Professional Skills Centre Director at British Council Nigeria

The British Council is the world's leading cultural relations organization and creates opportunities for people in the UK and worldwide to understand each other, to work together and learn from one another. We see this as crucial to building secure, more prosperous and sustainable futures for us all. We build trust and understanding between different countries and cultures and develop strong international links that are of benefit to people in Britain and the rest of the world.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Professional Skills Centre Director

Location: Lagos
Role Type: Business Delivery
Pay Band: 8
Duration: Fixed Term Contract - 18 months
Reports to: Director Programmes Nigeria

Role purpose

• To plan a sustainable and surplus driven business model for the Professional Skills Centre, Nigeria
• To lead the development and launch of the Professional Skills Centre.
• To build relationships with key national and UK delivery partners and suppliers, and with key internal stakeholders in Nigeria, the region and UK
• To work effectively with colleagues in all SBUs to contribute to a holistic country programme for all customer groups and to build the whole business

Geopolitical/SBU/Function Overview
42% of Nigeria’s population is under 14. The government has recognised that its Vision 2020 must address the aspirations of this young population as part of its drive to achieve peace and prosperity. This has led to unprecedented interest and investment in Education, the Arts and good governance. This alignment with the UK’s priorities creates a growth environment for the British Council.

To be successful in this, we are building understanding with our UK stakeholders of Nigeria as an emerging economy with substantial commercial and development opportunities as well as the challenges they may be more familiar with. In this we seek to integrate our approach with that of the wider UK mission.

We are expanding and scaling up our existing programmes, contracts and services in the Arts, Education & Society, English & Examinations and developing offers to fill important gaps such as in Skills. To this end the Professional Skills Centre (PSC) is a completely new initiative to respond to the demand for quality, accredited skills training for adults to support career aspirations and enterprise development in soft skills, business development and programmes leading to recognised British qualifications.

This offer will be part of paid customer service portfolio that currently includes our Exam service, which included the delivery of 91,000 exams in 2016/17 to over 50,000 candidates. This new post will be responsible for building on the PSC design outlined in the business case and marketing it into a service ready for a soft launch by March 2018 with a number of selected products, and for putting the systems and infrastructure in place so that it can be developed in to a sustainable operation able to meet the customer demand and generate a surplus.

The PSC Director will report to Country Director or Director Programmes and to a governance Board in Nigeria of internal Directors and Country managers for Business Services, Arts, HE and Skills, Exams, Marketing and Communications and Finance. The PSC will be delivered through partners and suppliers’ premises and digital communications because the British Council operation does not have training premises to operate from.