First week in first qualified job!

After the long process of interviews and seemingly endless applications here I am in my first qualified job as the LRC manager of a regional college in Cambridgeshire.

The first week has gone well. I had a hand over session with my predecessor a few weeks before starting, so I had the chance to do (lots of prep) at home of an evening and weekend. I came in on my first day with many pages of to do lists and lists of questions that I've slowly worked my way through.

As well as grappling with the usual new job business of learning names, procedures, a new LMS (AutoLib) these are the major challenges I'm facing at the moment:

• Refurbishment. We are half way through a refurbishment at the moment. I met with the project manager earlier this week and it's all looking good to get the LRC ready for the start of term. At the moment we are temporarily installed in a classroom.
• Change of use of LRC within the organisation. The library has been rebranded as an LRC, the major impact of which is that from September level 2 and 3 classes will be timetabled in for one session a fortnight of independent learning supervised by LRC staff. Therefore I need to get a procedure in place to make sure things run smoothly. This also means rebranding all leaflets, webpages etc. As part of this the Library Assistants were given redundancy notices and a new role of LRC Support Tutor was created which leads me to..
• New staff. I manage 3 LRC Support Tutors, 1 full time, 2 part time. Only 1 of the part timers are existing staff. In a way this is good as it means we can develop the new service together rather than having staff who are stuck in their ways. However, being told on my first day that I have to train new staff immediately when I wasn't expecting them for a month wasn't ideal. Especially when we aren't even in the LRC.
• Responsibility. I haven't been a budget holder before which is a little daunting, but I have a meeting on Monday to get fully up to speed on it.
• The commute. I now have a commute of 3 to 3 and a half hours a day round trip whereas my last job was 20 minutes up the road. I'm enjoying having time to get reading done and trying to see it positively. We plan to relocate soon so it's only a temporary situation.
• Inductions. My predecessor had been in post since 1976, and didn't leave any induction materials as she did it off the top of her head. This leaves me creating induction materials for an LRC that I haven't worked in yet and that is currently gutted.

Plenty to keep me out of trouble then! Exciting times ahead.