To celebrate International Women’s Day, we have been speaking to Ros Wilkinson about her impressive career journey and how she became ‘Head of Conference & Hospitality’ at Lancaster University.

Ros Wilkinson is a highly skilled Hospitality professional with experience in Tourism and the Meetings and Events industries- Meetings, Incentives, Conference & Exhibitions (MICE). She has worked across several sectors including Hotels, Conference Centres, Sport and Leisure, and now the Higher Education sector.

Ros started her career as a management trainee in the hotel industry straight from school at one of the last British Transport Hotels (ex British Rail owned hotels) before Margaret Thatcher’s government sold off the properties during the privatisation of the railways. The comprehensive five-year training programme included a year in France and involved all hotel departments, plus two years of classical chef training in two very different hotel kitchens, a large city centre hotel with conference facilities and a Country House Hotel hosting high profile events and private celebrations.

Ros trained in all corners of the kitchen - butchery, larder skills, sauce, working on the pass through to pastry. Also operating the ‘kitchen control’ (as it was called back in the day) side with the Head Chef planning and costing menus, ordering to stocktaking.

Her experience has taken her through hotels from prestigious Country House estates with golf courses, smaller privately owned hotels to large city centre hotels in major cities (up to 600 bedrooms) and has stretched across roles in operational positions, hotel management, business development and commercial management. She has covered all areas of the business spanning across a range of other sectors of the Hospitality Industry including conference venues, sports stadiums and now Higher Education.

Ros spent five years working for the Engineering Employers Federation, initially taken on to promote their residential training venue and courses then later developing membership sales. This gave her insight into the importance an organisation of this kind can play in supporting SMEs.

In 2013, Ros joined Sport England/Serco Leisure, operating their flagship venue; Lilleshall National Sports Centre and was also Commercial lead for Lilleshall, Bisham Abbey and Holme Pierrepont Country Park National Water Sports Centre. This role had a high emphasis on the food offered to the elite athletes based at each of these National Sports Centres developing close stakeholder relationships with some of sport’s national governing bodies – for example, nutritional values and working with the nutritionists on the build-up to important competitions such as the Olympic Games.

Ros joined Lancaster University in October 2016 as Head of Hospitality, leading a team to provide meals for thousands of customers across campus daily including students, staff and visitors for meetings, internal and external conferences, Pre-school, food to onsite outlets and catering for high profile university events, VIP dinners and other special occasions.

Since last year, Ros has taken on the dual role of Head of Conference & Hospitality to now include developing a strategy to ensure the successful development of conference and Guest Room services to deliver a high quality customer experience.

Lancaster University was the first University to achieve Allergen Accreditation across the campus for all its catering operations. As active members of The University Catering Organisation (TUCO) Ros and her team learn and share information across the University sector. TUCO is a procurement organisation but offers much more than this to its members by way of training and development, networking and guidance.

Ros Wilkinson commented: “My passion for the industry has not changed, once it is in your blood there is no escape. The greatest satisfaction I have is passing this passion on to teams and colleagues I work with, seeing them develop and achieve their potential.

There are several challenges I believe we are now facing in the industry:

• Recruitment and maintaining skills within the sector
• Supply chain availability and variety of stock
• Monitoring price increases and managing the expectations of our customers around this
• Sustainability and ethical challenges
• Environmental issues – i.e. packaging”

“I look forward to working through each of these challenges with my team over the next few months and years.”