Department Manager

The Role and the Department

The Department of Engineering is seeking a Department Manager to lead the Department's organisational and administrative functions, providing strategic support across learning and teaching, the student experience, research, finance, and impact. Working closely with the Head of Department and Senior Management Team, the post holder will contribute to business planning, help shape strategic priorities, oversee the Department's budget and resource allocation, and manage HR processes. They will also strengthen communication mechanisms, particularly through effective IT systems, and identify opportunities to enhance service quality through innovation and continuous improvement. The role includes maintaining and analysing management information, including KPIs and other performance metrics.

The Department Manager will be an active member of key committees, including the Senior Management Team, Strategic Advisory Board, Board of Studies, Education Committee, Research Committee, EDI and Wellbeing Committee, and the Athena Swan SAT, as well as contributing to Faculty level and University working groups. Building strong relationships with academic colleagues, professional services teams, and external partners, including transnational partners in Wuhan, China, will be essential. The role requires balancing institutional risk with enabling academic activity, ensuring departmental readiness and the effective delivery of new initiatives. The post includes line management of a team of administrative and ancillary staff.

We are looking for someone who is motivated by working in an educational environment and committed to making a meaningful contribution. The successful candidate will be highly organised, detail focused, and proactive, able to manage a varied and fast paced workload and work across multiple concurrent activities. They will be committed to continuous improvement, confident in solving problems, and skilled at building productive working relationships across the Department, Faculty, University services, and external partners to support and drive strategic aims and objectives, and ensure Department engagement with and successful implementation of local and University-wide projects and initiatives. They must demonstrate personal resilience and emotional intelligence in effectively dealing with a wide range of academic and professional services staff and students, as well as often complex process management challenges.

This is an exciting time to join the Department of Engineering, which is continuing a period of strategic growth. Durham's unified Engineering Department is recognised as one of the strongest in the UK, with an excellent reputation for teaching, research, and graduate employability. The Department is committed to research led education and has recently achieved high national rankings, including 5th in The Complete University Guide 2026, 6th in The Guardian University Guide 2026, and 7th in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2026. It was also ranked 2nd in the UK for Engineering, behind only Cambridge, in a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies report on graduate earnings.

The Department holds an Athena SWAN Silver Award, reflecting its commitment to diversity in STEM and its supportive, positive working culture. This is an excellent opportunity to join a growing Department and make a meaningful impact on its future direction.

The base location for this role is in the Department of Engineering, which is situated on the Lower Mountjoy area of the Science site. Due to the nature of the role, the successful candidate will need to work on campus for the majority of time but, subject to business need, may work in a hybrid capacity 1-2 days per week once established.