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If you're ready to make a real difference, we'd love to hear from you!
Brief Description
📢 Exciting 12‑Month Opportunity: Professional Development Manager
We're looking for a dynamic and people‑centred Professional Development Manager to lead our Professional Development team in Wessex Control. In this role, you will drive a professionalised, high‑quality service for Route Operations Control across key areas including training delivery, competence management, and operational capability.
As the Professional Development Manager, you will set the direction, establish professional principles, and champion operational standards. You'll play a key role in shaping how we develop our people, ensuring they have the skills, confidence, and support to deliver safely and effectively.
A vital part of this role will be building and maintaining strong, collaborative relationships with national training and development functions, as well as colleagues across other routes and regions. Your ability to influence, partner, and bring people together will be essential to your success.
This is a fantastic 12‑month opportunity for someone who is passionate about growing talent, raising capability, and making a meaningful impact across Operations.
If you're ready to lead with purpose, empower others, and help shape the future of our operational workforce, we'd love to hear from you.
About The Role (External)
* Develop and lead the training and development plan for the Operations Control team to align and support the routes succession plans to build capability and career pathways in Operations.
* Develop structured training packages and coordinate the production of training courses to be delivered by the route, within defined budget and procurement rules, to address local needs as well as continuously developing and improving training solutions.
* Specify and maintain that adequate and appropriate training environments are available for training delivery to ensure consistency, high standards are maintained, and best practice are adopted.
* Establish effective relationships, share best practice, and evaluate the quality of training with other Training & Competency Management / Development Management teams throughout Operations to deliver consistently high standards of training and development and to meet the competency management frameworks.
* Identify and address operational training requirements through building strong relationships with Professional Development & Training to deliver consistently high standards of training in Operations.
* Implement and comply with the relevant National Operations Procedures, and the Rule Book/Signal Box Special Instructions (SBSI)
* Provide direction to the Wessex Control team regarding continual professional development and support performance improvement processes within Operations, providing professional guidance on additional training and upskilling opportunities to develop their career and skills.
* Establish specifications for Operations leadership training courses building on best practice, industry reviews and audits set by national and local training teams, to develop the Leadership skills and behaviours required to deliver Operations training and development strategy.
* Coordinate the provision of training services by external suppliers and support Contracts & Procurement activities and improve service levels from external suppliers through effective specification of requirements and negotiation.
* Coordinate the Routes training approval process for all professional and higher education programme to support individuals within Operations.
Essential Job Skills, Experience and Qualifications
* Expertise and experience of successfully designing and delivering [discipline] training
* Ability to lead, manage and develop people
* Ability to provide technical leadership
* Excellent planning and prioritisation skills
* Excellent knowledge of training methodology
* Good knowledge of assessment processes
* Excellent communication skills with proven ability to present information effectively and appropriately (written and verbal)
* Ability to gain relevant training qualification(s)
* Experience of developing training courses and development programmes
Desirable
* Good knowledge of railway operations
* Assessor competence
* Verifier competence
* IT skills
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