Open Societal Challenges Assistant

Weekly Working Hours:  Part time (0.6FTE) 22.2 hours per week

Contract Type:  Fixed Term Contract for 2 years

Job Description: 

About the Role

It is expected that some attendance in the office will be required, we’d expect this to be approximately once per week. 

The Open University is recruiting a driven and highly-organised OSC Officer to act as the main administrator for the University’s Open Societal Challenges (OSC) programme and provide research development support within the OSC programme.

The post holder will coordinate and support OSC events, provide administrative assistance for research challenges, and manage OSC reporting and onboarding activities. Additionally, they will maintain the OSC Online Platform, ensure data integrity and compliance, and supply ad-hoc management information.

Key Responsibilities

The responsibilities listed below are those that are key to the role:

• Work with Academic Leads to run the annual programme of OSC Value Add events (internal and external), including cluster events, research festivals, training workshops and more. This will include preparing event comms, dealing with queries, making all necessary bookings, coordinating agendas and supporting the running of the event on the day
• Deliver administrative support for research challenges during the processes of onboarding and funding
• Support the OSC reporting process by arranging meetings, monitoring progress against deliverables and collating financial forecasts 
• Manage the OSC database, compiling monthly reports for various groups
• Maintain the OSC Online Platform with data and content
• Assist with ensuring data integrity within the OSC and compliance with institutional data policies and external legislative requirements (GDPR etc) and provide ad-hoc OSC management information (MI), such as in response to FOI requests or audit purposes.

Essential Requirements

• Educated to undergraduate degree level, or equivalent professional experience in research administration
• Excellent organizational skills including the ability to manage own workload
• Good interpersonal and communications skills
• Strong IT skills - in particular the use of Excel to tabulate and analyze information and MS Teams/Outlook to work collaboratively remotely
• Excellent attention to detail in dealing with data, problem solving ability, numeracy, analytical and interpretative skills
• Ability to work flexibly both independently and part of a team
• Commitment to the OU mission of equality and diversity

Desirable

• Experience of managing a busy administrative role and dealing with multiple tasks in parallel and sharing updates appropriately
• Experience working in research administration or in academic research
• Understanding of budget management and project management

You can find the full job description here

If you would like to discuss this role before making an application, please email Careers@open.ac.uk

To apply for this role please submit your CV with a personal statement, up to 1,000 words.  You should set out in your statement why you’re interested in this role and provide examples of where your skills and experience meet the required competencies for this role.

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