Are you ready to navigate the unique matrix of higher education and take strategic control of your professional future?
Working within universities requires a distinct blend of political acumen, institutional insight, and highly refined communication. Designed specifically for mid-career women in higher education, The Higher Ed Career Playbook is a free, four-part webinar series designed to help you break down institutional silos, amplify your impact, and position yourself for the next stage of leadership.
Dates: Wednesdays 18 November, 25 November, 2 December 2026 and 9 December
Time: 1-2 pm GMT
From understanding how executive search firms operate in academia to mastering the art of the professional narrative, your digital presence and your networks, this series offers actionable strategies to help you excel within the university ecosystem and beyond.
Why Join Us?
Demystify the Executive Market: Learn exactly how headhunters and search committees evaluate higher education talent.
Command the Room: Master the art of storytelling to articulate your value to senior leadership and promotion panels.
Break Down Silos: Map and activate your internal and external networks to build strategic influence across departments.
Optimise Your Digital Visibility: Optimise your LinkedIn profile to build a powerful professional brand tailored to the sector.
Wednesday 18th November 2026, 1-2 pm (GMT)
Making the Most of LinkedIn: Building Your Professional Profile, Visibility and Connections
Led by Anne Wilson, SFHEA, The Career Catalyst
Are you a LinkedIn Luddite, Lurker or Lover? Whether you rarely use LinkedIn, scroll through posts without commenting, or engage regularly with your professional network, this interactive workshop will help you explore how to make the platform work for you.
LinkedIn offers you opportunities to showcase your expertise, raise your professional profile and build connections beyond your immediate network. Yet you may underuse the platform, whether through lack of confidence, uncertainty about what to share or concerns about self-promotion.
Through practical examples and ideas, you'll explore how to tailor your LinkedIn profile to reflect your professional interests, expertise and the value you bring to others. You'll discover how sharing insights, commenting on others' posts and engaging consistently can increase your visibility, foster meaningful professional relationships and open doors to collaboration and new opportunities.
The emphasis is on authentic, purposeful engagement rather than self-promotion for its own sake. You'll leave with practical ideas for improving your profile, contributing to conversations and developing a sustainable approach to LinkedIn that supports your professional goals and fits the time you have available.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the workshop, you'll be able to:
Identify how you can use LinkedIn to raise your professional profile, showcase your expertise and extend your network beyond your immediate workplace.
Evaluate and improve your LinkedIn profile so that it communicates your professional interests, strengths and the value you offer to others.
Explore practical ways to engage actively through sharing insights, commenting on posts and contributing to relevant professional conversations.
Recognise how consistent, authentic engagement can help you build meaningful professional relationships and create opportunities for collaboration, knowledge exchange and career development.
Develop a simple, achievable action plan for making more purposeful use of LinkedIn in your professional life.
Wednesday 25 November 2026, 1-2 pm (GMT)
Rewriting the Stories We Tell About Ourselves: Story Intelligence™ for Confidence, Resilience and Agency in Academia,
Led by Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, Writer and a Story-Solution, Burnout and Executive Coach
Academic life is becoming increasingly demanding and uncertain. Institutional restructures, shifting expectations, growing workloads, and the competing demands of work and family life can leave even highly accomplished academics questioning their competence, confidence, and sense of purpose. Alongside these very real pressures are the stories we tell ourselves: I'm not doing enough. I'm falling behind. Everyone else is coping better. Perhaps I don't belong here. Shaped by academic culture, professional expectations, and our personal histories, these narratives can fuel perfectionism, imposter feelings, burnout, and self-doubt, limiting our confidence and sense of possibility. In this interactive one-hour online workshop, bestselling author and former academic Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner draws on narrative psychology, behavioural science, and her Story Intelligence™ framework to help participants recognise and challenge limiting self-stories, navigate uncertainty and change, and reclaim a greater sense of agency. Through practical reflection and reframing exercises, participants will learn to distinguish between genuine structural constraints and the additional pressures created by their own interpretations, loosen the grip of unhelpful narratives, and develop more flexible, compassionate, and empowering stories about themselves and their professional futures.
Wednesday 2 December 2026, 1-2 pm (GMT)
Demystifying Executive Search: What Really Happens Behind the Scenes?
Led by Professor Jackie Labbe, Creative Solutions Limited and Elle Hurst, University Leadership Associates
Ever wondered what happens after you press 'submit' on an application? What do researchers, consultants and clients actually do? How much notice should you take of conversations with a search firm? And is the closing date always really the closing date? Join Professor Jackie Labbe and Elle Hurst, Senior Consultant for UL Associates, as we draw on experience from both sides of the process. We'll explore how appointments are made, share common misconceptions, and offer practical advice on applications, CVs, stakeholder conversations and navigating search-led recruitment with confidence. There will also be plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion.
Wednesday 9 December 2026, 1-2 pm (GMT)
Beyond the org chart: who’s around your table?
Led by Dr Maria Kukhareva, Coach, Facilitator and Consultant
In a changing sector, much of what shapes your career happens through relationships, not job titles. In this practical session, Maria will help you see your own network with fresh eyes, including the people who sit beside, across and outside your formal hierarchy. You’ll map who is around your table, spot who is missing or underused, and leave with one small, realistic step to make your networks work harder for you. Come away with new insight and the confidence to use the connections already available to you.
Invest just one hour in your future.
Secure your complimentary place today and build your personal playbook for success.
Our Webinar Leaders
Learn from Trusted Experts
This series is delivered by highly qualified, experienced professionals with deep expertise in executive search, strategic communication, and leadership development. Bringing decades of collective experience within and alongside the higher education sector, our presenters offer the exact insider insights, proven strategies, and practical toolkits you need to confidently advance your career.
Elle Hurst, Senior Consultant, University Leadership Associates
Image of Elle Hurst, Senior Consultant, University Leadership Associates
Elle Hurst is a Senior Consultant with University Leadership Associates, specialising in executive search and senior leadership appointments across higher education. She has worked on all sides of the recruitment process: as an executive search consultant, an in-house search lead inside a university and as a researcher in search firms. Drawing on experience gained at UL Associates, GatenbySanderson, Minerva and Saxton Bampflyde as well as in-house, Elle brings a practical understanding of how executive search works behind the scenes. She is committed about helping candidates navigate recruitment processes with confidence and authenticity.
Dr Maria Kukhareva, Coach, Consultant and Facilitator
Image of Dr Maria Kukhareva, Coach, Consultant and Facilitator
Dr Maria Kukhareva is a coach, consultant and facilitator with 25 years’ experience in UK higher education, across academic, research and professional services roles. A Senior Fellow of Advance HE, she is is aso lead consultant for AHEP. Her work with women in universities includes coaching and facilitation on programmes such as Holding Space and Navigating Change (Women-Space) and Career Accelerator (WHEN). Maria is a solution-focused coach (Erickson-certified, with a CMI Level 7 Diploma in Leadership Coaching and Mentoring). She works one-to-one and in groups with women at every career stage, helping them find their next step, find fulfilment and draw on the strengths and relationships they have built.
You can contact her via email maria.kukhareva@gmail.com.
Professor Jackie Labbe, Jacqueline Labbe Creative Solutions Limited
Image of Professor Jackie Labbe, Creative Solutions Limited
Professor Jackie Labbe runs Jacqueline Labbe Creative Solutions Limited, a consultancy framed around helping the sector address its challenges with imagination and clarity. She is working with L Associates as a Non-Executive Development Director, helping them to refine their approach to senior recruitment in Higher Education. She has more than 30 years of experience as an academic and senior and executive leader, and over the years has engaged with many search firms as an advisor and candidate.
Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, Story Leadership™ and Story Intelligence™.
Image of Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner
Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner is a bestselling author, former Professor of Cultural History, executive coach, and founder of Story Leadership™ and Story Intelligence™.
Having spent two decades working in academia, she brings both personal experience and a research-informed perspective to the challenges of academic life, including professional identity, perfectionism, self-doubt, burnout, and the pressures of navigating competing expectations.
Her work sits at the intersection of narrative psychology, behavioural science, and coaching. She is particularly interested in how the stories we tell ourselves shape our identities, confidence, behaviour, and sense of possibility — and how we can develop more constructive relationships with these narratives.
Anna is the author of The Story Solution: Change Your Toxic Self-Stories and Thrive (Profile, 2026), Exhausted: An A–Z for the Weary (Profile, 2024), and The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths (Yale University Press, 2021).
Her books have been translated into five languages, and her work has been featured by the BBC and in Vogue, The Guardian, GEO, Psychology Today, and Philosophie Magazine, among others.
Website: www.annakschaffner.com
Anne Wilson, SFHEA, The Career Catalyst
Image of Anne Wilson, SFHEA
Anne is a career change coach for staff working in Higher Education. She is a qualified careers professional, a Firework Career Change coach, a licensed Strengths and MBTI practitioner and an award-winning women’s development trainer.
Previously, Anne worked as Head of Careers at the University of Warwick and has many years of experience in management and leadership roles within the careers sector.
Anne’s blog, The Career Catalyst, was created to support staff working in Higher Education.
Subscribe here to receive Anne’s weekly posts. Connect with her on LinkedIn.