Programme Manager - Education Programmes

Department: Operations

Location: Home based, UK (with travel to Cambridge and London)

Reports to: Head of Custom Programmes

Hours: 37.5  per week

Salary:(Depending on experience) 

Role Overview 

We are looking for a customer-focussed Programme Manager who takes full accountability for the implementation and delivery of our Education Programmes. This is not a passive administrative role—it is a central position where you will drive customer delight and ensure our programmes are delivered to a "Gold Standard." You will act as the primary bridge between our clients and our internal teams, managing the entire lifecycle from proposal handover to final delivery while driving client and learner satisfaction.

Key responsibilities:

Client Stakeholder Management

• Act as the main day-to-day point of contact for clients, driving momentum and energy in our partnerships through the delivery phase
• Work closely with the sales team to manage stakeholder relationships, ensuring a seamless bridge between the commercial promise and operational reality
• Own the service relationship, acting as the primary problem-solver for client queries and maintaining a 24-hour SLA for replying to emails
• Proactively manage feedback with clients, explicitly demonstrating the improvements and solutions we suggest based on client and learner feedback

Programme Implementation & Delivery

• Operational Readiness: Lead critical technical checks, specifically managing IT whitelisting and firewall clearance to ensure seamless access for learners before launch
• Own the implementation: Partner with Sales and Product teams to understand client needs, ensuring the programme is set up and implemented to specification
• Drive delivery: Maintain full ownership of all programme communications and timelines, ensuring every aspect of the delivery is planned and executed on time. This includes scheduling of workshops and trainers, setting learners up on EDUKATE.AI and sending learner comms.
• Take decisive action to ensure agreed outputs are consistently met and that the programme is delivering what the customer needs
• Lead in-person coordination, including hosting learners in the office or onsite with clients as required (current programmes run in Cambridge and London - occasional travel to other locations may be required)

Quality Assurance & Learner Experience

• Review learner feedback after each touchpoint to identify friction points, working immediately with internal teams to overcome these issues
• Maintain high Net Promoter Scores (NPS) from our learners by ensuring negative feedback is addressed with concrete solutions
• Serve as the day-to-day point of contact for learners, ensuring queries are resolved timely
• Communicate clearly and regularly with client leads regarding learner performance, issues, and onboarding progress

Growth & Collaboration

• Collaborate across internal stakeholders (Curriculum, Operations) to ensure seamless service delivery that drives revenue
• Identify referral and growth opportunities to pass on to relevant sales teams

Candidate Specification: 

Essential

• You have a minimum of 3+ years of experience working within an Education setting
• You have experience working across Corporate or funded education sectors
• You possess excellent customer service and communication skills (written and spoken)
• You are effective at planning and managing your own time with excellent attention to detail
• You are a strong team player who can also work independently
• You have a "Can-do" attitude and a desire to continuously learn and improve

Desirable

• Project Management experience

What We're NOT Looking For:

• Administrators who process tasks without thinking about the client experience
• People who struggle to adapt to a constantly changing, fast-paced environment
• Individuals who prefer working in silos rather than collaborating across teams
• People who would not be prepared to regularly attend in-person events

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.

____________________________________________________________________________

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.