Knowledge Transfer Lead - Water Sector

Salary: up to £50K DOE

Contract: 12 Month Fixed Term, Mon-Fri (Remote/Hybrid)

Holiday: 27 days of annual leave plus bank holidays

Benefits: Pension Scheme (6% employer contributions), Private Health, Life Assurance, 3 paid volunteering days each year.

Purpose of the Role

This role supports the delivery of Spring Innovation’s sector-wide knowledge sharing ambitions, aligned with Ofwat’s requirement for innovation projects to be “open by default”. It exists to embed the Spring and Ofwat Knowledge Sharing Vision “to unlock faster adoption by creating a world-class knowledge sharing culture” by ensuring insights and lessons are captured, shared, and applied across the water sector.

The role will promote and apply six core knowledge sharing principles:

• Learn before innovating
• Share early and often
• Be open by default
• Share successes and failures
• Centralise and open up knowledge
• Empower learning from external sources

As the Knowledge Transfer Lead, you will lead the full knowledge sharing lifecycle including planning, delivery and follow up for projects and events that turn learning into action across the water sector. You will work closely with project teams before, during and after each engagement to extract critical insights, craft compelling lessons learnt and make knowledge easy to find, understand and adopt. This is essential to maximising the impact of innovation, avoiding duplication, and driving faster adoption of solutions across the sector.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with sector to identify knowledge gaps in technical area and extract insights from project to fill the gaps.
• Assess relevance, transferability, and potential impact of insights to focus effort on high-value knowledge.
• Design and lead structured knowledge capture activities (e.g. interviews, reflection sessions, deep dives, workshops) using standard tools.
• Tailor outputs for targeted audiences (e.g. written summaries, slide decks, webinars, press) and publish via Spring and other communication channels.
• Build trusted relationships with innovators, water companies and delivery partners to broker connections and exchange knowledge.
• Monitor knowledge use, track adoption, gather feedback, and continuously improve tools and methods.
• Scan for new developments, sector needs and innovation movements to inform future priorities and insights generation.

Experience

• Proven track record of at least five years in knowledge transfer, knowledge management or innovation roles within the water industry or a comparable complex infrastructure environment.
• Experience in designing and running multi stakeholder workshops and events that capture lessons learnt and drive adoption of new solutions.
• Demonstrated success in persuading project teams and senior stakeholders to prioritise knowledge capture and quality storytelling.
• Hands on experience converting research or technical findings into practical guidance, case studies or policy recommendations.

Skills

• Information Synthesis: Able to distil complex technical and operational detail into clear, engaging formats such as infographics and one-page briefs.
• Facilitation and Training: Skilled in designing and leading interactive workshops, breakout sessions and reflection exercises.
• Communication and Storytelling: Excellent written and verbal skills, with the ability to craft compelling narratives that demonstrate measurable impact.
• Relationship Building and Influencing: Adept at forging partnerships across utilities, suppliers, regulators and academia, and motivating others to share knowledge openly.
• Knowledge Management Methods: Familiar with lessons learnt frameworks, after action reviews and communities of practice.
• Technical Literacy: Confident user of Microsoft 365, collaborative platforms like SharePoint, Teams and Miro etc.
• Organisational Agility: Strong planning skills, able to juggle multiple projects and adapt quickly to shifting priorities.

Requirements

• Legal right to work in the United Kingdom.
• Willingness and ability to travel throughout the UK, with overnight stays as required.
• A full UK driving license is an advantage.
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field; a master’s degree or professional qualification is beneficial.

About Spring

Spring is the open-innovation hub for the UK and Irish water sector. We work at the centre of a rapidly changing industry that is shaped by climate change, growing populations, ageing infrastructure and increasing public scrutiny, and we turn these pressures into progress. Our vision is to become global leaders in open innovation. Our mission is to attract, connect and support the brightest thinkers, both within and beyond the sector, so that transformation can happen more quickly. Our objective is to foster collaboration by offering a single, trusted source of intelligence on needs, trials, data and emerging solutions.

In practice, we:

• act as the front door to the UK and Irish water industry, giving companies and suppliers immediate insight into who is doing what, what is working and where the next breakthrough may arise;
• broker partnerships, share lessons learnt and remove duplication so that ideas move from concept to deployment at pace;
• give water companies the time and head-space to innovate by curating intelligence, building networks and highlighting opportunities;
• help the sector respond to its toughest challenges, ensuring resilient, sustainable water services for customers, communities and the environment.

By combining intelligence, clarifying priorities and making knowledge flow freely, we enable the industry to meet today’s challenges and create solutions for tomorrow.