Venture Partners are at the core of Purposeful Ventures’ work. Our Venture Partners provide our intellectual capital and the skills and experience that allows Purposeful Ventures, and all the ventures we work with, to thrive and deliver huge social impact.
Venture Partners:
- work at a strategic level to support, challenge and inspire the senior leadership of the mission-driven organisations we work with to develop the strategic and operational plans needed to turn great ideas into sustainable and high-impact ventures;
- work directly with our ventures through short-term projects and medium-term secondments to ensure they are successful and sustainable;
- grow the portfolio through building our pipeline of future ventures; and
- develop the ways in which Purposeful Ventures supports our group of ventures.
We are recruiting for Venture Partners to join our STEM Excellence portfolio, with an initial focus on maths excellence. We believe that everyone should be able to experience a high quality and inspiring STEM education, and that achievement in STEM can be catalytic in driving social mobility, particularly for those from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds.
To excel in this role you will be an analytical and strategic thinker with exceptional stakeholder engagement skills. You will be excited to work with entrepreneurs, educators and industry experts alike, and use your strategic, operational and sector knowledge to build organisations and start-ups which deliver significant social impact and systemic change.
Successful candidates will have demonstrable experience and success in strategic and/or analytical roles. This may include project management roles in a strategy consultancy, or leadership roles in education or a social enterprise.
We are recruiting for both permanent and fixed term contract positions. You will be able to specify your preferred employment length in your application.
Please download the full job description.
Responsibilities and duties
Work with the Purposeful Ventures leadership team and portfolio directors to identify and build a thriving community of mission-driven organisations:
- Help build a pipeline of potential initiatives and entrepreneurs
- Build long-term capabilities and knowledge across the Purposeful Ventures family
- Build the reputation and relationships of Purposeful Ventures
Work with our partners and incubated ventures to develop their strategies to deliver their mission and greatest impact:
- Provide ‘high challenge, high support’ mentorship, helping to develop and test strategies and operating plans
- Support the development of business plans and operating models that are mission-driven, impactful and support sustainable growth
- Provide commercial knowledge and insight to work towards financial sustainability and support our partners and incubated ventures to identify and access a range of funding sources
Support our partners and incubated ventures to build the organisations, teams, governance and capabilities that will give them the best chance of success, including:
- Providing input into organisational design and recruitment
- Supporting the development and implementation of governance structures and reporting disciplines
- Helping to find the best solutions for back-office needs, including finance, HR, IT
Provide direct strategic, operational or business development leadership through medium-term secondments to organisations within the Purposeful Ventures family
- Take a leadership role in the organisations with which we work
- Work with management teams to identify resources and capabilities needed within the ventures
- Support in understanding the skills and experience needed for organisations to develop and grow
Key requirements
- Passionate about transforming children and young people’s participation in, and opportunity to excel in, STEM.
- Strong working knowledge of the education sector, and ideally of the current “Maths Excellence” ecosystems, including trends, policy and key funders.
- Demonstrable experience in both strategic and analytical roles, such as project management in strategy consultancy, or leadership in an education, charity or social enterprise setting.
- Demonstrable track record of leading project and / or organisational success and delivering impact.
- Excellent analytical skills with the ability, tools and frameworks to apply logical, critical and methodical process to deconstruct information, identify problems and causes and present solutions and options: an at individual, organisational and sector level.
- Exceptional stakeholder engagement skills with experience of managing and aligning multiple stakeholders and agendas.
- Ability to supportively build capacity within teams and organisations to enhance effectiveness and impact.
- Effective, engaging and nuanced communicator, written and verbal, including the ability to structure and articulate complex information for internal and external audiences.
- Flexible, highly organised, and able to multi-task and prioritise work to meet deadlines.
- Tenacious and able to work in an agile environment with multiple start-ups, and comfortable with the ambiguity that may come with this.
- Right to work in the UK.
