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About the Role

This role exists to create an operational leadership layer between the Executive Director and the Lead SMEs. As Senior Delivery Manager, you will lead the day-to-day performance, capacity, and effectiveness of our assessment team. You will line manage our Lead SMEs, who in turn line manage our assessors, and you will create the structure, rhythm, and accountability needed for the team to deliver reliably at scale. Assessment delivery is the most critical area of the business, with increasing volumes, growing partnerships, and assessment reform changing how delivery works. This role requires sharper control of utilisation, capacity, scheduling, onboarding, upskilling, and delivery performance.

Responsibilities

Line manage the Lead SMEs, setting clear expectations for their leadership of assessors, performance management, communication, coaching, escalation, and day-to-day delivery oversight.
Create a strong operating rhythm across the assessment team, ensuring Lead SMEs are focused on the right priorities: assessor readiness, quality, utilisation, availability, standard coverage, and learner experience.
Provide direct, practical, and fast-paced leadership to ensure delivery issues are resolved quickly and do not drift across meetings, inboxes, or informal channels.
Build a performance culture in which assessors understand expectations around assessment volume, preparation, grade submission, platform use, CPD, standardisation, and responsiveness.
Ensure Lead SMEs are equipped to manage both full-time and freelance assessors consistently, fairly, and in line with AP’s operational and quality expectations.
Own the assessment team’s utilisation and capacity model, ensuring AP has clear visibility of available assessor capacity by standard, employment type, availability, training status, and forecast demand.
Use pipeline data, gateway forecasts, booked assessments, leave, sickness, freelancer availability, and upskilling plans to anticipate pressure points before they affect SLAs or learner experience.
Ensure full-time assessors are used effectively and that freelance capacity is deployed purposefully to manage peaks, specialist standards, cover requirements, and short-notice volume changes.
Lead the weekly and daily assessment-capacity rhythm, ensuring meetings result in clear decisions, named owners, and visible actions.
Identify under-utilisation, over-utilisation, lost capacity, recoverable slots, and avoidable rescheduling, and drive practical actions to improve performance.
Work with Commercial and Account Management colleagues to understand provider forecasts and major partnership pipelines, translating these into realistic workforce requirements.
Maintain a forward-looking view of capacity risks across key standards, including where AP needs to recruit, cross-skill, upskill, or retain specialist cover.
Ensure assessment scheduling is efficient, capacity-aware, and aligned to contractual and internal service levels.
Oversee the allocation of assessors to assessments, ensuring bookings reflect standard expertise, availability, conflict-of-interest requirements, reasonable adjustments, learner needs, and delivery timelines.
Monitor SLA performance across standards and intervene early where bottlenecks, late gateways, grade delays, reschedules, cancellations, or assessor availability issues create risk.
Own escalation and resolution of delivery issues relating to assessment allocation, scheduling conflicts, assessor cover, freelancer availability, and short-term capacity gaps.
Make sure operational reporting translates into action, not just visibility - particularly around assessment status, slot availability, late grades, recoverable capacity, and forecast demand.
Work with Operations to improve the handover between gateway, scheduling, assessment delivery, grading, and certification so that the learner journey is smooth and predictable.
Lead the operational management of assessor onboarding, ensuring new assessors move from recruitment to readiness through a clear, structured, and time-bound pathway.
Work with Lead SMEs, Quality/IQA, and Compliance to ensure onboarding includes assessment practice, standardisation, platform use, regulatory expectations, reasonable adjustments, learner support, and grade submission requirements.
Maintain clear visibility of assessor status: trainee, qualified, upskilling, inactive, freelance, standard-specific approval, and readiness for allocation.
Ensure upskilling plans are linked to forecast demand, not treated as isolated training activity.
Prioritise cross-skilling where it improves resilience, reduces dependency on individual assessors, or supports growth in standards with increasing volumes.
Ensure newly onboarded or newly upskilled assessors are not over-exposed before they are ready, particularly in complex standards, reasonable adjustment cases, or higher-risk assessments.
Work with recruitment partners and internal stakeholders to ensure future assessor recruitment is strategic, evidence-led, and aligned to forecast demand.
Work closely with Quality/IQA and Compliance to ensure assessment delivery remains valid, reliable, fair, and compliant with Ofqual requirements.
Ensure assessors and Lead SMEs understand their responsibilities in relation to assessment judgement, evidence requirements, reasonable adjustments, special considerations, malpractice, appeals, and grade release.
Support a risk-based approach to assessor deployment, ensuring complex or sensitive assessments are allocated to appropriately experienced and trained assessors.
Ensure standardisation, CPD, and feedback activity is acted on through Lead SME line management, not left as standalone quality activity.
Help identify patterns in assessment errors, delayed grading, learner issues, support queries, appeals, complaints, or provider feedback, and translate those patterns into improvement actions.
Ensure compliance risks arising from delivery practice are escalated quickly, with clear mitigations and owners.
Champion effective use of Apex, AP Gateway, AP Assess, AP Comply, and associated reporting tools across the assessment team.
Ensure assessors and Lead SMEs use platforms consistently, accurately, and in line with agreed processes.
Identify manual workarounds, duplicated effort, unclear ownership, and process friction within assessment delivery, then work with Product, Technology, and Operations to simplify or automate where possible.
Support the development and testing of utilisation reports, scheduling tools, capacity dashboards, reschedule tracking, learner-status reports, and operational MI.
Ensure platform improvements are embedded into real working practices through training, communication, monitoring, and follow-up.
Act as a strong operational voice in product and technology discussions, ensuring system development reflects genuine delivery needs and reduces friction for assessors, providers, and learners.
Produce clear, data-led reporting on assessment delivery performance for the Executive Director, SMT, and wider leadership team.
Report on key measures including assessor utilisation, capacity, SLA performance, assessment volumes, standard coverage, onboarding progress, upskilling readiness, lost capacity, reschedules, freelancer use, and delivery risks.
Turn reporting into decisions by clearly identifying what action is needed, who owns it, and what trade-offs may be required.
Create confidence that AP understands its delivery position at any point in time - current performance, immediate delivery risks, and future capacity requirements.
Use MI to challenge assumptions, expose avoidable inefficiency, and support evidence-based decisions on recruitment, freelancer activation, incentive schemes, and standard coverage.
Work closely with internal teams including Operations, Product, Quality/IQA, Compliance, Account Management, Commercial, and Technology to ensure assessment delivery is joined up.
Support provider-facing discussions where delivery performance, capacity, assessment planning, standard readiness, or learner experience need senior operational input.
Help ensure major partners receive a reliable, scalable, and professional assessment service, particularly where volumes are increasing or delivery complexity is high.
Represent the assessment team confidently in internal forums, giving clear updates on risks, progress, resource needs, and decisions required.

Requirements

Significant experience in apprenticeship assessment, awarding, education operations, or a closely related regulated delivery environment.
Strong people leadership experience, including managing managers or senior practitioners.
Proven ability to lead operational delivery in a fast-paced, high-volume environment.
Experience of workforce planning, utilisation management, capacity planning, or resource allocation.
Strong understanding of assessment quality, regulatory expectations, and the importance of valid, reliable, and fair outcomes.
Experience using data and MI to manage performance, identify risk, and drive operational improvement.
Strong stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to work confidently across senior internal teams.
Ability to translate strategy into operational plans and then drive those plans through to completion.
Excellent judgement, particularly when balancing quality, compliance, learner experience, commercial need, and delivery pressure.
Confidence managing ambiguity, resolving issues quickly, and making sensible decisions with imperfect information.
Experience working for an EPAO or awarding organisation.
Experience managing assessment teams, assessors, IQAs, SMEs, or distributed freelance workforces.
Experience of digital, data, AI, technology, or leadership apprenticeship standards.
Knowledge of Ofqual’s General Conditions of Recognition and the operational implications for assessment delivery.
Experience of assessment reform, new standard implementation, or changes to assessment methodology.
Experience implementing or improving scheduling, workflow, CRM, assessment, or operational reporting platforms.
Experience working with major training providers, employer partners, or high-volume apprenticeship contracts.
Experience designing or improving onboarding, CPD, standardisation, or assessor-readiness processes.

Skills

Highly organised, structured and delivery-focused.
Direct, clear and constructive communicator.
Strong people leader who can set expectations and hold others to account.
Data-led, analytical and confident using MI to make decisions.
Calm under pressure, especially when dealing with competing priorities or urgent delivery risks.
Comfortable working at both strategic and detailed operational levels.
Able to challenge constructively and make practical recommendations.
Strong commercial awareness, particularly around the relationship between utilisation, capacity, cost, and service levels.
Process-minded, with a continuous improvement approach.
Collaborative, but not dependent on consensus to make progress.
Resilient, adaptable and comfortable operating in a scaling business.
Committed to high standards of learner experience, assessment quality, and regulatory compliance.

Location

Hybrid: home-based and London office, Scale Space

Work Type

Hybrid
Full-time

Experience Level

Senior

Salary/Compensations

£60k-£70k

About the Company

Accelerate People is a leading apprenticeship assessment organisation, helping providers, employers and learners navigate a rapidly changing assessment landscape. We combine deep assessment expertise, sector insight and innovative technology to deliver high-quality, compliant assessments that reflect real occupational competence and prepare apprentices for long-term success. We are ambitious - for our business, our partners and the learners we serve. We are expanding our portfolio, leading the sector's transition to reformed apprenticeship assessment, and continuously investing in Apex, our assessment platform that connects the entire learner journey. Our focus is on delivering outstanding assessment experiences, greater visibility and insight for partners, and a scalable model that combines quality, efficiency and confidence at every stage.
Accelerate People is part of the Blenheim Chalcot portfolio. Blenheim Chalcot is the UK’s leading digital venture builder. It invests knowledge, experience, infrastructure and capital into businesses at the forefront of digitally disrupted sectors, including FinTech, EdTech, GovTech, Media, Sport and Charity. Its portfolio companies have total sales of more than £0.5bn and employ more than 3,000 people.