research fellow

lecturer

laboratory technician

research assistant

postdoctoral research fellow

University-of-Surrey

Over the course of my 8 years with the company, I experienced many challenges that ultimately shaped my perspective on workplace culture, leadership, and personal resilience.

A typical day at work often felt uncertain due to ongoing restructuring efforts and frequent changes in direction from senior leadership. It became difficult to find stability or a clear path for growth, which impacted both morale and productivity across the team.

One of the most difficult aspects of the role was navigating a workplace culture that, unfortunately, did not always feel inclusive or supportive. There were instances of discrimination that were disheartening and left me feeling undervalued. While I raised concerns, meaningful change was slow to come, if at all.

Management played a significant role in this experience. Leadership turnover was high, and communication from the top was often unclear or inconsistent. This lack of continuity made it challenging to feel confident in the company's vision or my role within it.

Despite these challenges, I learned a great deal about adaptability, perseverance, and advocating for fairness and equity in the workplace. I also came to understand the importance of strong, empathetic leadership and the value of a truly inclusive environment—qualities I will look for and contribute to in future roles.

While my time with the company was difficult, I’m grateful for the relationships I built along the way and the personal growth I achieved through adversity.

Typically a day in this role would involve talking and listening to the issues of an assigned group of 60+ University students, offering them advice or signposting them to the relevant bodies to help with their problems. These problems may be academic, health, emotional, or relating to international student specific issues.
It also would include the planning, budgeting and risk assessment of social, academic or general information focused events and activities that our team organised for the students

This role required a high level of active listening and ability to build rapport with students in order for them to place their trust in me as their mentor. During this role I learnt how to successfully engage with a large number of people of varying age, ethnicity and nationality in this manner.

The management and my co-workers in this role were very closely linked as the department was very small. This led to a large amount of sharing and rotation of roles, which allowed me to pick up management skills.

As the volume of students worked with is so high, the amount of time given to interact and listen to their issues was sometimes an issue, especially is dealing with a highly problematic case. However, in extreme cases another team member would take on extra students for one shift if more time needed to be spent with one specific student.

Being able to see a marked improvement in students lives constituted the most enjoyable part of this job.

Working at Open Days was a great experience for me. There is a plethora of reasons why this was the case. Firstly, I had the chance to meet a lot of people, (i.e., future students and their relatives) and have cheerful discussion with them. Not only I was helping them in any way, such as guiding them to the lecture theaters,but  I was also sharing my experiences at the university with them, creating a friendly environment. Additionally, my co-workers were mainly students thus we could easily communicate and help each other. Since the event was well organised from the University of Surrey, I could always talk to the responsible managers and resolve any issue that had arrived during the Open Days. I never felt lost and insecure, even when harder situations were raised. 

I learned that when dealing with people you have always to be calm and attentive when people are dissatisfied with something. For example, some of them complained because they had to wait for a long time for the lecturer to come to the subject talk. My approach to that was to listen to them, show them empathy and understanding, and explain to them in a polite way that these things happen since some lecturers could not make it at the end, and there was a need to ask from others to make their presentations. This was the hardest part of the job, since we wanted all students to be happy and pleased with the university. The good thing is that after answering to people's needs, people were happier, making you feel nicer as well.

People working at the same level are friendly enough to get you through the day. Good range of on-site facilities to get food or sit and eat packed lunch. Annual-leave is good, you get an additional 7 days off on top of the standard 25 days with 8 days bank holiday. Ideal if you need to work around children or have no career aspirations.

Managers are very nicey-nicey to your face, but wouldn't hesitate to throw you under a bus at the next breath. A toxic expectation that everyone coming in to new roles should have the same bland, monotonous academic mindset and automatically know what they're doing. Severe lack of training support to new joining staff. Far too much funding going to appeasing students and expanding the business and little-to-no support to the staff required to make sure efficiency is kept to a good standard. Micro-managing but no effective structure in place to help staff overcome any areas of concern. Every man for himself atmosphere. Complaints not taken seriously. 

Advice? Invest in your people. Management seriously need to have training or need to meet a certain competency criteria to improve how they run departments. Line managers need better people-skills to support their team. Stop micro-managing your staff and trust them to do a good job ONCE you've trained them properly. 

Arrive at 9:55am get changed into chef whites and enter kitchen at 10am, turn on all cooking appliances ie fryers, oven and grills then set up starter and mains sections ready for the lunch time service whilst doing breakfast service. After service every section is cleaned and all stock replenished or topped up...
I learned how to organise my time and forward planning.
The management was unsupportive and lazy ie very quick to point the finger at any mishaps but not there to help prevent any from happening in the first place.
My co-workers were what made it a fun place to be.
The hardest part of the job was trying to stay motivated when we weren't busy ie out of term time.
I found the most enjoyable part was when we were having a very busy shift and the team performed well including front of house and compliments were recieved for something I had prepared, it made all the effort worthwhile.

My role was to create all the video productions for my Faculty and with my faculty being a part of the Arts I was kept very busy. 

My main task (For the year) was to create a video (Between three to five minutes) for each subject in our faculty to advertise out to prospective students. This task was already very time consuming as each video involved planning and tailoring the video to that subjects audience.

When this was grouped together with many other students and lecturers wanting to create videos to promote their own research or subjects it can be seen why this job had such a large workload. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this regardless of the work as I managed to increase my skills and efficiency. When I look at the Universities channel I can still see my videos are being used and are providing a positive effect for the University.

My typical day was to collect the newspapers at the university shop, then check in journals, shelve the journals and later would do some inter library loan requests and then acquisitions later if time.

I learnt how to do acquistions, basic cataloguing, processing of journals and inter library loan requests.

I enjoyed my time there and learnt various interesting things about the various students that came to the University.

My co workers were pleasant to work with although we often didnt agree but that was fine.

The hardest part of the job was for me the handling of journals where at some stages it was physically hard work to move the journals when we were doing a stock take.

The most enjoyable part of the job was shelving and checking in the journals/periodicals. The lunch and tea breaks sitting outside on the bench watching the students going about there lives.

Overall my experience was very positive. For the most part, people are nice, responsible workers and good to work with. The Uni itself is a beautiful campus, and the city is a nice, safe (but expensive) place to live. Management is overworked but tries to be available and helpful, and I always felt that my voice was heard. There is a lot of red tape, which is normal for universities. There is also some (limited) favoritism in the work environment, not to the detriment of others, but it becomes clear pretty quickly as to whether or not you will go higher in your career. As with most universities, there is limited advancement regardless.

No investment in people, no support and always seem to lose staff at short notice. Executive board very removed from what actually happens on the ground but make frequent changers at short notice and without consultation. Lots of staff leave through poor training and high workload (you always seem to be covering other roles as well as your own). Always cost cutting.

There are two levels of employees.
1. Academic position. Great life, pay, culture but  constant pressure to get funding / grants etc.

1. non academic. Hard life, long hours, no structure to work to. Set impossible tasks i.e. fix a problem without parts  money or support. No positive feedback. Very competitive with massive levels of Bureaucracy everywhere.

Top Job Titles	Average salary
Research fellow 62 salaries reported	£39,275 per year
Lecturer 51 salaries reported	£43,910 per year
Laboratory technician 11 salaries reported	£28,795 per year
Research assistant 8 salaries reported	£32,320 per year
Postdoctoral research fellow 3 salaries reported	£38,493 per year

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