Staff Series: an Interview with Melissa Bruorton

Felicia Lee

Melissa Bruorton is the School Manager at the School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne. She takes care of all matters pertaining to strategic planning, human resources (HR), and finance at SoLL.

Felicia interviewed Melissa about her role as Manager at the school, her prior work experiences, as well as her very colourful personal life.

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Hi Melissa, could you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself before you took on the role of School Manager at SoLL?

Well, did you know I am an archivist by trade? I studied for a master’s degree in history here at the University of Melbourne, and when I graduated I got a position with the National Archives of Australia in Canberra. I worked with them for 12 years in collections management and with government agencies on government information management.

I actually met my ex-husband in the Babel building while I was studying at UniMelb in the 1990s; we got married on South Lawn so it’s kind of interesting to be back and revisit those memories of the fun times when I was student here.

It’s interesting that you started off doing archivist work but took on other roles after that. Tell us more about them!

Well, when I returned to Melbourne from Canberra, I decided I wanted to be a primary school teacher, so I enrolled in a postgraduate degree in teaching (Primary) at La Trobe University and studied for two years. Oh, I was a very good classroom teacher. I got 100% on my first practical assessment in the classroom – very proud about that!

But the Faculty of Education at La Trobe at the time requested me to work for them in curriculum development, specifically integrating the La Trobe graduate capabilities into the undergraduate curriculum. The university offers three Bachelor of Teaching degrees –  primary, secondary and community education. I really enjoyed that work even though it was a part-time position.

Besides that, I also became a sessional tutor teaching three subjects at La Trobe, and they were educational psychology, critical literacy and the interdisciplinary curriculum, and indigenous and cultural issues. I did that for a few years, and I really enjoyed teaching students straight out of high school, helping them to learn new things about the world, and watching them grow in their knowledge.

In 2015, La Trobe had a restructure, and my part time job was only fixed term so I got restructured out of the university. Then I applied for a job at UniMelb, at the Faculty of Arts in the Academic Support Office. I got the job and here I am!

Wow! You’ve got an interesting repertoire of work experience in many different sectors! Now, could you share with us what your day-to-day duties as School Manager at SoLL are?

My role has changed a lot after the recent restructure, so I do a lot more strategic work in  human resources (HR), for instance, workforce planning, teaching planning, working with programme conveners. I also do a lot of budgeting work like updating the budget and preparing the budget for the following year.  

I also always have to check Themis every morning to approve everyone’s expenses, so sometimes I may have to tell someone, ‘Oh you have to redo this because the account string is not right’. All in all, a lot of finance work, a lot of HR work.

Besides that, I also work with the Head of School on the school’s business plan, so we update that every year together with the committee chairs so that we talk about it at the annual School Planning Day. After that, we implement a series of initiatives in the business plan.

We have the new Enterprise Resource Planning  (ERP) coming in September next year and it’s a big thing. The ERP is going to manage our finance and HR and be integrated with our current system. That means that there will be massive change to the way we do things in schools, for example, processes that will need to be updated and changed.

We also look at the strategic priorities that we want to achieve for the year and transform them into goals before we identify the metrics for them. These metrics are a way of being transparent around the processes and an input to help our employees understand what their priorities are so that they can work towards their goals.

And finally, related to that, I have a team of four so there’s a bit of work around managing the team and making sure the professional staff performance development framework is on track.

It looks like you have a lot on your plate at work. I understand that you’ve also gone for a secondment at the Faculty of Education so could you tell us more about your experiences during the secondment?

Yes! I was a strategy advisor in Education for 6 months in 2022, and I worked with the Associate Deans on The Time is Now strategic plan for the Melbourne Graduate School of Education to recognise the commitment to engagement with a myriad of stakeholders, across diversity and inclusion, the international portfolio, and inclusion and recognition of Indigenous knowledge and histories, just to name a few.  

It was really interesting to be able to focus on strategic work without any of the operational work getting in the way, and I had a great time! I brought many ideas from what I have done at the Faculty of Education back to SoLL. For instance, I organised the event Mental Health Month last October in Education in which I put together various programmes for a whole month for both students and staff. That event inspired the various events that we planned at SoLL in 2023. We put together a diversity and inclusion calendar and each month, we planned a priority event based on this theme. So far, the team has organised the Biggest Morning Tea to raise money for the Cancer Council, we held the Great Book Swap to raise money for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, and we organised the R U OK? Day as well. We reached out to involve the whole Faculty of Arts so it wasn’t just our school. I think the initiatives were really successful because it helped the professional team achieve the University of Melbourne Award for Professional Excellence and Innovation. That was a nice touch, to recognise the considerable efforts of our team!

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Congratulations on the win for the team and it sounds like you’ve had a fruitful time during your stint at the Faculty of Education last year. Let’s now talk about something fun – what do you like to do in your free time?

Well, I grew up in the country in New Zealand, so I’m always thinking about that because I had horses, rode motorbikes, and went sailing. I had an idyllic childhood, so I’d love to be still doing that stuff, but it’s too expensive in Melbourne, so I have another hobby now: I play bass and sing in a band called Annual Leaf, and we play around Melbourne all the time. We produce records all the time and we played in Canada recently, which was fun! Yeah, that keeps me pretty busy because I basically manage the band and organise everything. So because that’s what I do… manage… I think being a manager is making stuff happen for other people.

We recently produced a vinyl record on a 7-inch yellow vinyl and it’s with another band called Grups. We did it in a backyard studio in Northcote in April 2022 for a brand-new song that my partner (guitarist, main vocals) had just written. And it’s really epic, because it’s very long. When we play it live, we just tell everyone, ‘You know, this is our epic song. This is our Bohemian Rhapsody’, You can listen to the song Fade to Zomp on Bandcamp or Spotify.

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That sounds really awesome! Your band could play at future school events! To conclude, is there anything else you would like our readers to know?

I think that working at SoLL is the best place I’ve ever worked in, and partly that’s because we have such a great Head of School. But it’s also the Office team, the academics and graduate research students that we’re lucky enough to have with us. It’s just been a fabulous experience being here.

Well thank you so much for speaking with me, Melissa!

Thank you, Felicia.