Department: Funded Learning

Location: Hybrid, UK (with some travel to client sites for in-person delivery)

Reports to: Head of Programme Performance

Hours: 37.5 per week

Salary:(Depending on experience)

A quick note before you apply: We are only able to accept applications from candidates who are currently based in the UK and hold the legal right to work here.

Role Overview
We are looking for a customer-focussed Programme Performance Manager who will take full accountability for the delivery of our Apprenticeship Units across the Cambridge Spark portfolio. You will play a critical role to deliver tangible impact for our learners and clients, ensuring that each cohort is delivered to a “Gold Standard”. You will act as the primary bridge between our clients and internal teams, managing the life cycle of each cohort and ensuring learner satisfaction.

Key responsibilities:

Team Leadership and Programme Management

Receive each cohort from Sales, Admissions and Scheduling and confirm it is ready to deliver: Facilitator allocated, schedule agreed, and learners enrolled with signed training plans.
Partner with Sales and Product to understand client needs, ensuring the programme is set up and implemented to specification.
Set the delivery standard and hold the Facilitator team to it. Facilitators own the day-to-day learner relationship; you are the escalation point. Take decisive action to ensure agreed outputs are consistently met.
Monitor attendance and delivery hours against plan across all live cohorts, and act early where a learner is at risk of falling short.
Oversee the skills test process: timely issue, marking, feedback and resits within the funded window.
Line manage the Facilitator team (objectives, 1:1s, performance, wellbeing and workload), plan capacity with Scheduling, and contribute to recruitment as the team grows.
Secure training plan sign-off from the learner, employer and Cambridge Spark, confirming delivery in full and the skills test passed. Confirm actual delivery hours per learner, pass complete, accurate records to the teams that report outcomes, and work with Compliance to maximise funding claims.
Manage the withdrawal process with Compliance, including extensions, breaks and the learner's record of training completed.

Quality Assurance and Learner Experience

Review learner and Facilitator feedback from every session, identify friction points and spot patterns, working immediately with the Product Manager, Facilitators and other teams to iterate content, format or logistics
Act as the escalation point for learners, ensuring queries and support needs are resolved in a timely way
Work with the Head of Quality on observations, quality standards and CPD
Work with the Head of Training to ensure Teaching standards and CPD are aligned
Work with Product teams to produce Cohort Impact statements and understand programme impact.

Growth & Collaboration

Collaborate across Operations, Product, Sales, Tech and Compliance to ensure seamless service delivery that drives revenue and captures the ROI for the client
Own and improve the operational processes for the programme, working with Systems and Product teams so processes run reliably and produce the data the business needs

Candidate Specification

Essential

Line management of delivery staff (trainers, coaches or mentors), including performance and workload management.
Experience running many concurrent programmes, cohorts or projects to fixed deadlines without dropping detail.
Understanding of funded training in England, enough to know what good delivery evidence looks like.
A systems mindset: works with systems to build the processes and get the data they need, rather than around them.
Uses feedback and data to drive improvements, working across teams to get changes made.
Confident with employer and learner stakeholders, including handling escalations and complaints.

Desirable

Experience of short-course, bootcamp or apprenticeship delivery.
Familiarity with Ofsted's further education and skills inspection approach.
Interest in data and AI, sufficient to credibly lead technical Facilitators.
Experience of using AI tools to automate admin and reporting.

Company Benefits:

Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
A day for volunteering
Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
Annual Summer and Xmas events
Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
CPD Allowance alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
Private medical insurance and cash plan
Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor

Background to our Organisation

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.

We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.

Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m.

Our Values

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

Entrepreneurial

We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.

Team Spirit

Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.

Customer-focused

Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.

Gold Standard

We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.

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Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.

Cambridge Spark

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