Ben Bullock-Smith

You’re having a lot of fun with your friends and your colleagues, so it’s really lovely to actually get to see that impact that Navitas has with people. 

Hi, I’m Ben Bullock-Smith and I’m the Senior Creative Manager in the Global Sales and Marketing team at Navitas. 

When and how did you come to be working with Navitas? 

I started working with Navitas in 2013. I was freshly graduated from SAE at the time. I studied with SAE Brisbane and I actually studied at SAE during the time when Navitas acquired SAE, although I didn’t realise that at the time. So, when I finished my degree and then I was applying for jobs, I applied for this job at Navitas, not knowing the connection. And it wasn’t until I was at my graduation ceremony that I saw these banners with the Navitas logo all over it, and I was like, ‘hey, I have a job interview with them!’ And then I came to understand the connection. 

I definitely think when I went to the interview, I think it definitely helped in the hiring process that I had studied at SAE Brisbane, which I think ultimately was just a, a really lovely testament to Navitas’ belief in their own education programs to hire their own sort of fresh graduates right out of their study. 

What is one of your favourite memories working at Navitas? 

One of my favourite memories for working at Navitas – it’s working on our business partners conference. It’s such an important part of our team building and sort of relationship building to work on the event. Over the years, there’s been many of them, work on the branding, getting to be part of the team, conceptualising it, planning it, bringing it to life. It’s, it’s such a massive amount of work that’s done on the side of our desks on top of regular work. So it’s a huge commitment to do. 

It’s also really enjoyable. And then I’ve been to a few of them now, when you’re there running the events and sort of on the ground in these beautiful locations, it’s such an experience. It’s a lot of work again in that moment, but you’re having a lot of fun with your friends and your colleagues and you get to meet a lot of people that we might only work with via Zoom or things like that. So, getting to be with them in person and then meeting people that we don’t deal with a lot, like our agents and students and university partners, and to get to see some of that side of the business, because quite often as marketers, we are a little bit behind the scenes. So, we’re not always meeting up some of these people. So it’s really lovely to actually get to see that impact that Navitas has with people. 

How has working at Navitas made an impact on your life?  

Working at an Navitas has made an impact on my life in so many different ways. For starters I have been here 11 years now, so just the sheer amount of time spent with the company, with the people. I’ve grown up a lot during that time. We’ve all gone through a lot of things together, personal things, and work-related things. So, it’s a really interesting story that’s intertwined. I’ve evolved, my friends and colleagues here have evolved. Navitas itself has evolved. When you spend that long with a company and the people behind it, it makes such a huge impact on your life. It shapes who you are.  

It’s a lot of time to be spending with people and you get to share so many important life moments with these people. Pretty much all of our team was present when I married my husband. So I think, I think yeah, it’s just the people that become part of your family and it really shapes who you are. That’s ultimately the main impact. 

What are your key professional achievements during your time at Navitas? 

I would say my key professional achievements during my time with Navitas firstly would just be my own progression during the time. I started as designer, a junior designer really, and have sort of evolved into a manager role. So, that in itself is an achievement. 

Specifically, I would say working on the latest Navitas brand refresh has been a really great achievement for me. It’s such a huge project to work on, and to be trusted to take the reins with that and to be the lead on that project and sort of make some hard choices and push to make our brand and our visuals better, to make it stronger, to improve systems and processes for people. I think it’s a really lovely thing to be trusted with that and to get to work on it. It’s a lot of work, but it’s great to see it come to life and to be launched into our company. And I think when you work on anything for that long, it was about 18 months that we were working on it before it launched, it becomes like your own little baby. So, to see that actually released and launched was incredibly gratifying and to have a lot of positive feedback about it afterwards. And having people that I’ve never met working at the company reach out and say how much they appreciate some of the new things and how much they like it has been really, really lovely. 

It is such a massive project to do and it’s something really unique because of Navitas’ breadth of offerings and needing our sort of top-level brands to exist in so many ways and spaces had to be something really, really flexible, but also have some distinction and strength to it. It was really nice to get to…to have that sort of trust be felt and get to make some impact and make some changes to the better and to have the support of, sort of, stakeholders on that was also a really important part, but a really lovely part. In a project like that, you can have a lot of friction and a lot of pushback sometimes, but it was actually quite a smooth process really. 

I definitely think that the fact that during my 11 years here I’ve worked pretty much in every part of the business as a designer definitely helped give me some first-hand knowledge of ways things would be applied in different areas so that we could make decisions that would suit all the needs.