Senior Consultant - Education

Primary Purpose: Management, leadership and technical delivery of education projects globally; contributing to strategic direction of the education practice; managing and leading acquisition of new business.

Job Description Summary

OPM is seeking a dynamic and highly motivated senior education specialist to join its Education Practice as a Senior Consultant. This role can be based in Pakistan, India, Kenya or Tanzania. This role will involve occasional international travel as required by projects.

The Education Practice is a global team of education experts. We are committed to high-quality, lifelong learning opportunities for all in low- and middle-income countries. We support education systems become adaptive, self-improving, and focused on building the skills, values, and attitudes needed to achieve development goals, especially for the most hard-to-reach and marginalised children and youth. We do this by providing high-quality, responsive, impact-oriented, and contextually relevant policy research, technical assistance and consulting services to governments and their development partners. Currently, we have projects in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Kiribati.

The successful candidate will work closely with the Education Practice Lead and Technical Hub Leads. The successful candidate will be eager to contribute to the strategic direction, technical leadership and management of education consultancy projects, including establishing and managing relationships with multiple governments and funders. The successful candidate will lead and manage project staff and achieve objectives for project impact and quality. They will proactively identify new business opportunities, develop technical and financial proposals, and conduct other business development and external influencing activities.

The candidate will have a strong reputation and grounding in education policy and programming, contributing to policy debates and research methods, focussing on sub-Saharan Africa and/or South Asia. The successful candidate will lead delivery of projects to achieve objectives of impact and quality, business development, and learning and external influencing. Establishing and managing relationships with multiple clients and building work with new clients will be an important part of this role.

Primary Responsibilities

• Technical delivery: Manage and lead delivery of high-quality technical work on education projects to impact, timetable, and budget.
• Business Development: Identify, develop, and deliver tenders and business opportunities for key clients in line with practice acquisition and diversification targets.
• Client management: Lead engagements and forge close working relationships with multiple donor counterparts including senior development partner and government officials.
• Strategy development: Work with the Education Practice Lead and Technical Hub Leads to contribute to the practice strategy.
• Internal learning and knowledge management: Mentor and manage some education staff to high levels of technical and consulting performance across geographies; lead one or more internal change management and business improvement initiatives
• External influencing: Represent OPM and the education practice externally on key policy issues, through writing, presenting, discussing, hosting roundtables, or meetings

 Essential skills and experience

• Qualification: Post-graduate qualification in a relevant discipline such as education, development studies, statistics, economics, public administration, or another related field.
• Relevant experience: Minimum of 10 years’ professional experience in international development consulting, of which at least 5 years in the international education sector.
• Education sector knowledge and experience: Demonstrated knowledge, reputation and experience in one or more of the following priority technical areas:
• Foundational learning and school readiness
• Inclusive education policies and practices, especially focussing on gender, conflict, climate and disability
• Education finance and planning
• Youth, skills and labour market
• Cross-cutting technical skills: Substantial experience and/or formal training in one or more relevant technical skill(s): e.g. leading design of education policies and programmes, leading analysis of complex education data (learning outcomes, budget data), strong grounding in research and evaluation methods (quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods) combined with excellent writing skills; experience in leading primary research.
• Project delivery experience: Experience in leading or leading aspects of education projects; working with diverse clients (FCDO, UN, USAID, EU); or experience working embedded in a developing country government (e.g. Ministry of Education).
• Management experience: Project and people management experience, within a relevant consulting environment; experience in managing project budgets and workplans.
• Client management: Experience of directly working with senior donor and government counterparts in delivering technical work; experience of leading technical and commercial discussions with senior government officials and staff of international aid agencies.
• Business development: Experience of leading or significantly contributing to technical and financial proposals and business development activities in a relevant consulting environment (e.g. FCDO, USAID, UN, EU, Foundations); strong sector and market knowledge of key funders and trends in international education.
• Communication: Excellent written and oral communication skills, with high levels of attentiveness to needs of diverse audiences; ability to communicate complex technical issues to diverse audiences in a clear and simple manner.
• Language: Ability to work in English and at least one relevant foreign language.

Behavioural capabilities:

• Highly motivated and self-driven, with a keen interest to shape evidence-based debates and drive impact in the education sector
• Excellent attention to detail and analytical rigour, with a problem-solving mindset
• Switch comfortably between detail and the bigger picture
• Good at prioritising changing and competing demands and tasks, while consistently delivering quality work
• Excellent leadership and management skills
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills; collaborative and constructive approach to working with others, mentors and coaches junior staff; builds effective relationships internally and externally