Senior Operations Officer

Job description

​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 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 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.

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 post will be offered on a full-time, fixed term contract for 2 years.

Key responsibilities

• To coordinate and at times lead the day-to-day business operations of the International School for Government, providing direct support to both Academic and Professional Services, clients & business partners, and relevant stakeholders.
• To deliver and coordinate administrative support of the ISfG’s business function, which includes some diary management, finance (procurement & invoicing), HR including off-payroll working, asset management, external client liaison, estates & facilities, health and safety, business continuity, information and data management and internal and external event management.
• To regularly liaise with clients of the ISfG programmes, including serving on joint operational groups to navigate and problem solve any challenges that may arise.
• To take local ownership of the invoicing procedures and processes against client contracts, working closely with the Head of Administration and central teams
• To take a lead role in the administration and event coordination of face-to-face credit and non-credit bearing courses, including travel, room bookings, catering, payments, schedule and speaker coordination.
• To actively contribute to and help to shape the delivery of the ISfG’s business and education functions, as well as the broader Operational Support Network within the Policy Institute and beyond.
• To role model a culture of professionalism with a focus on providing responsive and timely customer service, leading and enabling others in role modelling those behaviours.
• To share and develop best practice solutions with colleagues and coordinate the promotion of new ideas for better and more effective and efficient delivery of services.

The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post.  

Skills, knowledge, 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 analysing and reporting on this data

4.       Experience of managing a busy individual’s (or team’s) diary, along with excellent written and spoken communication skills

5.       Confident in corresponding with internal and external stakeholders, including senior government or business officials

6.       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

7.       Experience of book-keeping and financial processing (eg: invoicing, reconciliation, payments)

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

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

Desirable criteria

1.   Experience of using databases for student record storage and/or online learning platforms in a professional context (eg: SITS, Moodle)

2..  Experience of successfully supporting the administration of face-to-face executive education events

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