really organic, I just kind of found myself in higher education, realised that I absolutely loved it, and I wanted to stay and I’ve just kept progressing ever since.

Would you say your job is rewarding/meaningful?

My job is rewarding because I’m really close to our customers and service users and I think that’s unusual in some sectors and some industries, so the students and staff who are here to learn research and teach, they’re right there outside my office door and I’m here to make their digital experience better. And the impact of doing that can be seen immediately in the journey that’s happening all around you in campus. You know, we’re coming up to the start of term and we’ll be able to see new students arriving, using the technology that’s out there, using the services that we provide and that’s really rewarding, and you kind of get a closeness to the customer that I think is unusual. And ultimately, if students and staff are successful in what they’re doing at the university, then their learning and research will have an impact on the world around us around us and that comes back to benefit me as well and the community and the world so it feels really meaningful to me and really rewarding to be a part of that global purpose, I suppose.

How do you think working in higher education compares to working in the commercial/government sector?

The most notable difference between HE and the commercial sector is that our strategy serves many different drivers rather than a single goal of say profit or shareholder returns. Those things are important but they’re not really part of the university picture.

So to be successful, the university must offer an excellent teaching, research, and student experience, and it also must make a positive contribution to the local community. And so in my role in particular, the challenge is achieving a balanced portfolio of technology changes that serves all of those drivers simultaneously. And I think that’s one of the main differences really, is just what’s the university here for, what’s it all about, what’s our purpose and actually it’s many different things.

Another really interesting aspect of working in higher education is the level of openness between universities. We share challenges, solutions, plans in a way that I don’t think you can if you’re working in a competitive organisation in a commercial environment; that information would be business sensitive and you wouldn’t be able to do that. But we go to conferences we meet colleagues from universities all around the world and we share, share our challenges, share the ideas that we’ve come up with for making the experience better. And it feels like a real community from which you can draw a lot of support and inspiration.

And I’d also say there’s a lot of similarities between working in the government sector and higher education, so if you’ve got experience of working in a highly regulated environment with a complicated funding model, we can definitely make use of your skills in higher education, there’s a lot of crossover between those two things and we get a lot of transfers in from public sector civil service because they feel like similar environments and people can leverage those skills to tackle some of the same challenges.

Please highlight any development opportunities you’ve had

Learning is the university’s reason for being, so it stands to reason that it’s the foundation of what it means to work there, regardless of your role or area of the business. So I’m in IT and I’m not directly related to any of the teaching that we do, but learning is absolutely part of our team values and our culture at the university.

The development opportunity I’ve made the most of is the University of York’s award-winning leadership development programme, which has given me the skills and confidence to progress really quickly from a customer service role when I first started eight years ago to a senior management role now, taking a lead on our technology and business change portfolio. So I’ve really benefited from that customized investment in me and within IT services, I’ve also had the opportunity to undertake formal and informal training on things like agile delivery methods, cloud development practices and professional project management methodology, and those are really over the last couple of years, so all the time we’re looking outside of the university understanding trends in the sector, in other industries and we’re trying to learn about those and bring those in. So I’ve had access to a lot of development opportunities in my time there.

Please tell me about your experience of the facilities on campus for university life/wellbeing

As a staff member in higher education, you can make use of all the facilities available to students, for example, the library, the sports village and all of the many restaurants cafes and bars on campus.

At the University of York, we also have an incredible archive which is local, national, global and we hold a lot of really important document collections, and if you’re local to Yorkshire, there’s a lot of family history information in the archive, so that’s something that people in the local community and staff members can make use of and there’s all sorts of interesting historical documents in there; I’ve been on the staff tour and really enjoyed having a rummage around. We also have a beautiful green campus with lakes and wildlife and one of my absolute favourite things about working at the university is time spent walking between meetings is not wasted because you get the opportunity to soak up the campus atmosphere, get a bit of fresh air and some green space and that’s really important to me in my kind of day-to-day well-being. And I feel part of the university community and that helps me; I feel invested in its future and feel that it’s invested in me and so that also helps with my experience of working there.

What do you like most about working in a university?

What I like most about working in a university is exposure to innovation. So our academics are at the forefront of their field, carrying out cutting-edge research, bringing that back into their teaching and they’re really finding new answers to global challenges, things like climate change, public health, and it’s really exciting to be close to those ideas and kind of hear about what’s going on at the university. And naturally this has an influence on us in professional services as well and what we do, so in IT we’re really forward thinking, we’re embracing cloud technologies and we’re seeking out partnerships with new edtech start-ups. So that kind of spirit of innovation like really pervades for everything that we do at the university and that’s what I most enjoy about working there.

What has been your career highlight whilst working in higher education and why?

My career highlight so far was being shortlisted for a national Women in IT excellence award in 2018. I was really proud to showcase the great work of IT Services at the University of York in increasing its gender diversity and supporting me really in reaching a senior level in the organisation, so even though it was me that was shortlisted, we got to travel down to the awards ceremony as a team, and really just give ourselves a pat on the back and celebrate everything that we’ve done.

I’m not the only woman in the leadership team in IT services and it was a real proud moment for me as an individual and as a team as well.

What are your tips/advice for those considering a career in IT at a university?

Okay so my tips for those considering a career at a university would be to, number one, develop your human skills. We work directly with a really big range of stakeholders; academics, students of all different walks of life from around the world, professional service colleagues in finance, research, estates, like lots of really different disciplines and so those communication and engagement skills are essential, and that’s what I look for in a recruiting manager, I look for those human skills. To a certain extent, you can learn the kind of specialist technical knowledge of working in higher education on the job, but it’s important that your values and kind of how you approach working with people are there.

Secondly, if you’re coming from commercial or government sector, then please show us how those transferable skills can help us with our unique challenges in higher education. We really welcome new insights and strategies from other sectors, we actively look for that and recruit those in. People stay in HE for a long time because it’s such a fantastic place to work but that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from other sectors and some of the innovation and practices going on out there. So if you’ve worked on a big civil service project or you’ve led a team in a local authority, for example, then we definitely would want to hear from you.

And thirdly, if you’re completely new to the whole university thing, like what is it all about, please seek out your local university and there’s pretty much one in every major city or region, and get a sense of what it’s all about. So most of them will have open days, specialist talks, some of them run knowledge festivals on an annual basis and there’ll be events that you can go to as a member of the public and you can just get a flavour of what a university is for, what their campus is like, and just expose yourself to some of the language that we use and it’s totally fine if you’ve not got personal experience of that and there’s ways that you can engage with universities and get a taster of why we enjoy working there so much.