Role summary

We are looking for a confident and experienced self-starter to join the Strategy & Communications division as the Government & Parliamentary Relations Manager. Your role is essential to ensure:

Our relationships generate national and local engagement that helps us to advocate about the issues and practice that can enable high quality careers support for young people across policy debate and delivery.

We raise awareness of our work to the extent that our government and parliamentary stakeholders can articulate what we do and why it matters nationally as well as locally in constituencies across the country.

Key responsibilities

• Working with the Department of Education (DfE) (our sponsor department) to help us build strong relationships with relevant DfE ministers, officials and their teams.
• Engaging and building policy led relationships across wider Government - to enable cross-departmental engagement about CEC’s work.
• Building and maintaining cross parliamentary support – to increase our awareness and support amongst key MPs and Peers and to respond well to their inquiries and commissions.
• Internal team operations – acting as as CEC’s lead for internal government and parliamentary briefing to support CEO and senior colleague’s visits, meetings and engagements.

Essential Criteria

• Proven experience of engaging through the policy process – (1) developing policy ideas and (2) responding to consultations and briefing requests.
• Proven ability to engage senior and working level stakeholders and manage political, ministerial and departmental sensitivities.
• Communicate well (written and verbal) - confidently and with salience and ability to not just report moments but offer context and direction. Competent and assured in providing sound counsel to senior colleagues.
• Analytical skills – you will be engaging data and evidence generated from CEC’s work and externally, and will be required to interpret findings, make and communicate connections in an understandable and interesting way.
• Collaborative and good at building relationships at all levels, both internally and with a range of external stakeholders.
• Adaptable, resilient, flexible with the ability to deal with complexity, ambiguity and work at pace.