- What motivated you to become a leader in the enrolment space?
- What strategies do you use to ensure enrolment goals are consistently achieved, and how do you celebrate success?
- Can you speak to any unique challenges or opportunities you face in the UK higher education landscape?
- What are the biggest opportunities you see for innovative technology like AI to support enrolment professionals?
- What differentiates Boundless Learning’s enrolment team?
Voice of a Leader: Shireen Loonat
Meet Shireen Loonat, Director of Enrolment (UK) for Boundless Learning. Shireen has a passion for people and education, and joined us to discuss her career history, her methods to motivate her team, and what she believes the Boundless Learning difference is.
Key takeaways:
- Shireen’s passion for people and accessible education led her from medical research aspirations into enrolment leadership.
- Teams use structured reflection, housekeeping sessions, shared responsibility, and testing of new tactics.
- Success is celebrated at individual, team, and monthly levels, with learner feedback as the highest acknowledgment.
- International recruitment requires staying current on embargos, accreditation, and country-specific relevance.
- AI can extend high-quality service across time zones while preserving the essential human element.
- The UK enrollment team’s differentiator is genuine passion, care for students, and strong collective teamwork.
What motivated you to become a leader in the enrolment space?
“Prior to joining the company, I completed my bachelor’s in pharmacology. Before that, I worked for a recruitment agency whilst studying for my master’s in clinical drug research and development.
My initial plans were to move into medical research, but I realised my passion was working with people, so I combined the two things I loved most: accessible education combined with human interaction through conversation.
During my studies, I volunteered at an education center that taught English as a second language to students who had migrated to the country. We primarily focused on children and young adults, but expanded to evening sessions for parents to help them understand items like university and college application forms, helping them better understand how to support their children as they took their next steps in life.
I love to nurture talent and enjoy seeing people progress and challenge themselves, which supported my continued progression into leadership. I have had some incredible team members over the years who have challenged me to be better, and some incredible leaders who have changed the way I think about management.
I joined Pearson as an enrolment advisor on the King’s College London partnership over nine years ago, and now I’m the Director for Enrolment Services over all our UK-based partnerships.”
What strategies do you use to ensure enrolment goals are consistently achieved, and how do you celebrate success?
“Reflection is important to my team. Whether the team has overperformed or underperformed, we spend time at the end of each teaching period reflecting as a group.
Each team runs what is known as “housekeeping afternoons.” These have a set agenda, where the team reflects on what worked, what didn’t work, and spends time planning as a group how many calls are needed to improve the pipeline, what their individual conversion statistics are, and what activities need to happen each week up to the next deadline. As a group, they share the responsibility of writing an engagement email to their pipeline each week. Across our teams, we share best practices, look at new ways of working, and most importantly, we try new tactics in test buckets before sharing our findings.
We encourage the advisors to think about improvements and changes in ways of working so we can work through their ideas and test them. Most importantly, we foster an environment of encouragement, collaboration, and recognition. We encourage accountability, which has led to some great new ways of working, including reactivation, enrolment conversion activities, and understanding industrial landscapes to better support conversations.
Each manager reviews performance with each team member on a weekly basis, the end goal is always to increase student enrolment but along the way we want to celebrate little wins – increased calls, increased conversion, better conversations, these are all wins.
The greatest acknowledgment is feedback from new learners about their excitement to begin their educational journey, and thanking individual advisors for helping them navigate through these steps.
Every enrolment is celebrated, and every target is celebrated. We also have monthly meetings where the entire team gets together to celebrate success, but also to analyze and reflect on challenges.”
Can you speak to any unique challenges or opportunities you face in the UK higher education landscape?
“As we recruit internationally for our UK programs, we need to maintain information on international issues such as embargos and international accreditation restrictions. On a country-by-country level, we need to provide the best support and information on how relevant our courses are globally.
As with all countries, the world is unsteady and financial and economic barriers continue to be our biggest challenge. Whilst we understand the UK market, it is key for us to understand the international markets to support our conversations with learners and partners.”
What are the biggest opportunities you see for innovative technology like AI to support enrolment professionals?
What differentiates Boundless Learning’s enrolment team?
“Passion. I can confidently say each of my team members has the passion and drive to succeed but also a very high level of care for the work that they do.
The Boundless Learning team care, not only about the students, but about the quality of their work. The UK enrolment team truly works as a team. Though they have individual goals, the collective team goal and support of each other is key to building a strong foundation and working in the best interest of the student. Each of our advisors is in education because they care about making a difference.”