Since winning the NTFS award in 2005, Arti retired in 2010 as Associate Director of the CETL at University of Bedfordshire with Emeritus status, She writes for publication and supports employability and sustainability development projects.
Arti was awarded her NTF in 2005 for inspiring work with students in the field of career management skills (CMS) integrated with personal development planning (PDP) and employability. She has led and developed modules and contributed actively to working groups and projects, both within and outside the University of Bedfordshire. She helped to launch an ambitious CMS project at University of Reading, and wrote the text for an award-winning, widely-used, web-based tutorial package for career development learning.
She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a member of the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services, Centre for Recording Achievement and the British Association of Psychological Type. Her work was instrumental in the University of Bedfordshire's university-wide adoption of PDP and employability approaches, for which the University gained a CETL in 2006. As her NTF project she has written a book: Kumar, A. Personal, Academic and Career Development in Higher Education - SOARing to Success London & New York, Routledge Taylor & Francis. The book has a companion website and is also available as an e-book. She was awarded an MBE in the Queens New Year Honours list 2008 in recognition of services to higher education.
As full-time Associate Director of the CETL, she was working with academic and support staff across the University to implement innovative curriculum developments, supporting action research projects and e-portfolio trials that will build content towards the new Higher Education Achievement Report recommended by Burgess (October 2007). She is leading a project on Assessment Centres and exploring how lessons learned from employers' practices in graduate recruitment can inform, challenge and motivate students to develop a range of employability skills and attributes. Central to this type of academic and assessment practice is the SOAR model (described in her book) which seeks to animate and contextualise the dynamic relationships between Self, Opportunity, Aspirations and Results.
She is happy to share these concepts and practical examples, and has been invited to present and run workshops on the SOARing approaches at several universities in the UK and at conferences here and abroad.