It was a challenging journey worth traveling. It was also a precious experience for me to meet a local senior manager in a medium sized organization, being taught face to face about strategic skills, efficiency and organization ability. I spent 2 half days shadowing him. During these periods, Simon give me brief and complete introductions about his daily work: how to organize a meeting, deal with emails, arrange each issue; description about what the Students’ Union is and how it runs supported by charts and detailed financial reports, plus the newly printed brochures. He also guided the tour of the refurbished building for me.
Points impressing me most:
- Tier of plans and management strategy
Simon gave me a very clear illustration of internal hierarchies, and the tiers of plans based on that: The strategic plan, the operational plan and the departmental plan. All of them are in accordance with the Students’ Union mission and value statement, and each member/employees in these hierarchies know exactly their position and contributions to the whole organization, so that they are highly motivated, and the whole management is in a transparent way.
- The Student Union as a mixed organization
As a Chinese international student I am quite sensitive to the nature of the Students’ Union, whether it’s a private company or a Non-Governmental Organisation, or just an informal self-administrating organization. From this experience, I was surprised that it is actually a charity running independently, with a company like high efficiency and a Non-Governmental Organisation like devoting goal. As is emphasized, it is built up by the students and for the students, I assume it has really played an important role in Newcastle students’ daily life. Funded partly by the university and partly by self-owned business, it tries its best to keep balance among different stakeholders, and also utilize this mixed nature to avoid many shortcomings like bureaucracy and chaos. I would definitely bear this in mind and gather more evidence in the future about this type’s advantages.
- The recruitment/application procedure
I was grateful that Simon gave me detailed instructions about how they screen potential candidates and judge an applicant’s eligibility: using scoring sheets and arranging specific tasks. Now I’ve been aware of the process of recruitment from the eyes of the interviewers: It is more objective than I think. Moreover, Simon was very willing to give me suggestions based on his recruiting experience as a judge: Try to take control of the surroundings where you will have the interview–be familiar with them in advance; understand the job requirements thoroughly and deliver them back using own experiences; give details but remember to make them focused on the targeted skills……
- The importance of external relationships
Simon categorized his own work into 3 fields: Governance, network relationships and operations. I was attracted by his emphasis on network relationships–the one I used to think that only Chinese people care and are good at. It’s about building up connections with the Newcastle, the franchises and stores that have partnerships with them, the National Union of Students (NUS) and other universities’ Students’ Union. As Simon analyzed, the relationships are often of two sides: reciprocal and competitive. The key thing is to make them balanced.
His shadowing me:
Simon spent a whole day with me in the INTO building, listening to me patiently about my modules, assignments, my responsibility as a Course Representative, as well as attending a class seminar with me, and especially, accompanying me through my co-chair role play in the staff student committee meeting which was coincidently arranged in that day. Two things needed to be made clear here: The first is that one teacher refused to permit his attendance–this was confirmed before the shadowing but since I did not expect that, I have to ask Simon back to his office to deal with his own works for a while. Though a little bit pitiful, I still managed to give more details to Simon about that course later that day, and I obeyed the rules of Staff Student Shadowing Scheme. Part of this lost time was made up by the earlier start of that afternoon (1.00 pm)–the usual schedule of INTO’s life. The second thing was that instead of taking usual seminar at 1.00 pm, he accompanied me to participate in the second staff student committee meeting held at the same time. This was not a tailored meeting, but rather my normal life as a Course Representative. It was also a good chance to let him know how the representative system from the Students’ Union was implemented in INTO.
Conclusions and further issues:
For me it was a very fruitful day shadowing him. Though a little bit information overloaded (because it was really hard for me digest all he introduced in a short time), I still tried to summarize and review the whole experience. Also, my classmates and teachers were happy about his attendance. I thought for me it was a journey of a deep understanding of the Students’ Union, Newcastle campus life, as well as the daily running of a medium size charity. I was grateful for the suggestions given by Simon, both towards this scheme and myself.
There are some further considerations I would like to share here: Though INTO Newcastle and Newcastle University Students’ Union are indeed two organizations, co-operation can happen and can really do good to both. In both of their goals, the students’ interests are emphasized as of highest priority, so I hope to see in the future, there may be more activities or programs launched in between and benefits the students most, just like how this Staff Student Shadowing Scheme has done.
XING LIANG
the current student in INTO Newcastle for Graduate Diploma in Business and Humanities