Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Our community
The LBU Professional
Is the LBU Professional for me?
The LBU Professional is for everyone who works in a professional service and support role, regardless of grade or where you're are located within the university. This includes support colleagues within professional services, academic services colleagues within schools, senior managers, technical, administrative, catering, estates and facilities colleagues across all levels of the university.
The LBU Professional will...
An in-person launch event took place on 4 February 2025. With over 80 colleagues from across the university's professional community in attendance, the launch event was an opportunity to connect with colleagues and learn more about the purpose and drivers for the LBU Professional.
Following a welcome from Tracey Lancaster, our Deputy Vice Chancellor, a colleague panel discussed the importance and complexity of working together to embrace change and foster a learning culture. Colleagues then took part in taster sessions on each of the priority skills.
If you missed the launch event, you can watch the recording of Tracey's welcome talk to the right, and we'd love to see you at an upcoming LBU Professional session.
The LBU Professional launch video - Click play below to watch Tracey Lancaster's introduction from the LBU Professional launch event
Priority skills for 2025
The opportunities for colleagues to engage, connect and develop are aligned to the following critical skills:
- Agility - including embedding change and embracing change-led innovation.
- Creative thinking - including exploring process efficiencies and effective problem-solving.
- Digital capability - including enhancing digital skills and leveraging digital innovations.
Delivering excellent service, tailored to individual roles, is a key focus of all LBU Professional activity.
Professional staff in higher education are a fundamental, passionate group, navigating a complex web of rules, traditions, innovations, and government initiatives. We have insights to share, experiences to unpack, and ideas to explore."
Development and support
The following development and support opportunities are available for colleagues:
LBU Professional Events
Details of future events will follow shortly.
Our latest LBU Professional Winter Event took place on 21 January 2026 in the Carnegie School of Sport building. Over 80 colleagues from across the university attended. Through an inspiring keynote talk by external speaker Dave Bunting MBE, a selection of interactive workshops and a fantastic colleague panel discussion, we explored 'The Power of Collaboration'.
Our first LBU Professional Summer Event took place on 1 July 2025 in the James Graham Building. The event, focussed on bringing colleagues together and offering a valuable opportunity for connection, learning, and collaboration, was attended by over 100 colleagues.
Online resources
This learning path within MyDevelopment provides resources, activities, examples of good practice and thought-provoking perspectives on the priority skills.
These resources will continue to grow as the network evolves and we welcome contributions from across the LBU Professional community. If you have a learning resource that you believe would be valuable to share, please contact the People and OD team at POD@leedsbeckett.ac.uk.
Masterclasses
Our regular masterclasses each focus on a particular priority skill area. They include expert speakers sharing their thought provoking insights, experiences and key learning, with time given for discussions to explore the topic further.
Our next masterclass, 'Transforming Meetings', is scheduled for 30 April, 10am-1pm, in Bronte G13, Headingley Campus. To find out more and to book your place please click the button below.
Feedback from the masterclasses that have taken place so far can be viewed further down the page. The slides/summary document from these can be accessed via the LBU Professional MS Teams Files tab.
Action Learning Sets
Our facilitated Action Learning Sets are designed to foster collaborative learning and create innovative solutions within the LBU Professional community.
If your role contributes to enhancing service delivery or process improvements in your area (however small) and you would benefit from another perspective, this opportunity is for you. Everyone's expertise and insights are valuable and welcome.
Register interest to take part in our Service Delivery Excellence Action Learning Sets.
In addition to the specific LBU Professional activities above, here are some of the other learning and networking opportunities available to you:
The 'Exploring Your Career' pathway within MyDevelopment provides resources and strategies to help you take a strengths-based view of your current situation, explore your options, and achieve your career goals.
You may also find the Job Shadowing HE podcast series useful. The podcast (available on any major podcast platform) takes a deep dive into the roles of people who work in Higher Education, providing a bank of expertise and insight. Featuring guests from across the sector, each episode reveals what's involved in a specific role and the career path that led to it.
You can access one to one support to help develop your professional skills and confidence through structured conversations with a qualified coach or experienced mentor.
Find out more via our Coaching and Mentoring webpage.
Our colleague networks are vital to the university community as they facilitate a space for colleagues to share ideas and support each other. Our colleague networks are an important part of our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI).
Our networks aim to:
- Raise the visibility of our diverse communities, which make LBU a great place to work
- Create community and belonging for people of shared experiences and identities
- Contribute to fair and equitable decision making across the university
- Provide professional development opportunities to our colleagues
Visit our Equality and Inclusion webpage or contact the EDI Team for more information
The LBU Professional is intended to complement and fit alongside the LBU Leader, as we all have personal leadership responsibilities within our daily work.
We may have diverse leadership responsibilities within our teams and some of us have formalised leadership roles too. The LBU Leader describes the behavioural indicators and qualities, identified through our research, as being associated with effective leadership at our university.
The LBU Leader webpage presents the framework and also details a range of associated development and support opportunities.
If you'd like support or advice with an idea you have for how something could be done differently, the 'Your Ideas' scheme is here to help.
This could be a possible solution to a particular challenge or an idea to improve a process, whether it's at an individual, team, service or university level.
Find out more about the scheme, including examples and the form to submit your idea, via the below link.
The DEAP CPD Fellowship Scheme, run by Leeds Beckett’s Centre for Learning and Teaching, is open to all colleagues who support the learning of others (both colleagues and/or students). The scheme offers the opportunity to reflect on what you do and how your role connects with and impacts on the wider university, with a successful claim being a mark of a colleague’s excellence in supporting learning and teaching.
Interested colleagues can find out more, and join the waiting list, via the HEA Fellowship Programme webpage.
The Learning Excellent Academic Practice (LEAP) Programme is also available to professional colleagues, and is ideal for those who wish to develop their ability to support learning and possibly go on to make a claim for HEA Fellowship.
We know that colleagues also operate within unique professional frameworks, specific to the needs of their role and setting. For example, CIPD for HR professionals.
Professional registrations offer valuable personal and professional development and acknowledge the tailored knowledge, skills and experience that colleagues have gained throughout their careers. As well as enhancing professional credibility and recognition, they also contribute to the overall standards and excellence of LBU.
You might like to find out about professional registrations which are relevant to your role and how this works in your local area by speaking to relevant colleagues in your School/Service.
It can be daunting joining higher education in a professional services role for the first time. Whilst LBU offer a full induction pathway, you might also find it helpful to learn more from sector experts about how the service you have joined contributes to the wider context.
Universities HR (known as ‘UHR’) are a member-led organisation who offer regular, virtual inductions for professional services colleagues. The sessions cover governance structures, opportunities and challenges facing the sector and decodes some commonly used acronyms! As LBU is a member organisation, our colleagues can access this resource free of charge.
You can watch the recordings from the sessions in December 2024 via the links below, and/or search for upcoming dates. (Please note, you will need to create a UHR account/login to access this resource.)
Feedback from our sessions so far:
Click the right and left arrows to view some of the feedback from 4 sessions
A key aim of the LBU Professional is to empower colleagues to identify, create and maximise collaboration opportunities across the university. To support this, we'll look to develop and showcase case studies of effective, practical initiatives, such as working groups, action learning sets and job shadowing.
Get Involved: We’d love to hear from you if you have a story to share or an interest in exploring a particular opportunity linked to any aspect of the LBU Professional. Please get in touch with us.
Your experiences and ideas can inspire and guide others. Let’s work together to foster a culture of collaboration and continuous learning at LBU.
