Senior Business Operations Officer - International School for Government

Job id: 087309. Salary: £37,332–£42,099 including London Weighting Allowance.

Posted: 04 April 2024. Closing date: 24 April 2024.

Business unit: Social Science & Public Policy. Department: International School for Government.

Contact details:Paula Sawyer. [email protected]

Location: Strand Campus. Category: Professional & Support Services.

The International School for Government (ISfG) is designed to equip policymakers and civil servants from across the globe to meet the challenges of the future, creating leaders capable of delivering the services that citizens expect today. Through education, research and public engagement, the School focuses on the most pressing policy problems, ensuring that policy professionals are prepared with both the hard and soft skills necessary to understand how power, influence and change move through political circles. 

​The International School for Government (ISfG) is designed to equip policymakers and civil servants from across the globe to meet the challenges of the future, creating leaders capable of delivering the services that citizens expect today. Through education, research and public engagement, the School focuses on the most pressing policy problems, ensuring that policy professionals are prepared with both the hard and soft skills necessary to understand how power, influence and change move through political circles.

The Senior Business Operations Officer works as part of a team to ensure consistent support and delivery of school operations by providing high quality and effective administrative support, in accordance with university and School priorities, timelines and policies. The role holder will be responsible for day-to-day operation of the School and will role-model a culture of professionalism with a focus on providing responsive and timely customer service. The role holder will prepare all financial data within the ISfG, and will be responsible for complex data sets relating to participant financial information.

The role holder will actively contribute to and help with the delivery of the ISfG operations, including executive and online programmes. The role holder will also share and develop best practice solutions with colleagues and coordinate the promotion of new ideas for better, more effective and efficient delivery of services.

The ideal candidate will have experience in providing operational support to meet tight deadlines; good planning and project management skills; strong financial acumen and the ability to handle complex excel spreadsheets with advanced excel knowledge to manipulate large data sets with ease. We are looking for an enthusiastic and organised individual, with a passion for coordinating a high-quality administrative support.

This role will present exciting opportunities to work with a small and collaborative team and together support a growing portfolio of online and executive education offerings. 

This is a full time (35 Hours per week), and you will be offered an contract.

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1.        Educated to degree level, or equivalent experience.

2.        Experience of working within a small, busy team to tight timelines

3.        Experience of collating and maintaining accurate records, such as course participant/student data, or similar, and of analyzing and reporting on this data.

4.        Excellent written and spoken communication skills and confidence in corresponding with internal and external stakeholders, including senior government or business officials. 

5.        Comfortable with decision-making under often quite strict time pressures, taking the initiative, problem-solving and escalating matters where required with an ability to identify and address potential operational problems/inefficiencies.  

6.        Financial administration skills (eg: raising PO’s, invoicing, reconciliation, payments), demonstrating attention to detail.

7.        An enthusiastic and flexible team player with a proactive, ‘can do’ attitude.

8.        Excellent IT skills (esp. Microsoft suite of programs and intermediate/advanced use of Excel) and an interest in expanding and improving these.

9.      Excellent organisational/time management and prioritisation skills: the ability to plan, prioritise and to manage workload to meet deadlines; and to multi-task to work to competing deadlines.  

10.   Experience in successful planning and organising face-to-face and online events and activities to a professional standard, including working with external venues.  

Desirable criteria

11.   Experience of using databases for student record storage and (e.g SITS).

12.   Experience working in higher education or an executive education team.