Human Resources
Report by Barry Holmes, Director of Human Resources
The key strategic goal of Human Resources is to foster a positive culture at RCSI, grounded in our values of respect, collaboration, scholarship and innovation. At a time of institutional growth and reflecting some of the wider challenges facing the higher education landscape, our focus has been on empowering staff to develop and build skills and confidence with a particular emphasis on leadership.
Mentorship
We continue to build a culture that encourages and fosters mentoring, supporting more than 300 mentorship pairings in the past five years, 55 of which were established in the last 12 months. The ‘Positive Connections’ mentoring programme promotes academic and professional development for early-career academics by connecting them with senior colleagues in other schools and departments and bespoke mentorship training is provided to both mentors and mentees.
Leadership
Recognising frontline managers as culture champions, we continue to roll out our bespoke ‘Managing Through People’ programme aimed at all people managers. The programme includes classroom-based days on core leadership topics, a tailored 360 assessment and feedback session, psychometric reports, peer coaching and reflective practice. Separately, more than 100 RCSI staff have now completed the Aurora Women’s Leadership Development programme.
Employee sentiment
We regularly track key engagement metrics and the latest measures are encouraging:
- 94% of staff feel supported by RCSI
- 80% of staff surveyed feel connected to their team
- 91.3% of staff feel proud of what RCSI achieved in the last academic year
- 95% of attendees rated courses provided as ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’
The metric we are most proud of: more than 90% of staff would recommend RCSI as a good place to work.
Sunday Times recognition
To externally validate our engagement levels, we once again participated in the Sunday Times Best Places to Work survey in 2025. This is an evidence-based, externally-run, anonymous survey which provides results on employee experience benchmarked against a database of 100,000 companies globally, as well as within the higher education and research sector.
In both 2024 and 2025, RCSI was rated ‘excellent’ with average engagement scores exceeding industry benchmarks by more than 10%.
Attracting and retaining talent
Our sustained focus on employee engagement continues to positively impact RCSI’s ability to attract key talent. In 2024, our number of applicants passed 9,000, and, reflecting our investment in leadership development, 43 internal staff achieved promotional progression in 2024.