I work in the Estates and Facilities department at the University of Manchester. We manage the university’s campus with responsibility for building maintenance, cleaning, gardening, construction projects and environmental sustainability. My department is responsible for 229 buildings, 50,000 rooms, over 1,000 toilets and more than 100,000 lightbulbs — so working here is a challenging, varied and sometimes mindboggling experience.
The buildings are as diverse as state-of-theart laboratories, car park booths, greenhouses and even a World Heritage site. Managing this large and complex estate requires a wide range of specialist staff from building surveyors, electricians, gardeners and caterers. My role is coordinating these different teams to work effectively together to ensure the university’s students, staff and visitors have the facilities they need, when they need them, as well as ensuring the estate is contributing to achieving the university’s strategic aims, including its ambition to reduce its carbon emissions to zero. It requires a broad range of knowledge, skills and experience. I need to have a good understanding of the key functions of the university — teaching, research and social responsibility — and how the buildings operate to enable these functions.
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