Strategic Engagement Lead

Join to apply for the Strategic Engagement Lead role at The Pensions Regulator.

About us

It is important to us that TPR remains a great place to work. We do all we can to help our people reach their full potential with learning, secondment, and development opportunities. We put our 900+ employees first, supporting flexible working and offer a diverse, lively, and inclusive environment. This includes our Family Network (Balance), Disability Network, LGBT+ Network (Proud), Minority Ethnic Network, Mental Health Network, and Women’s Network which offer spaces to connect. We operate a hybrid working model, with regular attendance in our Brighton office to connect with colleagues across the business.

Role

TPR is moving towards an outcome-focused model of regulation, encouraging innovation enhancing the pensions system and intervening in a timely way to prevent risks to savers from emerging. This means using evidence and insight to guide regulatory decision-making and using a different regulatory toolkit to deliver the retirement income that pension savers need. In return you will be transparent about our priorities, and the evidence that sits behind them, and help educate and inform stakeholders about the pensions landscape. Success would be helping to enhance the pensions system and evolve the regulatory framework in a coherent, proportionate and effective way.

The successful applicant will be motivated by a high-profile role requiring collaboration and engagement across the organisation and beyond, including working closely with Board members, senior officials, partner regulators domestically and internationally and other Government departments.

Responsibilities

• The Strategic Engagement lead demands high levels of judgement, horizon scanning, and evaluative reasoning to influence strategic direction and contribute to regulatory excellence.
• The impact of the role is organisation-wide, with significant internal and external visibility.
• It strengthens regulatory credibility, shapes discourse, and contributes to the effective delivery of policy and regulatory initiatives that can genuinely protect, enhance and innovate in savers’ interests.
• Accountable for managing our strategic engagement with partners, conveying our positions, anticipating threats to saver outcomes and ensuring alignment with stakeholders where possible.
• Building structures to support a strategic approach to engaging with partners, including networks, agreements, forums etc.
• This requires building strong networks across TPR to ensure our strategic opportunities are surfaced and capitalised on.
• Co-ordinating responses to international regulator data submissions or requests for information about the UK market.
• Acts as a senior advisor to the Directors in Strategy, Policy and Analysis and other senior leaders, commissioning and contributing to briefings and generating joint outputs with partners.
• Engages externally with senior stakeholders and industry thought leaders to influence the pensions agenda and regulatory policy space.
• Promotes a collaborative and forward-thinking culture, enabling staff to connect across silos and contribute to shared regulatory and policy goals.
• Managing a team, ensuring fungibility of resource and the ability to flex to shift priorities depending on the regulatory landscape.

Essential and Desirable Criteria

• Excellent stakeholder management skills with an ability to identify and build trust-based relationships with a wide range of demanding and diverse senior stakeholders.
• Comfortable constructively and effectively challenging partners and stakeholders, using your excellent communication and influencing skills to generate buy-in and hold people to account for delivery.
• A track record of strong collaborative leadership, breaking down and working across barriers to deliver outcomes in a complex, fast-paced, environment of political or public interest.
• Proven ability to horizon scan, assess the relevant landscape to interpret and understand policy and strategy issues, balance competing priorities, and develop and deliver effective plans.
• Experience of creating an inclusive environment with positive engagement, a continuous improvement ethos and high-levels of innovation - where diversity of thinking and perspective is both valued and nurtured.
• Adaptable to change, you will be able to work flexibly, often under pressure and to inspire others to do the same.
• You will be able to demonstrate excellent communication skills, producing reports, presentations and briefings confidently explaining complex issues in a way that is easy to understand, with an eye for detail and ability to tailor style/content with impact and influence for different audiences.
• Knowledge of pensions policy, financial regulation, or a closely related area.
• Experience working at or advising Director-level or Board-level stakeholders.
• Familiarity with innovation methods, or strategic foresight tools (e.g. futures thinking, systems mapping, design thinking).
• Experience in building or contributing to cross-organisational communities of practice, thought leadership programmes, or collaborative policy networks.

Person Specification

• An individual with exceptional policy and strategy expertise that can monitor and analyse policy developments and strategic trends affecting TPR policy and good saver outcomes.
• Experience networking across various stakeholder levels with the ability to build and maintain impactful relationships across sectors.
• Able to devise, plan and deliver senior-level strategic engagements with impact – ensuring senior leaders are well briefed and structured in their interactions with partners.
• Demonstrates effective horizon scanning, proactively reviewing internal and external information sources, disseminating insight on key market developments, policy development, and anticipated changes which might impact pensions, and leverage opportunities to shape developments in the interests of savers.

Problem-Solving

• Conceptual, analytical, and creative thinking required to operate in a forward-looking, ambiguous and fast changing policy environment.
• Facilitates high-level conversations internally and externally and provides a strategic frame to our engagement with partners.
• Develops and implements engaging and accessible ways of communicating findings to the business and partner regulators.

Leadership

• Ability to work within a multi-disciplinary team and assimilate information from across a variety of sources, teams and in different formats.
• Ability to work effectively with other technical specialists in other disciplines including actuaries, investment consultants, lawyers, intelligence, policy and covenant advisers across the organisation.
• Explain, reason and engage with key stakeholders with regards to our view of risk.
• Be confident and credible and be able to defend an evidence-based position.

Salary and Benefits

As well as a salary from £67,253 we offer:

• Civil Service Pension arrangements, which are recognised as some of the best in the pensions world.
• Discretionary bonus arrangements.
• Access to performance related pay progression.
• 25 days annual leave provision.
• Flexible working arrangements.
• Enhanced parental leave arrangements.
• A free employee assistance programme.
• An excellent office location in Brighton.

How to apply

To apply please email recruitmentteam@tpr.gov.uk quoting role reference number 231346 along with:

• A covering letter with details of how your skills and experience meet the role requirements.
• A copy of your CV.
• Details of your notice period.

Current TPR employees in their first 12 months of employment who want to apply for this vacancy should first contact their line manager to discuss their application.

We are an inclusive employer and offer equal opportunities regardless of an individual’s age, disability, gender identity, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.

As a Disability Confident employer, we’re committed to the recruitment, employment, retention, and development of people with disabilities, and to improving their employment opportunities. Candidates who declare that they have a disability and who meet the essential criteria for the job will be offered an interview.

Applications will be considered on a part time and job share basis. In accordance with Home Office guidance, the successful candidate will be required to provide their right to work in the UK before they start employment. Unfortunately, TPR is not able to offer sponsorship at the time. TPR is a UK-based organisation with a working location in Brighton, candidates must live in the UK to be employed by us.

The Pensions Regulator is an arm’s length government body and part of the public service. Any offer of employment will be subject to the receipt of satisfactory background screening checks and criminal record checks (BPSS). Whilst it is our aim to respond to all applicants, if you have not heard from us within 21 days of the advert closing, please assume you have been unsuccessful on this occasion. Specific feedback will only be provided if you have attended an interview or assessment.

If you have any queries about this role, or if you have a disability and wish to request a reasonable adjustment at any stage of the recruitment process, please email recruitmentteam@tpr.gov.uk.