Panorama’s UK and Australian partners worked on the appointment of a new Principal & Vice-Chancellor for RMIT.  With more than 82,000 students, the University is the largest technology university in the world and Australia’s largest higher education institution, with three campuses in Australia, two in Vietnam and one in Spain.  The University needed to appoint somebody who could bring truly global leadership to a large and complex organisation, hence the commitment to carrying out a search that stretched well beyond Australasia from the outset, with a dedicated research exercise focused on the northern hemisphere, for which we were responsible.

After a combined global search, which resulted in a shortlist of candidates from Australia, Canada and Europe (including three serving UK-based vice-chancellors), the University appointed Martin Bean CBE, then Vice-Chancellor of the Open University. With a distinguished career in Microsoft, including as leader of its Worldwide Education Products Group, and Novell, and having launched FutureLearn at the OU, Martin brought an outstanding combination of academic leadership, commercial acumen and experience at the interface of technology and learning systems.

As a result of this successful partnership we were also asked to work with the University on the appointment of the leader of RMIT’s European outstation in Barcelona, as detailed above.