Market Development Manager in Cambridge

The Market Development Manager plays a pivotal role within the Adult Social Care Commissioning and Market Development service, shaping how local care and support markets evolve to meet the needs of communities across Cambridgeshire. The team works collaboratively across commissioning, contract management and market shaping, ensuring the Council meets its statutory duties while delivering high quality, sustainable services that make a real difference to people's lives.

In this influential role, you will lead and drive market development activity, championing innovation, continuous improvement and high standards of care across the sector. You will work closely with providers and partners, building strong, trusted relationships while overseeing key projects that support a resilient and responsive care market. Using insight, data and market intelligence, you will identify opportunities, address gaps in provision, and proactively manage risks to ensure the right services are in place both now and for the future. Your work will have a direct and lasting impact – supporting the Council to navigate financial and market pressures, strengthen service sustainability, and deliver better outcomes for residents.

By embedding commercial best practice and leading on value for money and benefit realisation, you will help shape commissioning decisions, support local economic growth, and ensure adult social care markets contribute positively to community wellbeing and independence across Cambridgeshire.

What will you be doing? As Market Development Manager, you will take a leading role in shaping and strengthening local care and support markets across Cambridgeshire. You'll work at the heart of commissioning, contract management and procurement activity, ensuring services are high-quality, sustainable and able to meet both current and future demand. Day to day, you will drive forward innovative approaches that improve efficiency, quality and outcomes. This includes developing cost-effective solutions, enhancing oversight of provider performance, and ensuring services remain financially viable and resilient in the long term.

You will provide strong commercial leadership across a range of commissioning and contract management activities, influencing how services are sourced, contracted and delivered. This will involve embedding robust pricing approaches, leading commercial challenge, and strengthening supplier engagement to ensure the Council achieves maximum value for money. A key part of your role will be working closely with providers and partners to build a diverse, responsive and resilient market. You'll champion inclusive growth by supporting local providers, enabling innovation and helping to create a market that contributes to wider community wellbeing, economic development and strategic priorities.

You will also lead on savings, benefits realisation and performance tracking – ensuring that efficiencies, improvements and commercial gains are clearly defined, actively monitored and fully realised across programmes. Using insight and data, you will continuously review sufficiency forecasts and strategies, ensuring commissioning approaches remain proactive, evidence-based and responsive to emerging needs. Alongside this, you will have opportunities to deputise for senior leadership, providing additional strategic oversight and contributing to wider service direction when needed.

About you: We are looking for a person who is motivated and forward-thinking, who can bring strong leadership, commercial insight and a passion for improving adult social care markets. You will be someone who enjoys working collaboratively, thrives on delivering improvement, and is confident in influencing both peers and senior stakeholders. You may already have direct experience within care and support markets, or you may bring transferable skills from a related sector.

You will demonstrate the ability to think strategically, interpret complex information, and translate this into impactful outcomes. You will bring experience of developing and delivering strategic plans, working collaboratively with teams to support long-term organisational goals, identifying and leading continuous improvement and efficiency initiatives, with a clear focus on tracking performance and realising tangible benefits.

You will have experience of leading and developing high-performing teams, setting clear expectations and using insight to drive performance improvement, as well as managing projects from initiation through to delivery, ensuring outcomes are achieved and benefits are realised. Your application will demonstrate effective project and resource management, the ability to balance priorities within a dynamic environment, the application of risk management and governance principles, including experience of market oversight and responding to provider or market challenges, driving improvement, transformation or efficiency through commissioning, procurement or service redesign.

You will be someone with experience of contributing to market and commercial strategy development, ideally within care and support or a related sector, delivering measurable commercial outcomes through commissioning, procurement and supplier engagement activity, managing contracts across their lifecycle, with a strong understanding of compliance, performance and risk management. You will be able to embed commercial awareness across multi-disciplinary teams and confidently influence decision-making at a senior level.

You will be someone who can demonstrate these strengths through a variety of professional experiences and someone committed to making a positive difference to communities and residents.

Please use your supporting statement in your application to outline how your skills and experience meet the essential criteria outlined in the Job Description/Person specification.

Equal opportunities: The council is a disability confident employer and encourages each applicant to indicate any reasonable adjustments they may require as part of the recruitment process. The council also provides a Guaranteed Interview Scheme for applicants who disclose a disability and meet the essential criteria for a job vacancy. We collect relevant diversity data for monitoring as part of the recruitment process to understand the diversity of our applicants and monitor any trends throughout the recruitment processes so that we can take meaningful action.