Coaching is a powerful developmental technique that uses intentional conversations between you and a coach to help you grow your self-awareness, find solutions to personal and professional challenges and work towards your goals.

We offer our staff different opportunities for personal, one-to-one coaching conversations.

Career coaching appointments

You can make appointments to speak 1:1 with a career development specialist to help you move forward with their career goals or consider alternative paths.

Staff Coaching Service

Additionally, our internal Coaching Service offer a formal coaching provision for:

• Senior leaders and managers from around the University
• Researchers on Pathway 2 contracts
• Staff about to embark upon or return from maternity, adoption, paternity and partner (MAPP) leave.   

Working with a mentor who is more experienced than you can help you gain greater knowledge, insight, confidence and purpose in your role. 

The University supports a number of mentoring schemes, each with a specific developmental focus, including:

• Bristol Women's Mentoring Network: annual, whole-institution matching scheme for those who identify as women with a career or leadership focus. 
• Bristol Clear mentoring scheme: a career-focused scheme for researchers on fixed-term funding which matches mentors and mentees across School and Faculty boundaries to help mentees gain improved clarity and fresh perspectives on their career.

There are also several other local mentoring schemes operating in individual Schools, Faculties and departments. 

Learning from and sharing knowledge with your professional peers can be one of the most powerful forms of work-based learning and development within a large organisation.

You can join one of the University's many learning communities which bring together peers in similar roles from across the University to help you share knowledge, insights and skills. Some examples include:

• Research Professionals Network
• Communications and Marketing Network
• Executive Support Network
• School Managers group
• Heads of School forum

The People Development team can also support staff or teams who wish to set up their own mentoring schemes or new peer learning networks.