Role
Gary is a Principal Lecturer in Marketing, Assistant Head of Department and Departmental Quality Representative in the Department of Marketing.
As Assistant Head of Department, Gary is concerned with the day-to-day running of the department, including workload planning, timetabling, the management and professional development of colleagues and recruitment/selection interviewing. In addition to the management of core faculty, Gary is also responsible for recruiting and managing a large team of Hourly Paid staff who provide additional relevant and contemporary commercial experience to complement the academic strength of core faculty. As Principal Lecturer, Gary assumes direct line managerial responsibility for a number of core faculty and engages in the annual performance review process. In his role as Departmental Quality Representative, Gary is a member of the Business School’s School Academic and Quality Standards Committee. As such, he is responsible for overseeing the quality provision within the department and taking an active role in ensuring the quality of provision across the School. Gary has always been keen to encourage and maintain the highest standards of teaching excellence and innovation in the classroom amongst departmental colleagues.
Having been at Nottingham Business School for 21 years, Gary has taught across most of the departmental portfolio. However, his main interests lie within the areas of strategic marketing, marketing management and business-to-business marketing, with a particular emphasis on relationship marketing. He currently spends all of his classroom, time with final year undergraduates, teaching on the core Contemporary Issues in Strategic Market Management and Improving the Customer Experience modules. In addition, he supervises a large number of final year undergraduates in the Research Project module. Gary is an experienced lecturer with significant commercial experience who relishes the challenge of exploring the relevance of academic concepts and theory to the real world with his students. In doing so, he always tries to ensure that lectures, seminars and workshops are engaging and exciting. He is a resourceful and indefatigable individual who believes in ‘going the extra mile’ for the students in his charge. He likes to think that his natural enthusiasm and positive attitude will rub off on all those with whom he comes into contact.
Career overview
Before coming to Nottingham Trent University, Gary started working life with the Dixons Stores Group. Rapid promotion to store management was followed by a transfer to Head Office and a role within the Marketing function, initially in photographic equipment and, subsequently, in audio. This period of his life lasted just over 6 years before he took up a lecturing position at Croydon College, where he remained for a further nine years leading in-company retail management programmes. He joined Nottingham Trent University in 1998.
Research areas
Dr Harden’s doctoral research revolved around examining aspects of business-to-business relationships within a higher education context. His current research activity is focussing on the BTEC student experience at university as part of a larger pedagogic research project inspired by the Trent Institute for Learning and Teaching (TILT).
Sponsors and collaborators
Dr Harden is currently collaborating with Judy Taft (Marketing Department) and John Buglear and Lynne Marshall (Management Department).