Managing Consultant and Agile Trainer vacancy in Southeast England (211jc)

My client who are one of the UK’s leading providers of Agile Training, Consultancy and Delivery services are now seeking to recruit an individual who with training can become a Managing Consultant and Agile Trainer within a very short space of time.

They have a UK workforce of about 25 full time and a core Consultant and Trainer Associate network of c.50, and they provide their services to customers nationwide and into continental Europe. They have UK offices in London, Leeds, Kent and international offices in Pakistan and the US.

What they do:

Agile is a method, a mind-set and way of working that can be applied to software development, business change, product development, Enterprise transformations, and business strategy. The Agile movement seeks alternatives to traditional project management. Agile approaches help teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and empirical feedback. Agile is an alternative to waterfall, or traditional sequential development.

The Role:
The role has a number of areas of responsibility, as laid out below: Their objective is to recruit an individual with all the qualities, skills and characteristics to be successful and then to develop them in-house as quickly as possible to become a SME in Agile methodology.

This personal development will be a mix of training and front line work, paired with other consultants and trainers. As my client is a professional training organisation, they can offer free training in all their main Agile certifications as a way of bringing your skills up to speed. This will likely total £10,000 in free training over your first 12 -24 months employment.

Managing Consultant:
When they take on client engagements they use a delivery management wrap to support the client and their consultants and this is done by an individual known as a Managing Consultant. Providing a managing ‘oversight’ on all multi-consultant engagements, be these Delivery, Training, Coaching, Consulting, or a blend of all of these, entails:

• Coordination
• Scheduling
• Engagement set up
• Client relationship management
• Consultant support
• Ensuring we meet our deliverables
• Managing the initial ‘go live’ after it has been handed off from sales
• Managing contract closures
• Developing relationships with the client to help grow the account based on our successful performance

This role is also about supporting our Consultants, providing them with some moral support on engagement, coordinating any deliverables, being a part of their Slack Channel communications, being their point of call for any problems (these are usually then relayed internally), sharing materials and getting a full handle on the scope of the work activities, feeding any new requests into resourcing and sales.

PreSales Support:
As your Agile knowledge and experience grows and develops, you will help support Company’s sales interactions. These are many and varied, but frequently, and almost exclusively with Consulting and Coaching work. There is a need for them to meet face to face with a client to discuss their challenges before they are awarded the work.

These meetings are usually a mixture of listening to the customer’s problems and then offering up approaches and ideas as to how they can help them address their challenges. The nature of these meetings is the clients are, in part, selecting my client on their ability to demonstrate competence and credibility in their chosen subject matter. Do we deliver Agile using Agile? Can we grasp their problems? This entails the following:

• Talking credibly about Agile adoptions
• Talking credibly about Agile transformations – from the team to the Exec
• Talking credibly about Agile leadership
• Talking credibly about Innovation
• Taking credibly about Scaling
• Taking credibly about our services: People and Training
• Talking credibly about work that we have done in the past and case studies
• Talking credibly about their engagement model – the Specific USP
• Writing the solution element of any follow up proposal

PreSales is NOT about selling, nor is it about managing client interactions to close business. It is about being the credible solutions face of The Company in front of our prospect customers. This work is currently shared by all of their existing Coaches and Consultants, perm and associate, but they would like it to be owned more by Managing Consultants, so you are engaged with the customer from day one.

Product Development:

This is a very small part of the role, but it is about defining and contributing to Consultancy Processes and ways of working, such as building out the delivery management wrap. It is also about spending time thinking about the creation of new commoditised consultancy products, such as the ‘Review & Adapt’ that we sell.

Training:

All their Consultants Train and all of their Trainers Consult. It is what allows them to bring real world examples to the training room and quality impromptu ‘at desk’ training to their Consultancy customers. They train such a breadth of courses, they would develop you as an individual to teach both public scheduled courses and private courses on client site across the majority of their portfolio.

Associate Consultant Quality Control (QC):

At its simplest, when they put people onto client site, be they new to us, come from our Community or from our Resourcing team, we need to ensure we QC them to the highest standard. This requires interviews to ascertain suitability. As the person who is involved in Presales and acting as a client facing Managing Consultant, this role is perfectly poised to take on some of the QC undertake in the business.

Being a Company employee:
Whether someone is a perm employee or an Associate, it is essential for them that certain characteristics are met. They are like a family there and they work effectively because they share the same beliefs about what working for them is. People here are expected to be transparent, hardworking and flexible. But they are also expected to manage their own workload at a sustainable pace and to partner with others to achieve results.
They have lots of nice people who work there and above all else, they want nice people to continue to work here. It doesn’t mean they don’t all get a bit testy with one another from time to time, but they are all at heart a group who get on well with one another.

They provide their employees with the training and support to help them develop and with the freedom to own their own workload and shape their own direction of travel. As our founder always says, “we hire brilliant people, and we let them be brilliant”.

Location:

Ideally within a 2 hour commute to London would be preferred, but as long as you can travel, you can be based anywhere in the UK. Spending time in the London office will be required.

The ideal candidate for this role would be someone who likes to question things and who is able to look at all situations and always ask “how can I make this better”. This would probably suit a SNCO/WO or Capt/Major or similar who has possible just left the military and who is seeking his first step into the Consultancy Market place.

In return they are offering a salary circa £45k, but can be flexible, but with a good strong benefits package, as well as an ongoing training and development package that will see you as you gain more skills, knowledge and ability to gain significant uplift in your base salary package and to become a key member of the team, as you will be reporting to the Senior Management Team from a very early stage.