Careers, Skills & Academic Partnerships Manager

The Employability & Careers team is Edinburgh Napier University’s dedicated professional service for student and graduate career development. The team’s work focusses on developing the career readiness of our students, empowering them to become career ready and highly employable.

Our Career Development Consultants are an essential part of this service and currently, we are recruiting a Careers, Skills & Academic Partnerships Manager to lead an expert and committed team of practitioners and work closely with a wide range of stakeholders in academic schools and other professional services, to ensure that employability becomes firmly embedded in the university’s provision.

The Role:

As our new Careers, Skills & Academic Partnerships Manager, you will have an excellent opportunity to use your significant experience of careers guidance/employability services to lead on planning and coordinating activities associated with integrated careers and employability delivery, helping to ensure that these align with university strategies/KPIs.

Working in partnership with the academic community, you will be in a strong position to use your relationship building and influencing skills, your understanding of learning and teaching in an HE context and experience of playing a significant role within an employability and careers service to consider and implement a range of innovative approaches to careers development across the university, ensure that the university provides a high-quality, inclusive service that meets the diverse needs of our students, graduates and employers.

Your data analysis skills will also serve you well as you ensure appropriate career readiness data is captured, analysed, visualised and distributed with academic partners– using this to inform the setting of priorities and action planning.

This is a pivotal role in the Employability & Careers service and across the university, seeing you become a valued member of the department leadership team.  This is also an exciting time for Napier as we develop our new University and Education & Student Experience strategies.

We are looking for an experienced manager and leader who is passionate about career development learning and has experience of integrating employability into curricula and assessments and working in partnership with academic colleagues.

If you have relevant experience of employability and careers in Higher or Further Education, strong leadership skills and the desire to lead work that is collegiate and impactful, then we would love to hear from you.

What we will need from you:

• - Educated to degree level or equivalent
• - Significant careers guidance, or other relevant experience regarding employability, within an HE or FE context
• - Experience of leading or playing a significant role within a careers guidance service
• - Management experience at both strategic and implementation levels and experience of managing and motivating staff
• - Ability to analyse, develop and implement strategy, setting clear objectives and ensuring performance against these
• - Ability to use strong leadership and management skills to motivate staff to deliver a high-performance culture

Benefits we offer:

41 days paid annual leave, employer pension contribution of 17.6% and flexible/hybrid working.

For more information about our wide range of benefits, click here.

Additional information:

Contract:  Permanent, Full Time – 35 hrs/wk, (hybrid 2-3 days on campus).

Application Deadline: 26th August 2026

Interviews: Week commencing 14^th September 2026

Advert information