With a 40-plus year career that's taken her to eight cities across Canada and into several different sectors from high-tech and health care to higher ed, Gitta Kulczycki's professional life has been filled with accomplishments and personal firsts.
This year, she added another one to the list: interviewing for and accepting a new job remotely from nearly 5,000 kilometres away.
"I鈥檓 coming to Dal having gone through a process of talking to a lot of people at the university, but for the first time in my whole career I am moving to a position where I鈥檝e never physically sat with the people I鈥檓 going to be working with and for," says Kulczycki, who began her role as Dal's new vice-president finance and administration (VPFA) on Monday.
Kulczycki says the whole experience 鈥渨orked quite beautifully,鈥� a testament of sorts to how people and organizations have been able to adapt in the face of a global pandemic. It鈥檚 a situation Kulczycki is quite familiar with, as she鈥檚 spent the last several months working through the same challenges at the University of Alberta (U of A), where she served in the same role (vice-president of finance and administration) she鈥檚 now taking on at 国民彩票. It鈥檚 meant challenges, for sure, but also new opportunities for institutional change.
鈥淲hen COVID came upon us, we had to turn on a dime to do things that we said before either could never be done or would take a long time,鈥� she says.
An accomplished career
As at U of A, where she spent four years as VPFA, Kulczycki鈥檚 new position at Dal encompasses a range of diverse portfolios integral to supporting the university鈥檚 core mission of teaching, research and service. At Dal these include financial resources, human resources, facilities management, information technology services, ancillary services, environmental health and safety, internal audit services, athletics, and sustainability.
With all of these units (many of them sizeable) reporting into her office, the scale and scope of the VPFA role is significant. But Kulczycki brings to the table decades of experience in similar roles at large organizations, both in the post-secondary sector and beyond.
The first time she moved to Atlantic Canada to take a job, in the mid-1990s, it was to oversee finances and corporate services at a regional health care corporation in Moncton. And prior to that, she鈥檇 worked as chief financial officer/vice-president business services at a hospital in Calgary, as an executive in a Canadian subsidiary of a Silicon Valley tech firm, and as a manager in high tech in Ottawa, among other positions.
Kulczycki鈥檚 professional entry into higher education came in 2004 when she took on the role of vice-president of resources and operations at Western University in London, Ont. With 32,000 students, a $1.1-billion budget and more than 13,000 employees annually, Western 鈥� a member of Canada鈥檚 U15 group of research-intensive universities, like Dal 鈥� offered up plenty of professional challenges and opportunities over the course of Kulczycki鈥檚 12 years there.
The importance of relationships
Fellow U15 school U of A brought an even larger size and budget to manage when she joined in 2016, all set against the backdrop