Chief Operating Officer- Generation UK & Ireland in Leeds

Location: Hybrid - The role can be based anywhere in the United Kingdom, with an expectation to attend the nearest regional office (London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, or Glasgow) one day per week on the hub office’s designated office day. We offer flexibility to employees to balance their commitments, including medical appointments, parental or caregiving responsibilities, and personal goals.

Salary: £75,000 to £90,000 p.a. FTE, based on experience (Includes Base salary and a performance element)

Contract: Full Time (flexible hours considered) Permanent; 40 hours per week; 9 AM to 6 PM, Monday to Friday.

Recruitment timetable: Last date for submission of applications: Sunday, 18 January 2025 Interviews: Last week of January 2026

Informal enquiries for this position can be sent to Michael Houlihan, CEO- Generation UK & Ireland, michaelh@generation.org or Yasmeen Seth, People Director- Generation UK & Ireland, yasmeen.seth@generation.org.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As Chief Operating Officer, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of Generation UK & Ireland at a moment of ambition, scale, and opportunity. Reporting to the CEO and working closely with the Senior Management Team, you will lead the organisation’s funding acquisition and management team, oversee financial management of the charity, lead on key strategic planning and operational elements, as well as the Impact and Data function. In doing so, you will ensure Generation UK & Ireland’s bold vision translates into sustainable impact for thousands of learners across the UK & Ireland. This role sits at the heart of the charity’s growth. You will champion operational excellence while fostering an outcomes-driven culture that enables teams to innovate, adapt, and perform at their best.

As a senior leader and external ambassador, you will build trusted relationships with our funders, partners, and stakeholders across the public and private sectors, including bringing new funders and partnerships into the organisation. You will represent Generation’s work nationally and, in doing so, will play a role in shaping the future of inclusive employment and initiatives that can help reduce unemployment across the UK and Ireland. This is a rare opportunity to combine strategic leadership, financial stewardship, and social purpose, making a tangible difference to people’s lives.

Why This Role Matters?

This is more than a leadership position. It’s a chance to shape the future of a charity, drive innovation in programme delivery, and inspire a dedicated team and wider community. If you are a strategic, visionary leader passionate about creating lasting social impact, with a track record of delivering results and bringing funders and partners together, this role provides a platform to turn bold ideas into meaningful change.

ABOUT GENERATION

Generation’s vision is a world where everyone should have access to a good job and income that can help them and their families have a better life. Our charitable mission towards this is to support people facing significant and multiple barriers to employment into life-changing careers they otherwise could not access. We create impact with a unique methodology of profession-specific skills bootcamp training, focused on in-demand careers (specifically in the tech, healthcare and green sectors), with extensive, ongoing pastoral support and matchmaking to employer partners. Generation launched globally in 2015 and has grown quickly to become the world’s largest demand-led employment initiative. We have placed >100,000 people into roles, working with over 4,000 employer partners to date across 16 countries and 26 professions. Since launching in the UK in 2019 have now trained more than 3500 people. Our work focuses on supporting those from diverse groups facing barriers to desirable employment. For these learners, we have achieved an industry-leading c. 70% job placement rate with learners now placed at >800 employers. We have secured transformative corporate funding from Microsoft, the JP Morgan Charitable Foundation, the Macquarie Group Foundation, Barclays, BlackRock, and many more. In recent years, we have also been one of the leading charities delivering contracts for the Department for Education and a number of Combined Authorities. This has driven our scale to new programmes, regions and beneficiary groups. By joining Generation UK & Ireland, you will become part of an organisation committed to social impact and determined to play its part in changing the system in this context. The work is fast-paced, exciting, and innovative.

Find out more at https://uk.generation.org/

And you can hear more about our impact from our learners and beneficiaries themselves https://www.youtube.com/@GenerationUK-I/videos

And you can also learn more about our culture, directly from our incredible people on our website: https://uk.generation.org/work-with-us/

Generation acknowledges the duty of care to safeguard, protect, and promote the welfare of staff and learners and is committed to ensuring safeguarding practice reflects statutory responsibilities and government guidance and complies with best practice. We carry out employment and right-to-work checks, and request a declaration of any criminal convictions from all staff as part of our recruitment process.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Funding & Financial Leadership
  • Lead a team responsible for all funding activity, including acquisition, renewals, and grant management, plus playing a direct and key role in funding acquisition yourself.
  • Building and maintaining strong relationships with high-profile funders, serving as the primary point of contact.
  • Partnering with the CEO to oversee financial management, including P&L responsibility, forecasting, scenario modelling, and budgeting.
  • Collaborating with the internal finance officer and outsourced accountancy partner to ensure robust financial processes.
• Strategic Operations & Organisational Planning
  • Overseeing organisation-wide planning cycles, from annual plans to cohort-specific delivery schedules, organising, aligning and motivating a team of 70+ people in doing so.
  • Managing planning tools and processes, ensuring operational alignment and accurate resource allocation across all teams.
• Programme Strategy, Impact and Data
  • Ensuring programme strategy and design achieve intended outcomes over multiple years, driving sustained impact.
  • Leading continuous programme improvement, convening teams around Impact, and ensuring strategic reviews and implementation plans are robustly executed.
  • Embedding an outcomes-focused, impact-driven culture across the organisation.
  • Overseeing data infrastructure and dashboards to support reporting and informed decision-making, while partnering with teams to improve data quality and integrate impact insights into strategy.
• Special Projects & Strategic Growth
  • Lead initiatives critical to long-term impact, including delivery model innovation (such as our work with FE colleagues), expansion into new regions, leading on new programme launches (leading market diagnostic work, followed by implementation plans for the most impactful opportunities identified).
  • Support organisational design and project manage high-profile collaborations, including a collaboration with the Youth Futures Foundation, with whom we are embarking on a partnership over 2026/2027 to evaluate the impact of our programmes through RCT.
• External Representation & Thought Leadership
  • Act as spokesperson for the charity at events, in publications, and to key external stakeholders.
  • Support Generation Ireland where relevant, particularly in strategic planning and alignment.

Who will you work with?

Internal

• Leading a talented team of 12, including 4 direct reports: Head of Funding, Growth Strategy Manager, Impact Director, and Project & Partnerships Manager (Special Projects).
• Collaborating closely with the CEO on finance and strategy, and with the Senior Management Team- Chief Learning Officer, Chief Partnerships Officer, Admissions Director and People Director on organisational delivery.
• Working with programme teams to ensure smooth cohort planning and operational alignment.
• Partnering with Impact/Data teams to drive evidence-based decision-making.

External

• Engaging existing and new funders from the private and public sectors, including national and local government.
• Building partnerships with colleges and other organisations for programme co-delivery and regional growth.
• Representing the charity at public events, in publications, and through communications with key stakeholders.

Attributes & Skills for the role

• Strong leadership and team management experience, playing a senior role in coordinating the activities of teams of similar size to Generation.
• Excellent strategic thinking and organisational planning capabilities, demonstrated through effective improvements or cycles of planning that have led to high levels of organisational impact.
• Proven track record in funding acquisition, grant management, bringing in and successfully delivering against six or seven-figure grants.
• Proven track record of sourcing, securing, and delivering new initiatives, with new partners, creating significant impact and long-term potential.
• Experience running finances, including budgeting, P&L oversight, and scenario modelling, enabled by strong financial acumen.
• Evidence of leveraging data & tech to increase the effectiveness of an organisation, and being able to lead these functions to service the organisation and deliver ongoing improvements.
• Deep understanding of Impact, able to further build Generation’s capability in this field.
• Past experience with RCTs or other forms of counterfactual evaluation is helpful.
• Strong project management skills, with the ability to lead cross‑functional initiatives with both the planning toolkit and a track record of effectively engaging teams and people around a vision and implementation plans.
• Outstanding communication and public speaking skills, able to represent the organisation externally to drive wider awareness and influence in doing so.
• Adaptability and collaborative mindset to work across teams, regions, and partners.

At Generation, we're changing the lives of many individuals, and that in itself gets us out of bed! Here are a few other benefits you’ll experience working with the UK team:

• Purpose and social impact in the heart of your work.
• Playing a key role in a pioneering organisation that is helping to shape the future education-to-employment programmes, demonstrating ‘what works’ through robust evaluation, with a view to future scale and wider policy impact across all of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
• Opportunity to get involved with a range of activities and varied projects - as COO, you will be involved in and often lead projects across a wide range of topics, engaging the whole organisation in doing so.
• We offer flexible and remote working to accommodate everyone's preferred working patterns/preferences and unique needs.
• WFH set up offer of support of £300 to help you make your working-from-home setup comfortable and efficient.
• Professional Development is a priority for Generation and employees, and you can access up to £1,000 towards your learning & development per year. This support is accompanied by up to 5 days of training days/ study leave per year to enable your development activities.

A FAIR CHANCE

Every role at Generation is open to applications from all sections of society. We believe in the potential of everyone; regardless of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other aspect that makes you, well, you. We believe that the more diverse we are, the better we become. More than just encouraging your application, we go further together. It’s this philosophy that drives us towards our mission. We open our doors to those who share this mindset. We are particularly interested in hearing from candidates from marginalised groups. We will assess applications on a rolling basis and close this posting as soon as we have found the right candidate. We look forward to hearing from you.

Generation acknowledges the duty of care to safeguard, protect, and promote the welfare of staff and learners and is committed to ensuring safeguarding practice reflects statutory responsibilities and government guidance and complies with best practice.

Support with your application Here’s a recruitment support resource that explains our application process and offers tips to help you put forward your best possible application. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C2eU1_6tGW0ML4OHoXYTYAy_aLApg0M4EqcjU33tj3M/edit?usp=sharing