Service Delivery Manager (Mat Leave Cover)

Department: Delivery

Location: Home based, UK (with occasional travel to our London office)

Reports to: Apprenticeships Director

Hours: 37.5 per week

Contract type: Fixed Term, 12 months

Salary: (Depending on experience)

Role Overview

The Service Delivery Manager is responsible for overseeing the performance and success of a learner occupancy of 500+ learners, ensuring timely completion, retention, and learner satisfaction. This role directly manages a team of Learner Success Coaches and Data Mentors, each responsible for a caseload of learners, providing strategic oversight and driving interventions when learners require additional support. In addition, the Service Delivery Manager plays a crucial role in liaising with employer partners, addressing challenges that may impact learner progression, and working closely with Accounts & Sales teams to support escalations and growth planning. As a key leader within the business, you will be expected to define solutions, champion initiatives, and drive continuous improvement in alignment with Cambridge Spark’s strategic objectives.

Key responsibilities:

• Learner Performance & Case Management: Lead monthly deep-dive caseload reviews to track learner progress, identifying risks, defining necessary interventions, and engaging directly with learners and employers. Proactively manage and support your team’s performance, ensuring alignment with individual KPIs and departmental OKRs. Identify trends across the learner population using caseload reviews and other data insights, implementing strategies to improve overall learner progression. Develop and pilot innovative approaches to enhance learner engagement, retention, and success for a diverse group of learners and employer partners.
• Team Leadership & Development: Hold regular team meetings to communicate key updates, foster team engagement, and drive the adoption of new initiatives. Conduct monthly one-to-ones and quarterly personal development planning (PDPs) to ensure individual career aspirations, motivation, and well-being are supported. Ensure Quality Assurance (QA) and OTLA feedback is actioned effectively, incorporating it into coaching sessions and PDP planning. Support and develop a high-performing team that is agile, responsive, and solutions-focused in addressing learner and employer needs.
• Employer Engagement & Stakeholder Management: Act as a key point of contact for employer partners, providing regular updates on learner performance and collaborating on solutions where challenges arise. Support or lead client interventions, ensuring proactive engagement and timely resolution of issues impacting learner success. Provide rapid response and solutions to internal escalations, working across departments to resolve concerns effectively.
• Strategic & Operational Leadership: Ensure service delivery meets agreed SLAs and proactively contribute to improving processes and outcomes. Champion a culture of continuous improvement, identifying, leading, and guiding internal teams in initiatives that enhance the learner experience. Deputise for the Service Delivery Director (SDD) when required, providing leadership coverage during periods of leave or high demand.

Candidate Specification:

• Experience within apprenticeship sector
• 3+ years Management of a team (ideally in remote settings)
• 3+ years Commercial awareness and acumen
• Project Management (desirable)
• Exceptional communication
• Stakeholder management at a senior level
• Experience of driving performance via effective management towards KPIs
• Experience of working across multiple systems including LMS platforms
• Experience of prioritising workload, working to strict deadlines and following governing procedures and controls

Company Benefits:

• Remote first company providing flexibility to work from home
• Pension with up to 5% matched contributions
• 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
• A day for volunteering
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
• Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
• Annual Summer and Xmas events
• Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
• CPD Allowance
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• EAP with 24 hour confidential support line

Background to our Organisation:

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era. We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets. Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m.

Values:

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

• Entrepreneurial: We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.
• Team Spirit: Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.
• Customer-focused: Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.
• Gold Standard: We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.