HE Governance Career Journey:
Chris Ince
Name: Chris Ince
Job title: University Secretary & Chief Compliance Officer
Institution: University of Hull
What does your current role and remit encompass?
I like to describe my work in four components. The first is around support for Council and all that entails; the second is the line management I have for areas of governance, information compliance, safety, and apprenticeships compliance; thirdly (and most complicated!) is the broader compliance role around areas such as UKVI, HTA, animal research plus things like risk management and business continuity; lastly is the role any member of the senior team has around institutional activities so, for example, I’m currently leading on a big digital transformation project.
You need to strike the right balance between rules that have to be followed and rules that can be flexed.
What does a typical day look like for you in your role?
The role is busy with lots of meetings covering a broad range of topics / issues. Like many other senior leadership roles the working day is often quite long and hectic starting at 8am and finishing after 5pm with almost no breaks in the day! I think post-Covid (if we are…) we tend to flow from online to f2f but not allowing for much time between, so things seem very hectic. I guess that similar to most other people in the governance space I spend a lot of my time in meetings or the arrangements for them and trying to manage email in between.
What is your previous work history?
Prior to Hull all my roles had been in London institutions. I started out working at Imperial College London (where I’d also been a student and a sabbatical officer) before working at Kingston, SOAS and then London Met. I also like to tell people about the two years near the start where I got paid to play computer games!!
What led you to a role in HE governance?
Like a lot of people, it was partly by accident. I was looking for a career that wasn’t playing games (it wasn’t as fun as you might think) and the role of Assistant to the Head of Central Secretariat, a great HE job title, came up at Imperial. It looked pretty diverse covering project support for Imperial’s Council, Senate and various boards, providing secretariat services, strategic advice and developing good working relationships, and I thought I could give it a shot. My skills as a Sabbatical Officer which included time and people management, liaising with university staff at a range of levels and knowledge of how HE and the institution worked, really helped me here and the rest, as they say, is history.
What sources / training / qualifications or people have most helped you in your HE governance role to date?
I haven’t done any formal qualifications in this area but have had excellent training across my career. I did a PhD and I do think the skills you learn in this are very transferrable to many other areas, you certainly see a lot of Dr Xs in university professional services. Beyond that I’ve benefited from great internal staff development throughout my careers and then got involved with AHEP (when it was AUA) so have seen that side. More recently I did the AHUA’s Professional Service Directors Programme and then I started TMP 45 just before Covid hit, so our cohort only finished last academic year!
What role do you hope to move onto next and how will you go about preparing for it?
Nothing right at the moment. I’ve been at Hull for coming up to three years and it is a great place. It really does get under your skin once you’ve been and we have a VC who has been in post for just over a year, an ambitious Strategy and a great staff group to work with. That said…I guess any future role would probably be an extension of what I do now, so with either a wider remit or in a larger university where the scale might give a different dimension to your work. I’m very happy right now, although the weekly commute from London to Hull can be draining at times.
What is the best piece of advice you have received about HE governance?
You need to strike the right balance between rules that have to be followed and rules that can be flexed. Many of the things we do in the HE sector are of our own choosing so we can change how they are done and learn from each other and other sectors.
October 2023