Progress review slides from Employability Summit no. 4

Below are my slides from our fourth Employability Summit (you can see the agenda here and some of the previous presentations here).

I need a good sort out

Over the years I've used a whole bunch of web tools for different things. The tools I use most in both a work and a non-work context are:

• Remember the milk (my to do list, which I've blogged about here, and use for a modified Getting things done system)
• Evernote (for notes - especially from meetings - and things to keep for reference, in particular photos of hand-written notes)
• Diigo (for bookmarking)
• Google Drive (for creating and collaborating on Google Docs and storing other documents)
• Dropbox (for storing and sharing documents)

One of the keys to their usefulness is that all work well on mobile, tablet and desktop and sync seamlessly across these platforms (apart from Diigo - the apps for which aren't great and I find it only works really well on a desktop - so I email to Diigo and tag later). I use GoodReader on my iPad to view documents offline (it syncs with Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft Exchange) and is particularly good for annotating PDFs.

But before I leave for Bristol I need to do a good tidy up of all these different tools. How I use them has evolved, and the tools themselves have evolved as well, so which one I use for what has become a bit blurred in places. I especially need to sort out my tags and notebooks in Evernote and decide if I need to use Dropbox at all or whether I can just use Google Drive.

Does anyone have any tips?

Leaving Leicester for Bristol

So, my big news (which I announced a while ago and so most people already know) is that I'm going to be the Director of the Careers Service at the University of Bristol. It's a very exciting move for me, but after 8 happy years at Leicester it's going to be a bit of a wrench to leave. We have made great progress at Leicester in careers over the past 3 years and it will be good to take that experience to a different setting and a new challenge. The University of Bristol has a fantastic reputation and everyone keeps telling me what a great city it is. What's not to like?!

I start on 27 January and looking forward to my family joining me as soon as possible...

A very fine evening at #THEawards 2013

Well we didn't win Outstanding Support for Students this year (congratulations to Essex who did) but we did have a very fine evening. The University of Leicester did win Research Project of the Year though, for the discovery of the remains of Richard III (so I've no hat to eat).

Sandy Toksvig was an excellent host and @timeshighered did a great job with the tweets :)

#THEawards 2013 short list - Outstanding Support for Students

Tonight is the Times Higher Education Awards and the University of Leicester is short listed for 2:

1. Outstanding Support for Students (that's for us in the Career Development Service)
2. Research Project of the Year (for the fantastic and extremely collaborative discovery of the remains of Richard III)

I don't know how we'll do in the former (we're up against Derby, Essex, Plymouth, Stirling and Sunderland) but I'm pleased to get short listed. I'll have some hat eating to do if we don't win the latter though.

It should be a good night (apart from the minibus ride home in the early hours of Friday morning).