Partnerships Manager

In a nutshell

We’re a learning and development partner to a thriving community of creative, growing organisations around the world — and have an immediate, full time (4 - 5 days per week) opening in our close-knit, remote-first team for a Partnerships Manager.

Drawing on relevant experiences in project/community/account management (or similar), you’ll be central to the smooth delivery of standalone projects and ongoing training partnerships, enriching long-standing relationships and ensuring new ones are smoothly up, up and away.

You’ll need to be available for regular in-person client activity and team collaboration in London, and willing to travel nationally and overseas sometimes too. Salary is from £30K, and we’re open to upping that depending on expectations and experience.

Some helpful context

Established in 2001, You Can Now is a training and development partner to smart organisations of all shapes and sizes — from foodie favourites like Pip & Nut and Dishoom, to fast-growing tech companies like Dice and Epic Games; publishers like the Guardian and It's Nice That, to amazing charities like Shelter and Action for Children; sensational retailers like Lush and Cubitts to top-notch creative agencies like Koto and VCCP.

We’re building a deeply engaged community of creative and growth-oriented partners. And while working in all kinds of industries, they collectively recognise the urgency of connecting modern, motivating and measurable learning and development to the most important commercial and cultural challenges of the day.

And that’s what we partner to provide; combining live, social training experiences with on-demand resources and digital tools, that inspire people to experiment with new approaches and different ways of working together.

Our focus is in-demand skills for the modern world of work. The topics we explore with our brilliant community reflect what’s most important to their leaders and teams today — from making the most of remote collaboration, to neurodiversity awareness; giving and receiving feedback well, to maximising time and energy.

To design and deliver our programme and products we collaborate with the finest and most generous subject matter experts around the world, boiling down their brilliance into brain-friendly and behaviour changing magic. And our ever-growing community of associate coach-facilitators bring their own lived-experiences to the mix; and inclusively get groups (both cross-organisationally, and from the same teams) together for energising, experimental and deeply practical sessions.

Enough about us!

You and the role

As a Partnerships Manager you’ll be the key point of contact across projects and partnerships of various shape and size. You’ll be comfortable managing multiple partnerships at any one time; owning the partnership experience right from the outset, working directly with senior members of our partners’ teams and ensuring a totally streamlined experience as they onboard into the world of YCN.

From there it’s about ensuring that the specific aspects of their partnership (whether a standalone DE&I training programme, or multi-year company wide access to our learning platform) are delivered, delightfully — and in full; and with all the relevant reporting, feedback and other relevant touch-points received on time.

Along the way you’ll be working closely with both YCN colleagues and our awesome community of coaches, subject experts and facilitators; ensuring that everyone is set up for success throughout the different stages of partnerships being fulfilled.

You’ll have at least 3 years experience in a comparable role, although we appreciate this might not be within the training and development industry. What’s key is endless curiosity, organisational smarts and a passion for enabling others through continual learning.

Key strengths this role will help you build:

• Organisation

• Collaboration

• Written and verbal communication

• Connectivity

• Research

As a Partnerships Manager, your responsibilities will include:

— Being the key point of contact for all stakeholders across a project; from client teams and programme participants to coaches, facilitators and your supportive YCN colleagues.

— Managing diaries, schedules and other moving parts across multiple projects and partnerships at any one time to ensure a seamless experience for participants and clients alike.

— Being present in key workshops, events, partnership kick-off sessions and learning sessions (virtually and in-person).

— Ensuring that the magical behind-the-scenes systems are well-oiled and firing on all cylinders. We’re a small central team and so everyone takes responsibility for keeping information tidy, up to date and in a place where we can all benefit from it. We use HubSpot as our CRM, and can easily onboard you to it, if you’ve not used it before.

— Researching and liaising with potential subject experts and collaborators for new and existing programmes; setting them up for success by sharing insights and priorities.

— Supporting the running pre-partnership kick off sessions with partner teams to capture individual and collective learning goals.

— Preparing, designing and and sharing good-looking reports with key clients in our partners teams to show learner engagement, impact and feedback across programmes.

— Generally bringing ideas, energy and imagination to our day-to-day doings and embodying our values in ways that feel authentic to you.

— Continually sharing feedback with your colleagues, and pulling it it for your own continual learning.

— Prioritising your own development, both within our own programme and contexts and externally too.

Salary and benefits

This is a full time role, and we are open to that being either 4 or 5 days a week.

Full time Salary is from 30K, depending on the number of days — and we’re open to increasing salary based on expectation and experience.

You’ll need to be available for regular in-person work and team collaboration in London, and willing to travel nationally and internationally too.

We can also offer generous development benefits (of course!) and good perks over the year too.

We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and community; value different thinking styles and strengths, and are open to any adjustments to best support you in your time working with us.

Ways of working

We are remote-first, but aim to meet up in person as a team, in London 2-4 times per month. These days are really important, so we ask everyone to prioritise being there. Typically we’ll have a tasty team breakfast or lunch and work together at a co-working space, or within a partners’ space — having collaborative meetings throughout the day.

Outside of these days, you’ll WFH / remotely, and have a Pleo card and an allowance for finding working environments that work for you — that might sometimes mean spending it on a day pass at a co-working space, or just a coffee at your local cafe spot.

As part of your key role activating and sustaining relationships within our partner community, we’ll encourage finding opportunities to get closer to partners for conversations and collaborations within their places of work.

We expect people to work the hours that enable them to get their work done, we do not stipulate that you must work a static 9 hours a day 9 — 6pm. This works currently because we have a super-motivated high trust team and we hope we will be able to continue this way of working into the future!

We constantly review how we work as a team and are committed to finding a flow that works for everyone.

Annual leave

23 days base can be taken as you wish.

Between Christmas and New Year we shut down as a whole company (from 23rd to 2nd Jan). This means a minimum of c.29 days holiday plus bank holidays

Extra bits

Apple laptop for everyone.

Unlimited access to our all-you-can-eat learning platform and as much time off as you need to dive into the development that’s helpful for you.

An additional £1000 Learning & Development budget per year, to spend on development outside of YCN.

Excellent swag from our generous partners.