Why join us
Joining Sainsbury's as a Retail Skills Specialist means being part of a forward-thinking organisation that values innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning. In this role, you will have the opportunity to shape and drive the operational skills development of our retail workforce, working closely with diverse stakeholders to create impactful learning solutions that drive performance excellence across our retail teams. With a focus on long-term, sustainable outcomes, you will have the space to influence strategic decisions, lead communities of expertise, and make a tangible impact on the skills development landscape. By joining us, you will be part of a dynamic team that fosters growth, values data-driven decision-making, and prioritises stakeholder satisfaction and continuous improvement.
What you'll do
As the Retail Skills Specialist at Sainsbury's, you will play a pivotal role in consulting, defining, and managing operational skills development across the retail workforce to drive operational excellence. Working closely with various stakeholders, you will lead the establishment of communities of expertise, ensuring the development of a robust and scalable skills-based learning offer that aligns with critical priorities and transformation agendas. Your responsibilities will include providing strategic consultation, identifying and addressing skills gaps, managing the core retail curriculum, coaching team members, and collaborating with subject matter experts and external providers to deliver high-quality, impactful learning solutions. Your success will be measured by the uptake, effectiveness, and impact of the learning offer, as well as stakeholder satisfaction and continuous improvement, demonstrating the quantifiable return on investment for the business through robust capability benchmarking and evaluation.
Who you are
As a Retail Skills Specialist at Sainsbury's, you are a seasoned learning and development professional with a strategic mindset and a proven track record of designing and implementing impactful learning strategies aligned with business objectives. Your ability to diagnose root causes of skills gaps, define skills frameworks, and collaborate with stakeholders at all levels enables you to drive the development of a robust and scalable skills-based learning offer for the retail workforce. With your strong project management skills, commercial acumen, and data-driven mindset, you excel in creating quantifiable learning solutions that deliver measurable impact and drive continuous improvement in operational excellence.
Essential Criteria
1. Demonstrable experience consulting with senior stakeholders to diagnose skills gaps and define learning solutions that align with business performance outcomes.
2. Proven ability to design, implement and evaluate skills-based learning strategies or capability frameworks that support organisational priorities.
3. Evidence of using qualitative and quantitative data to inform decisions, measure learning impact and provide actionable recommendations.
4. Demonstrable capability in managing and maintaining a curriculum or learning product portfolio, ensuring content remains relevant, accurate and scalable.
5. Proven ability to influence, challenge and guide subject matter experts and stakeholders to ensure learning requests deliver measurable value.
#LI-SA3
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work–life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. We’re the first to say we do HR differently here. For a start, we work as business partners and specialists — whether that’s making sure nearly 150,000 colleagues are paid on time, or shaping a strategy that helps us attract the right people, put them in the right place, and unlock their potential. This is a fast-moving business, and our policies and rewards evolve with it. That’s why we’re as flexible as we can be about where and when you work. We’re also flexible about your future. There’s always room to move up or across, if that’s what you want. We really value different perspectives, so there’s no one opinion, no single path, and yours matters.