Content Operations Director

Location: Cambridgeshire

Job Title:

Content Operations Director
Salary: £85,700 - £117,800

Location:

Cambridge, hybrid

Contract:

Fixed term contract, 18 months

Hours:

35 hours, full time
Are you an operational leader, who defends quality and author experience while driving efficiencies?
We are Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a world-leading academic publisher and assessment organisation and a proud part of the University of Cambridge.
We are looking for an energetic, empowered and committed Content Operations Director to lead our teams and develop ways of working for our strategy. The Content Operations teams manage all of our Academic books, elements and journals content from author delivery through to publication.
About the role
Academic publishing is undergoing a period of significant change. Evolving customer needs, digital transformation and the rise of AI is reshaping how we and our authors and communities work and want to read our content. We need to deliver our core publishing to meet our key BAU targets while supporting new approaches and product development. As an operations team, we need to support the new while finding efficiencies, standardisation and improvements to our current ways of working.
This role supports a global team, with the majority of colleagues in the UK but also in the US and India, and involves extensive collaboration with other colleagues internally as well as external suppliers. These suppliers are treated as partners in our pre-press work and we are developing and streamlining our ways of working with their new technologies. Internally this cover role will work closely with the Head of Supply Chain Operations, Academic, to ensure team cohesion across the end-to-end publishing lifecycle, including onward digital and physical distribution.

Building relationships with our editorial teams is also vital in enabling us to protect Cambridge standards as we deliver efficiency projects. Strong stakeholder engagement, empathy and diplomacy are needed to manage expectations and significant change programmes.
We have high standards for our content and seek to continuously improve author and reader experiences. This requires the role to keep up to date with industry news and competitor positioning to inform our strategy. We are committed to accessibility and a digital first mindset in our content workflows, helping to support our environmental sustainability goals to reduce emissions. How we prepare our content and role model these key priorities in our department will have a significant impact on delivering our goals.
Data-based planning and decision making is also critical to measure our success, proving our performance continues to deliver a better customer and author experience. Exploring how we can gain from automation and AI projects and experimentation will also be important.
This position has been classified as a hybrid role, requiring the selected candidate to typically spend 40-60% of their time collaborating and connecting face-to-face at their dedicated location. Aside from our hybrid principles, other flexible working requests will be considered from the first day of employment, including other work arrangements should you require adjustments due to a disability or long-term health condition.
About You
You will:
 
* Have experience of leading a large team or department in a publishing operations setting, ideally content operations.

Experience of leading teams in Academic publishing organisations is desirable
 
* Be a positive and decisive person, who is motivated by working on multiple priorities and inspiring others. You will be able to judge when to be hands on and delve into details and actions yourself but also when to step back and take a broader view.
 
* Thrive working with multiple teams, offering excellent communication lines and clear and honest direction to maximise performance and improvements.
 
* Have significant experience in supplier management, working collaboratively with them to drive continuous improvement and maintain service levels.
 
* Be an experienced line manager, developing and coaching colleagues to pursue their potential. You will be able to empathise with your team…