Learning Manager – North and Midlands (England)

Purpose:

The purpose of this role is to provide leadership in the design and delivery of SSE learning programmes. This role will be pivotal in the advancement of our learning and delivery offer for social entrepreneurs. This role will involve the direct responsibility for facilitating some learning programmes as well as overall accountability for SSE’s learning programmes delivered by learning facilitators, ensuring they fulfil the requirements of SSE external funding partners and investors. You will also line manage, supervise, and direct, learning facilitators, mentors and other contributors as required. You will play a key ambassadorial role in promoting SSE’s approach to blended learning and ensuring that all our delivery aligns to our action learning pedagogy.

You will succeed in the role if you believe in the potential of social entrepreneurship to create social change and are willing to work collaboratively as part of a fun yet focused team.

Key responsibilities:

Find and recruit the UK’s most promising social entrepreneurs:
1. Build relationships with local partners working with social entrepreneurial talent and undertake outreach to ensure SSE is fulfilling its mission in yielding diverse pools of talented applicants.
2. Support the design of innovative candidate assessment activities that bring out the best in the talent that applies for SSE’s programmes, successfully identifies and tests promising entrepreneurial talent that could best benefit from SSE’s programmes and minimises unconscious bias that may disadvantage minoritised applicants.

Design and deliver SSE’s innovative support for social entrepreneurs:
3. Lead the design of learning programmes that support SSE’s social entrepreneurs and their ventures to build their capacities for social impact generation and commercial success. These programmes should be shaped by SSE’s blended learning framework, organizational strategy, funder requirements and the needs of our social entrepreneurs.
4. Integrate our virtual learning environment into the design of learning programmes
5. Line manage learning facilitators to design and deliver programme sessions for SSE’s social entrepreneurs.
6. Deliver 1-2-1 sessions, such as entrepreneurial diagnostics and enterprise coaching sessions, to support our social entrepreneurs to develop commercial and impact goals and provide ‘critical friend’ accountability as they work towards them. 1-2-1 sessions should include pastoral and wellbeing support in line with SSE’s Health and Wellbeing Strategy, where appropriate.
7. Deliver group sessions for cohorts of social entrepreneurs, for them to grow their capacity for impact and commerce by drawing on the insights of their peers, and ‘learning by doing’ rather than ‘learning by viewing’. Session themes would include
financial management, business modelling, impact measurement, marketing, team development.
8. Support the planning and delivery of events for SSE’s social entrepreneurs, including sessions for graduates of SSE’s programmes (SSE Fellows).
9. Collect data to feed into the project monitoring and evaluation plan and integrate learnings during project implementation
10. Support the development of the pool of impact and enterprise speakers and experts who contribute to SSE’s programmes
11. Support programme managers to manage budgets, forecast and financial reporting by maintaining accurate financial records
12. Support colleagues to prepare, collate and present documentation for internal and external auditing and reporting requirements

Build yours and SSE’s changemaking know-how, nationally & globally:
13. Build internal knowledge and expertise around the impact areas in SSE’s Theory of Change (connecting people, addressing unemployment, reducing emissions, improving health, and tackling poverty) and the global best practice approaches to tackling these in order to support SSE’s social entrepreneurs to innovate.
14. Contribute to and support Learning Facilitators to contribute to SSE’s internal bank of activity plans and session plans, which are shared across SSE’s delivery team for the benefit of social entrepreneurs across the UK and internationally.

Specialism:
15. Each Learning and Delivery lead will have a specialism project that they will lead
on within the development of the learning team

Further information including a full job description is available here.