She’s lived and breathed international education, having worked for years in Latin America and the UK. She’s regularly asked to present at international conferences and join panel discussions – given her enthusiasm for international education – and she is, of course, fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.
She has extensive experience in student recruitment and marketing, extending to a burgeoning reputation as a results-oriented yet nurturing sales trainer. She has her finger on the pulse of the grassroots issues and challenges recruitment teams grapple with, and her open, collaborative approach encourages sales people and recruiters to discard their preconceptions and embrace bigger and higher-performance techniques.
Her capacity for creating positive and productive connections between people extends to every project. She shines when it comes to helping people with different priorities find common ground. She’s confident and comfortable empowering large and disparate groups of people. She’s hyper-energetic. She’s also sensitive and intuitive in the assimilation and processing of new information and data that impacts the development of fresh strategy.
Talk to me about
- Journey mapping and personas
- Student experience
- Sales training
- International partnerships
- Latin America
Major projects
- Designed and delivered training and mentoring programs for education counsellors and agents in Vietnam and Latin America for the British Council.
- Developed personas, and current and future state journey maps, identifying the pain points students face when making payments to universities in the UK.
- Developed a suite of university and stakeholder profiles for a client to better understand their customers and the challenges they face.
- Developed and delivered workshops and training sessions for numerous clients, including Sales and Communications skills training to a group of international education recruiters on behalf of BUILA.
Before Edified
Sara has managed student recruitment and partnerships for many years in the UK – including during a long stint at the University of Southampton, where she rose through the ranks from International Officer to Deputy Director of International Student Recruitment. During this journey, she had great success opening the university’s first overseas office in the Americas, in Mexico City, resulting in the largest number of Mexican students at any university in the UK.
After hours
Sara’s boundless energy needs an outlet, so needlepoint and crosswords aren’t really her style. Instead, she’s either salsa dancing, scuba diving, in the front row at the theatre, or jumping on a bouncy castle with her two children. Her love of Latin America fits with her voracious appetite for all things colourful, vivacious and spicy. She travels to Mexico City whenever she possibly can (she’s been more than 30 times so far!), especially when the nationwide celebrations of Dia de los Muertos are taking place.