Integrated Planning Operations - 12 months FTC/ secondment or acting up opportunity in London

Division: Operations

Department: Portfolio Management Unit

Salary: National (Edinburgh and Leeds) ranging from £43,300 to £54,100 and London from £46,400 to £57,900 (salary offered will be based on skills and experience)

This role is graded as: Senior Associate, Corporate

About the FCA and team

We regulate financial services firms in the UK, to keep financial markets fair, thriving and effective. By joining us, you’ll play a key part in protecting consumers, driving economic growth, and shaping the future of UK finance services. The Integrated Planning Team sits within the Portfolio Management Unit and plays an important role in helping the FCA make well-informed, joined-up decisions about its priorities, people and resources. The team brings together planning, data and insight from across the organisation to create a clearer picture of what can be delivered, what it will take and where the key trade-offs and opportunities lie. Working closely with colleagues across divisions and corporate functions, the Portfolio Management Unit helps shape a more connected, forward-looking approach to planning and portfolio oversight - giving this role the opportunity to help improve how the FCA plans, prioritises and delivers its work.

This is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys bringing structure to complex activity, turning information into clear governance and guidance materials, and helping colleagues understand what is needed to support effective planning decisions.

Role responsibilities

• Support the end-to-end Integrated Planning cycle by coordinating key milestones, submission windows, communications, forums and planning touchpoints, including agendas, papers, actions and follow-through.
• Maintain the master planning timetable, dependency view, submission trackers and action logs, ensuring risks, blockers, slippage and follow-up activity are identified, recorded and escalated where needed.
• Support the development, release and maintenance of planning standards, guidance, templates and definitions, helping divisions and functions understand what is required of them and ensuring submissions are consistent, comparable and aligned to planning requirements.
• Coordinate the receipt, collation and quality assurance of planning inputs, carrying out readiness, completeness, consistency and data-quality checks, and highlighting gaps, issues and remediation needs to planning leads.
• Maintain controlled planning repositories and collaboration spaces in SharePoint and Teams, ensuring artefacts, submissions, decisions, actions and lessons learned are well organised, version controlled, traceable and auditable.
• Support the production of planning packs and governance materials, including preparing first drafts, coordinating inputs, maintaining pack trackers, checking quality and ensuring outputs are accurate, consistent and decision-ready.
• Work with divisional and functional planning leads to clarify requirements, manage expectations, support timely submissions and ensure decisions or outcomes from challenge and governance forums are reflected in planning artefacts.
• Capture learning from the planning cycle and propose practical improvements to guidance, templates, tracking, communications, tooling and ways of working to reduce rework and improve stakeholder experience.

Skills required

• Minimum: Experience supporting or coordinating planning, governance, programme, portfolio or operational cycles within a complex organisation.
• Well-developed organizational skills, including the ability to manage multiple priorities, stakeholder inputs, records, trackers and reporting outputs with a high degree of accuracy and attention to detail.
• Proficient in Microsoft 365 applications, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
• Essential: Ability to coordinate end-to-end planning or governance activity, including milestones, submissions, forums, communications, actions and follow-up activity, while managing competing priorities, risks, blockers and deadlines.
• Experience applying standards, guidance and quality assurance processes to ensure planning inputs and outputs are complete, accurate, consistent and decision-ready, including data validation, readiness reviews and governance reporting.
• Ability to draft and coordinate governance materials, guidance documents and stakeholder communications, translating planning requirements into clear, practical information for divisions and functions.
• Sound judgement and discretion when handling sensitive information, maintaining auditable records and supporting effective governance practices.
• Proactive approach to continuous improvement, identifying recurring issues and recommending practical improvements to processes, guidance, templates and ways of working.

Benefits

• 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Non-contributory pension (8–12% depending on age) and life assurance at eight times your salary.
• Private healthcare with Bupa, income protection, and 24/7 Employee Assistance.
• 35 hours of paid volunteering annually.
• Colleagues spend a minimum of 50% of their working time in the office each month (60% for Directors and Executive Directors) across our London, Leeds and Edinburgh offices.
• A flexible benefits scheme designed around your lifestyle.

Our values and culture

Our colleagues are the key to our success as a regulator. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture: one that’s free from discrimination and bias, celebrates difference, and supports colleagues to deliver at their best. We believe that our differences and similarities enable us to be a better organisation – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation, and delivers better regulation.

If you require any adjustments due to a disability or condition, your recruiter is here to help - reach out for tailored support. We welcome diverse working styles and aim to find flexible solutions that suit both the role and individual needs, including options like part-time and job sharing where applicable.

Disability confident: our hiring approach

We’re proud to be a Disability Confident Employer, and therefore, people or individuals with disabilities and long-term conditions who best meet the minimum criteria for a role will go through to the next stage of the recruitment process. In cases of high application volumes we may progress applicants whose experience most closely matches the role’s key requirements.

Useful information and timelines

Timeline:

• Job advert closes: Midnight, 31 August 2026
• CV Review/Shortlist: 2 September
• Interview: from the 9th September moving forward

Your Recruiter will discuss the process in detail with you during screening for the role, therefore, please make them aware if you are going to be unavailable for any date during this time.