Director of Executive Education

Department: Operations

Location: Home based, UK (with with regular travel to London/Cambridge)

Reports to: Chief Operating Officer

Hours: 37.5 per week

Salary:(Depending on experience)

Role Overview

This is an entrepreneurial leadership role. We are looking for someone to build and scale a world-class executive education business, not maintain one.

Cambridge Spark is the UK's leading provider of AI and data workforce development, having trained over 10,000 professionals for some of the country's most prominent organisations. We are now building a premium executive education division that brings the same depth of expertise to senior leaders and the C-suite.

Key responsibilities:

1. P&L and Commercial Strategy

• Full accountability for revenue, margins, and profitability of the executive education portfolio
• Budget management including faculty costs, programme delivery, and team headcount
• Commercial model development: pricing strategy, packaging, cost-to-serve, and revenue forecasting
• Monthly reporting to the exCo and contribution to board-level updates

2. Portfolio Development

Design and develop our portfolio of executive education products, ensuring each is commercially viable and educationally outstanding:

• Long-format executive programmes (multi-week/multi-month) co-developed with university partners, covering AI strategy, data leadership, and digital transformation
• Short-format workshops and masterclasses for C-suite and senior leaders on applied AI, generative AI strategy, and data-driven decision-making
• Bespoke corporate programmes tailored to enterprise clients' strategic priorities
• Executive membership and networking propositions that create ongoing value and community for senior leaders
• Standardised programme components that can be configured for different client needs while maintaining consistency and quality

3. University Partnerships

A critical part of this role is building and expanding a portfolio of university partnerships for co-branded executive education:

• Identify, approach, and negotiate partnerships with leading UK and international universities and business schools
• Structure partnership agreements covering revenue sharing, faculty access, IP ownership, brand licensing, and academic governance
• Build a diversified portfolio of university relationships to support different programme themes and market segments
• Manage ongoing partner relationships, ensuring alignment on quality, curriculum, and market positioning

4. Faculty, Coaching, and Talent Pool

You will build and manage the delivery talent ecosystem that defines the quality of our programmes:

Faculty: Recruit and onboard world-class faculty (academics, industry practitioners, subject matter experts). Standardise rates and contracting. Build relationships with faculty at partner universities.

Coaching and mentoring: Design the coaching model across all programmes: session formats, frequency, quality frameworks, and feedback loops. Recruit and manage a pool of executive coaches with clear performance standards.

Delivery team: Lead an internal programme management team that owns end to end programme delivery, ensuring customer satisfaction for each programme. Recruit and manage a pool of contractors responsible for facilitating sessions, gold standard learner experience and programme design that aligns to customer objectives. Define roles, performance metrics, and development pathways.

5. Service Excellence

Set and enforce a gold standard for executive education delivery:

• Define the end-to-end client experience, from initial engagement through programme delivery to post-programme support
• Implement quality assurance: participant NPS, client satisfaction tracking, faculty performance reviews
• Own the operational playbook: venue selection, event management, digital platform integration, participant communications
• Lead the design and execution of high-profile events such as summits and executive gatherings

6. Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Sales Directors to build a pipeline of high-value opportunities, with pricing guidance and client insight
• Work with the Curriculum and Chief AI Officer teams to keep programme content cutting-edge and differentiated
• Collaborate with Marketing on positioning, thought leadership, and brand development for the executive education portfolio
• Coordinate with Technology to ensure our learning platform supports executive-level digital experiences

Candidate Specification:

Essential

You come from the L&D or executive education practice of a major professional services firm (KPMG, EY, Deloitte, McKinsey, BCG) where you designed and delivered senior leadership programmes or you built executive education at an organisation such as Emeritus, GetSmarter/2U.

You bring:

1. P&L ownership: Proven track record of owning and growing a revenue line in executive education or professional services. You understand unit economics, cost-to-serve, and margin management.
2. Commercial acumen: You think creatively about how to generate revenue, not just manage it. You spot opportunities in client conversations, market gaps, and partnership models that others miss. You are comfortable shaping propositions, testing new formats, and moving quickly to capture demand.
3. University partnerships: Direct experience structuring and managing partnerships with universities for co-branded programmes, including brand licensing, faculty access, and revenue-sharing arrangements.
4. Faculty and talent management: Experience recruiting, managing, and quality-assuring a network of faculty, coaches, and programme delivery professionals. You have built rate cards, performance frameworks, and scalable talent pools.
5. Programme design: You have taken executive education products from concept to market: long-format programmes, short workshops, or membership communities.
6. Service mindset: You understand that executive education is a service business where client experience, customisation, and relationship management are paramount.

Desirable

• Deep understanding of AI and data as a subject domain, with credibility at C-suite level on these topics
• Existing network of faculty, academics, and industry practitioners in AI, data, and technology
• Experience operating across UK and European markets
• Familiarity with digital learning platforms and blended programme delivery

Who You Are

You are entrepreneurial and comfortable building in ambiguity. You are not looking for a role where everything is already set up: you are a builder who gets energy from creating systems, processes, and teams from scratch. You are obsessive about quality and client experience, commercially rigorous about revenue and margins, and a natural relationship builder who operates comfortably with university deans, C-suite clients, and faculty alike.

Company Benefits:

• Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
• 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
• A day for volunteering
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
• Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
• Annual Summer and Xmas events
• Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
• CPD Allowance alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor

Background to our Organisation

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.

We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.

Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m.

Our Values

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

Entrepreneurial

We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.

Team Spirit

Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.

Customer-focused

Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.

Gold Standard

We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.

Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.