Hybrid Chief Operating Officer – Generation

at Generation

• Job title: Chief Operating Officer – Generation
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: £75,000 - £90,000 per year
• Degree requirement: No Education Requirement
• Location requirements: Hybrid, London, United Kingdom

About the role

• Chief Operating Officer at Generation UK & Ireland, leading funding acquisition and financial management to drive social impact in education-to-employment programmes.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team responsible for all funding activity, including acquisition, renewals, and grant management, plus playing a direct and key role in funding acquisition yourself.
• Building and maintaining strong relationships with high-profile funders, serving as the primary point of contact.
• Partnering with the CEO to oversee financial management, including P&L responsibility, forecasting, scenario modelling, and budgeting.
• Collaborating with the internal finance officer and outsourced accountancy partner to ensure robust financial processes.
• Overseeing organisation-wide planning cycles, from annual plans to cohort-specific delivery schedules, organising, aligning and motivating a team of 70+ people in doing so.
• Managing planning tools and processes, ensuring operational alignment and accurate resource allocation across all teams.
• Ensuring programme strategy and design achieve intended outcomes over multiple years, driving sustained impact.
• Leading continuous programme improvement, convening teams around Impact, and ensuring strategic reviews and implementation plans are robustly executed.
• Embedding an outcomes-focused, impact-driven culture across the organisation.
• Overseeing data infrastructure and dashboards to support reporting and informed decision-making, while partnering with teams to improve data quality and integrate impact insights into strategy.
• Lead initiatives critical to long-term impact, including delivery model innovation, expansion into new regions, leading on new programme launches.
• Support organisational design and project manage high-profile collaborations.
• Act as spokesperson for the charity at events, in publications, and to key external stakeholders.
• Support Generation Ireland where relevant, particularly in strategic planning and alignment.

Requirements

• Strong leadership and team management experience, playing a senior role in coordinating the activities of teams of similar size to Generation.
• Excellent strategic thinking and organisational planning capabilities, demonstrated through effective improvements or cycles of planning that have led to high levels of organisational impact.
• Proven track record in funding acquisition, grant management, bringing in and successfully delivering against six or seven-figure grants.
• Proven track record of sourcing, securing, and delivering new initiatives, with new partners, creating significant impact and long-term potential.
• Experience running finances, including budgeting, P&L oversight, and scenario modelling, enabled by strong financial acumen.
• Evidence of leveraging data & tech to increase the effectiveness of an organisation, and being able to lead these functions to service the organisation and deliver ongoing improvements.
• Deep understanding of Impact, able to further build Generation’s capability in this field. Past experience with RCTs or other forms of counterfactual evaluation is helpful.
• Strong project management skills, with the ability to lead cross-functional initiatives with both the planning toolkit and a track record of effectively engaging teams and people around a vision and implementation plans.
• Outstanding communication and public speaking skills, able to represent the organisation externally to drive wider awareness and influence in doing so.
• Adaptability and collaborative mindset to work across teams, regions, and partners.

Benefits

• Purpose and social impact in the heart of your work.
• Playing a key role in a pioneering organisation that is helping to shape the future education-to-employment programmes, demonstrating ‘what works’ through robust evaluation, with a view to future scale and wider policy impact across all of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
• Opportunity to get involved with a range of activities and varied projects - as COO, you will be involved in and often lead projects across a wide range of topics, engaging the whole organisation in doing so.
• We offer flexible and remote working to accommodate everyone's preferred working patterns/preferences and unique needs.
• WFH set up offer of support of £300 to help you make your working-from-home setup comfortable and efficient.
• Professional Development is a priority for Generation and employees, and you can access up to £1,000 towards your learning & development per year. This support is accompanied by up to 5 days of training days/ study leave per year to enable your development activities.