Operations Officer

£27,200 – £32,000

Farringdon / Home based

Permanent

The job of a Save the Children UK’s Operations Officer is busy and varied.

• Do you have strong organisation and administration skills with the ability to plan and prioritise a varied workload?
• Do you have strong numeracy skills with experience and the ability to monitor and manage financial information and monitoring budgets?
• Are you motivated by our vision of creating a world where every child doesn’t just survive, but thrives, and can go on to change the world?

If the answers to these questions are yes, we would love to hear from you!

About Us

The number of children requiring humanitarian assistance is rising as the climate crisis, entrenched conflict, and fragility, forced migration and infectious diseases all lead to an increase in the frequency, duration, and severity of catastrophic events. With needs continuing to grow and rapidly outpacing available resources, humanitarians around the world are once more forced to do more with less. Recognising the changing humanitarian risk landscape, the need to stay relevant, and to step up for greater impact, Save the Children has adopted a bold vision for the future of its humanitarian work and as part of this, there is an important role for SCUK to play in identifying and supporting next-generation collaborative initiatives that will ultimately deliver impact for disaster-affected children and their families.

The Humanitarian Leadership Academy (HLA) as part of SCUK’s humanitarian department provides high-quality humanitarian capacity strengthening for the movement, as well as the wider sector, as part of our shifting the power agenda. The HLA’s mission, as a team within the humanitarian department, is to enable people around the world to prepare for and respond to crises in their own countries, by providing quality learning opportunities. The HLA’s approach spans from focused needs-based learning in countries hit by crises to the huge international reach of our learning platform, Kaya. They are a global team that has a full suite of in-house skills to provide and develop the offer; technical and learning experts, platform specialists, a digital and design studio, communications support and more. The HLA enables SCUK to offer the most effective and impactful humanitarian capacity strengthening resource for both the Save the Children movement, the wider humanitarian sector and beyond.

Job Purpose

As the Operations Officer you will enable high levels of operational efficiency with regards to contract and award management, excellent financial management, effective decision making and responsiveness to stakeholder needs. You will work across all areas of the HLA covering commercial and charitable activities balancing the needs of different funding streams as well as the growing revenue from commercial activities.

Main Accountabilities

The Operations Officer’s key duties will be to:

Cross team coordination

• Implement effective processes and systems for financial and operational insight and decision making
• Introduce effective processes and systems for customer relationship management (inc. account management).
• Contribute to supporting strong ways of working across the new team, as well as taking individual responsibility for building an inclusive and supportive team culture.

Financial Management

• Claim and record HLA’s income
• Monitor and follow up regarding outstanding income
• Support the categorisation of HLA-E deferred income for SCUK audit purposes
• Monitor HLA’s debt reports
• Support maintenance of the HLA monthly staff salary recharge tracker
• Process requisitions and purchase orders via Agresso Web
• Raise sundry invoices via Agresso Web
• Create SOF DEAs as required by SCUK Finance
• Process cost transaction recode requests and new supplier forms
• Support HLA’s interaction with SCUK’s AFIHUB Team (Finance), including processing: New Sources of Funds (SOFs) and income schedules; Donor income claim requests; Report validation requests; SOF close outs

Contract and Award Management

• Update and maintain HLA’s Award Management System (AMS) records
• Support the Operations Lead in managing HLA donor contracting activities
• Conduct Due Diligence compliance checks as required by SCUK Legal
• Support procurement activities
• Responsible for team documentation management (storage & management of contracts / awards / finance information)

Performance management

• Support effective arrangements for internal and external reporting, tracking monthly progress against financial modelling, plans, budgets, and key performance indicators

Change management

• Support strategic change initiatives for the HLA’s operating model and operations

Person Profile

The ideal candidate will demonstrate appropriate judgment in balancing the need for maintaining to a high standard, necessary operations day-to-day tasks (e.g. generating new contracts, recoding finance transactions, etc.), with supporting operations to update our current operating model. You must be able to manage a high number of competing priorities for time critical operations activities, whilst keeping perspective of how we may achieve higher efficiency and effectiveness across our financial and operational processes and systems.

Experience and Skills

• Numerate with experience and the ability to monitor and manage financial information.
• Familiarity with funding budgets, financial reporting including construction and monitoring of budgets.
• Highly computer literate and confident with MS Office, especially Excel.
• Proven analytical skills with the ability to identify key points from complex material or information.
• Proven attention for detail and ability to effectively manage a high volume of data and

information

• Excellent organisation and administration skills with the ability to plan and prioritise work.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills (verbal and written), with an ability to work with people from a range of backgrounds and cultures
• Strong team skills, with the ability to develop and maintain effective working relationships and collaborate both within and outside the team.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with ability to propose solutions for translating a variety of funding information into Save the Children system formats.

Ways of Working:

Remote First – The majority of our roles can be performed remotely, however you may work from the office as often as you wish. Whilst you will be predominantly working from home, we may require you to come to your contracted office up to 2-4 days per month or 6-8 days per quarter (Note: This will be agreed with your Line Manager and team) This is intended to be time spent on collaborating with colleagues and relationship building.

On-site – There are certain roles that cannot be performed remotely and so your role will be based in an office location and you may occasionally be able to work from home.

Flexible Working – We are happy to discuss flexible working options at interview**.**

Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion:

Save the Children UK believes in a world that is fair, inclusive and equitable where all children have the opportunity to change their world. We apply this to our workforce and we are committed to developing and supporting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisation where all employees have a sense of belonging and feel that they can be “Free to Be Me”. We are mot looking for just one type of person – we want to recruit people who can add fresh perspectives, innovative ideas or challenge that disrupts the risk of group think.

We are especially interested in people whose childhood experiences – of life on a low income, of migration, of being in a racialised community, of the care system, of being LGBT+ or in an LGBT+ family or living with (or with someone with) a disability – help us to see things we might otherwise miss. Whatever your story is we want to hear it because we know that different voices, ideas, perspectives and knowledge, working together will enable us to better the lives of children around the world. This is the reason why we are all here.

To see our full statement please visit this link: https://jobs.savethechildren.org.uk/our-policies/diversity/