Client Partner

Cognassist UK Ltd; Hebburn; Hybrid; GBP 65,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Share scheme

Health plan

Coaching sessions

Flexible working

Birthday day off

Life insurance

Nursery benefit

Job summary

Cognassist UK Ltd is seeking a Client Partner to own commercial relationships in the FE, apprenticeship and employer provider market from first contact to renewal. You will diagnose client needs, design partnerships, and steward multi-year value with senior stakeholders across colleges and providers.

The role involves building trusted relationships, forecasting, and collaborating with Customer Success to drive adoption and expansion. Travel across the UK is expected as part of the role.

Qualifications

• Experience owning commercial relationships end to end in multi-stakeholder sales.
• Understanding of FE, apprenticeship or skills sector and how institutions are funded and inspected.
• Strong diagnostic and problem-solving ability to uncover real issues in a provider’s support model.
• Excellent relationship and communication skills across the full range from practitioners to executives.
• Ability to travel across the UK to meet customers.

Responsibilities

• Win new partnerships with defined portfolio targets and annual growth.
• Diagnose client needs and design joint partnerships with measurable outcomes.
• Run a structured commercial process with forecast accuracy and CRM hygiene.
• Own the relationship post-close, driving renewal and expansion.
• Feed insights back to Product and Marketing to shape propositions and market messaging.

Skills

Experience owning commercial relations

FE/Apprenticeship sector knowledge

Diagnostic problem solving

Stakeholder relationship management

UK travel flexibility

Job description

Role Overview

Cognassist helps colleges and training providers understand how their learners think, deliver reasonable adjustments to aid with the progression through their programme, and evidence great inclusion to external bodies. We work across FE colleges, apprenticeship providers and employer providers in a sector under sustained pressure: inspection scrutiny, tight funding, achievement rates under the spotlight, and a learner support gap most institutions know they have but cannot yet see clearly. We are looking for a Client Partner to own commercial relationships in that market from end to end — from the first conversation through to a signed partnership, and then partnering with Customer Success to deliver adoption and renewal. This is a senior individual contributor role with full ownership of the relationship and of its commercial value over time in the early stages. It is a role for someone who diagnoses before they prescribe. The people you will work with — quality directors, curriculum leads, ALS and SEND managers, finance directors, principals and managing directors — are experienced, are wary of suppliers, and are dealing with problems that have no off-the-shelf answer. You will need real curiosity about their world, the credibility to be useful in the first meeting, the honesty to say when we are not the right fit, and the commercial discipline to turn the right opportunities into long‑term partnerships.

How You’ll Build Pipeline

Our market is finite and knowable. There are a few hundred FE colleges and a defined set of apprenticeship and employer providers, and we can name every one that matters to us. This is not a role about generating volume at the top of a funnel. It is about covering a known list with credible, well‑timed contact, and understanding what is actually happening inside each institution.

• Working triggers, not lists. Inspection reports, monitoring visits, achievement rate publication, leadership changes and funding announcements each give a specific, current and public reason to make contact. You will track them and act on them.
• Timing to their year, not ours. Budget setting, self‑assessment season and enrolment determine when an institution can actually act. You will plan coverage around their calendar.
• Being present in the sector. Association events, roundtables, speaking and an active professional profile. In this market, people buy from those they have already seen and heard.
• Earning referral. Colleges and providers talk to each other constantly and trust each other more than they trust suppliers. Turning delivered outcomes into introductions is a deliberate part of this role, not a happy accident.
• Building partner routes. Awarding bodies, MIS and data providers, and sector consultancies each reach dozens of the institutions we care about.
• Creating things worth forwarding. Working with Marketing on the material a quality lead pastes into a leadership paper — not brochures.

We measure what outreach produces, not how much of it there was.

Responsibilities

Win new partnerships

• Own a defined portfolio of target colleges and providers, delivering against an annual new business and first-year growth target.
• Self‑source opportunity through the routes described above, maintaining meaningful coverage of your named account list.
• Build genuine relationships across the institutions you work with, understanding their learners, their pressures and their constraints before proposing anything.
• Forecast accurately against quarterly and annual targets, with the pipeline coverage needed to hit them.

Diagnose and design

• Run discovery that reaches the real operational problem — where support is failing, what it is costing, and who inside the institution feels it.
• Translate that into a business case senior leaders can defend internally, quantifying the impact on achievement, compliance, funding and workload.
• Bring market insight, sector context and honest comparison, including where we are not the answer.
• Design the shape of the partnership — scope, rollout, success measures — alongside Customer Success, so what we sell is what we can deliver.

Run a disciplined commercial process

• Qualify and manage opportunities through a structured process (we use BANT and MEDDPICC), keeping CRM records current and forecasts honest.
• Work across the whole buying group — quality, curriculum, support, finance and executive leadership — identifying early who sponsors the change, who signs, and who can stop it.
• Navigate procurement, tender and framework routes where they apply, and negotiate terms that hold up over a multi-year relationship.

Own the relationship after signature

• Retain commercial ownership of your accounts post-close, accountable for the value of the relationship over its lifetime.
• Partner with Customer Success on adoption and outcomes, because a partnership that is not delivering will not grow and should not renew on autopilot.
• Identify and execute growth within existing partnerships, including expansion from apprenticeship provision into whole-college delivery.

Feed the wider business

• Bring what you learn in the market back to Product and Marketing — where the proposition lands, where it does not, and what the sector is about to face.
• Contribute to sector content, events and thought leadership alongside Marketing.
• Share approaches, insight and intelligence with colleagues across Sales and Customer Success.
• Help improve how we go to market: process, enablement, systems and reporting.

Required Skills & Experience

• Experience owning commercial relationships end to end in a considered, multi-stakeholder sale, with a record of winning new business and growing accounts over time.
• Understanding of the further education, apprenticeship or skills sector — how institutions are funded, inspected and held to account, and how decisions actually get made inside them. Directly equivalent experience from an adjacent sector will be considered.
• Strong diagnostic and problem-solving ability: able to work out what is really wrong in a provider’s support model, not to run a standard demo.
• Excellent relationship and communication skills across the full range, from support practitioners to executive leadership.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and able to adapt — the proposition, the market and the funding landscape all move.
• Commercially disciplined: accurate forecasting, clean CRM hygiene, and familiarity with a structured sales methodology such as MEDDPICC or MEDDIC.
• Willing and able to be visible in the sector — events, speaking, writing and professional networks.
• Able to travel across the UK to be in front of customers.

Key Competencies

• Curiosity and listening — asks better questions than the competition and actually hears the answers.
• Judgement — knows which opportunities to pursue, which to walk away from, and when to say we are not the right fit.
• Credibility — is worth the meeting, and is remembered for being useful rather than persistent.
• Resilience and self‑direction — plans their own coverage and keeps going through long buying cycles.
• Organisation — runs multiple live opportunities without losing forecast accuracy or letting relationships go cold.
• Negotiation and presentation — confident in front of a leadership team and in a commercial conversation.

Qualifications & Motivation

• No specific qualification is required. Experience of the education, EdTech, skills or apprenticeship sector is a strong advantage.
• A genuine interest in cognition, inclusion and learner achievement, and in the commercial mission of widening access to cognitive assessment.

How Success Is Measured

• New partnership revenue and first-year growth against annual target.
• Coverage and quality of intelligence across the named account list.
• Opportunities created, by source — so we learn which routes into this market actually work.
• Forecast accuracy.
• Retention and multi-year commitment across the accounts you own.

What’s in it for You?

• EMI company share scheme, meaning you would own a percentage of shares, turning into significant monetary value in time.
• Competitive salary.
• Westfield Health cash plan.
• 1‑2‑1 Sanctus coaching sessions to support personal and professional development with proactive mental wellbeing support.
• Flexible working.
• A paid day off on your birthday.
• Aviva Life insurance.
• Workplace Nursery Benefit.
• Long service awards to celebrate key employment anniversaries.
• Excellent discounts/wider wallet.
• 5% matched contribution pension scheme
• Pension salary exchange scheme
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays (33 days).
• Paid wellbeing days, volunteer days, and study days.
• Quarterly All Star award.
• Annual company Summer event.
• Modern homeworking tech kit.
• Enhanced maternity & paternity pay.
• And being part of something AMAZING!

Cognassist is a Disability Confident Committed employer, and we welcome your application even if you believe you do not meet all of the above criteria - your unique skills, and experiences are valued, and your contribution could be exactly what we need to grow together.