Senior Manager, Head of Early Careers Delivery, Learning & Development, HR

Deloitte LLP; Manchester, Reading, Birmingham, City Of London, Manchester, Birmingham; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading professional services firm is looking for a Head of Early Careers Delivery in Manchester. This role involves strategic oversight of early careers programmes, ensuring effective delivery and operational excellence across the portfolio. The ideal candidate will have proven leadership experience in a complex environment, strong relationship management skills, and a passion for developing learning experiences that drive impact. Join us to shape the future of learning at our firm and make a meaningful difference to early career professionals.

Benefits

Hybrid working options

Comprehensive training and development programmes

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading large-scale learning and early careers delivery.
• Ability to design and embed learning delivery effectively.
• Strong financial acumen with budget management experience.

Responsibilities

• Provide strategic oversight of Early Careers programmes.
• Design scalable processes for learning delivery.
• Build strong relationships with stakeholders and vendors.

Skills

Leadership

Organizational skills

Data analysis

Relationship management

Coaching

Education

Experience in learning and early careers delivery

Tools

Learning technologies

Job description

At Deloitte, we’re re-imagining how the next generation of professionals learn, grow and lead.

Deloitte is one of the largest student employers in the UK. Every year, we recruit around 4,000 students into our graduate, apprentice and work experience programmes. These experiences set the foundation for how our people learn, connect, and build careers with impact. We’re now taking that experience to the next level, by blending human skills potential with innovation to prepare our people to thrive in a rapidly changing workplace.

We’re now looking for a Head of Early Careers Delivery to help evolve our offer. This is an important and high impact role where you will drive the operational delivery of our market leading Early Careers portfolio. This is your chance to lead learning experiences that define how our people begin their Deloitte journey, ensuring every programme runs seamlessly, scales effectively, and delivers measurable impact. Your leadership will turn strategy into action, embed scalable delivery frameworks, and ensure Deloitte continues to set the standard for best in class Early Career learning.

Connect to your career at Deloitte

Deloitte drives progress. Using our vast range of expertise, we help our clients' become leaders wherever they choose to compete. To do this, we invest in outstanding people. We build teams of future thinkers, with diverse talents and backgrounds, and empower them all to reach for and achieve more.

What brings us all together at Deloitte?It’show we approach the thousands of decisions we make everyday. How we behave, our beliefs and our attitudes. In other words: our values. Whatever we do, whereverwe arein the world, welead the way,serve with integrity, take care of each other ,fosterinclusion, andcollaborate for measurable impact. These five shared values lead every decision wemake and action we take, guiding us to deliver impact how and where it mattersmost .

Connect to your opportunity

As Head of Early Careers Delivery, you will lead the operational enablement and evolution of Deloitte’s Early Careers learning ecosystem, one of the largest and most complex portfolios in the UK. You’ll ensure every programme, from onboarding to professional qualification, runs with precision, pace, and purpose, delivering measurable outcomes for learners and for the firm. You’ll be responsible for translating our vision into delivery, ensuring our learner experiences create lasting commercial and human impact. You’ll be at the centre of a complex and always evolving landscape.

Acting as a trusted partner to senior stakeholders up to Partner level, you’ll balance strategic oversight with hands on delivery management. You’ll set and maintain the delivery standards that underpin our Early Careers experience, ensuring alignment with business needs, professional education pathways and regulatory frameworks. Most importantly, you’ll create an environment where the wider team and our learners can do their best work, and where operational excellence fuels real impact.

This is a high trust and autonomy leadership role at the intersection of learning strategy, delivery excellence, and business performance. Reporting to the Head of Early Experience Learning CoE, you’ll shape how we build the infrastructure and culture that enable scalable, inclusive and ultimately exceptional learner experiences.

Responsibilities

Operationalising our strategy

• Provide strategic oversight and operational leadership across Early Careers programmes, ensuring delivery is consistent, inclusive, and aligned with business priorities
• Translate strategic intent into integrated delivery roadmaps, balancing near-term execution with long-term evolution
• Design scalable processes and frameworks that blend innovation with stability, ensuring programmes run efficiently without compromising learner experience
• Build the infrastructure, systems and frameworks that enable consistent, efficient, and inclusive learning at scale, embedding continuous improvement at the heart of our delivery model

Nurturing strong relationships

• Serve as a senior point of alignment between vision and delivery, anticipating challenges, driving accountability, and creating the conditions for success
• Coach, influence, and inspire Early Careers and Learning SMEs, creating clarity of direction, building capability, and fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement
• Act as a visible leader and trusted partner to senior stakeholders up to Partner level, influencing decisions and ensuring operational priorities are aligned to strategic goals
• Maintain strong, solution oriented relationships with vendors and providers, ensuring high standards of quality, accountability, and collaboration.

Driving data led improvement

• Use data and insight to surface opportunities, evaluate impact, and inform future investment to translate metrics into meaningful action
• Simplify and streamline how delivery operates, reducing duplication and friction while improving learner and business experience
• Continuously foster innovation in our approach to reflect best practice and emerging learning technologies

Champion governance and wellbeing

• Embed thoughtful governance across wellbeing, safeguarding, risk management, and regulatory compliance, ensuring confidence and integrity in processes
• Champion inclusion, wellbeing and learning excellence, helping every early career colleague thrive from their first day at Deloitte

Connect to your skills and professional experience

You’re a natural organiser who leads with empathy and clarity, creating confidence in others and helping teams move from uncertainty to momentum. You balance pace with perspective, knowing when to step back, challenge assumptions, and guide decisions that shape long-term success. Most of all, you’re motivated by progress and purpose by building strong relationships, keeping people connected, and ensuring every learner experience truly matters.

• Proven experience leading large-scale learning and early careers delivery in a complex, matrixed organisation, ideally within a professional services or regulated environment
• Demonstrated ability to design and embed learning delivery, driving consistency, scalability, and measurable quality across a complex learning portfolio
• Strong financial and commercial acumen, with experience managing budgets, third-party providers, and vendor contracts to deliver value and performance
• Adept at translating strategy into clear delivery plans, anticipating risks, and creating the conditions for success in fast-paced and evolving contexts
• Understanding of professional education pathways, apprenticeships, and regulatory standards that govern early-career learning environments
• Awareness of safeguarding, risk, and compliance requirements, and the judgement to balance assurance with agility and progress.

Skills and Behaviours

• Calm, credible leadership – you’ll bring steadiness, perspective, and clarity under pressure, earning trust through sound judgement and consistent delivery
• Empowering coach – you enable others to perform at their best, combining accountability with empathy and giving people the context and confidence to deliver
• Commercial and data-minded - you understand how operational decisions connect to value, using data and insight to drive improvement and demonstrate impact
• Relationship-led influence - you build trust quickly and navigate complexity with tact and authenticity, balancing senior stakeholder engagement with practical delivery insight
• Collaborative and pragmatic - you focus on outcomes, working with others to solve problems simply and effectively while modelling Deloitte’s values of inclusion and integrity

Connect to your business - Enabling Functions

Collaboration is central to everything we do at Deloitte. From IT to HR, marketing and more, our teams help to support the wider business in everything they do. Bringing your individual skills and specialist knowledge, you can make a far-reaching impact. Come join us.

Human Resources

At Deloitte, Human Resources is transforming. We are already an award-winning HR team but we’re not resting there. We want to make an impact that matters for our people, our clients and for society. To achieve this, we're firmly embedding HR into the business, advising and innovating along with our business leaders.

Personal independence

Regulation and controls are standard practice in our industry and Deloitte is no exception. These controls provide important legal protection for both you and the firm. We are subject to a number of audit regulations, one of which requires that certain colleagues abide by specific personal independence constraints (e.g., in relation to any financial interests and employment relationships). This can mean that you and your "Immediate Family Members" are not permitted to hold certain financial interests (shares, funds, bonds etc.) with audit clients of the firm, and also prohibitions on certain employment relationships (e.g., you are not permitted to hold a secondary employment role with SEC audit clients of the firm whilst being employed by the firm). The recruitment team will provide further detail as you progress through the recruitment process or you can contact the Independence team upon request.

Connect with your colleagues

"The amount of investment in me in terms of training and development has been incredible - it has undoubtedly helped me to progress my career." -Jim, Enabling Functions

Our hybrid working policy

You’ll be based in London, Reading, Manchester or Birmingham with hybrid working.

At Deloitte we understand the importance of balancing your career alongside your home life. That’s why we’ll support you to work flexibly through our hybrid working policy. Depending on the requirements of your role, you’ll have the opportunity to work in your local office, virtual collaboration spaces, client sites and remotely. You’ll get the chance to meet face to face when needed, while you collaborate and learn from colleagues, share your experiences, and build the relationships that will fuel your career and prioritise your wellbeing. Please check with your recruiter for the specific working requirements that may apply for your role.

Our commitment to you

Making an impact is more than just what we do: it’s why we’re here. So we work hard to create an environment where you can experience a purpose you believe in, the freedom to be you, and the capacity to go further than ever before.

We want you. The true you. Your own strengths, perspective and personality. So we’re nurturing a culture where everyone belongs, feels supported and heard, and is empowered to make a valuable, personal contribution. You can be sure we’ll take your wellbeing seriously, too. Because it’s only when you’re comfortable and at your best that you can make the kind of impact you, and we, live for.

Your expertise is our capability, so we’ll make sure it never stops growing. Whether it’s from the complex work you do, or the people you collaborate with, you’ll learn every day. Through world-class development, you’ll gain invaluable technical and personal skills. Whatever your level, you’ll learn how to lead.

Connect to your next step

A career at Deloitte is an opportunity to develop in any direction you choose. Join us and you’ll experience a purpose you can believe in and an impact you can see. You’ll be free to bring your true self to work every day. And you’ll never stop growing, whatever your level.

Discover more reasons to connect with us, our people and purpose-driven culture at deloitte.co.uk/careers