Head of Workforce Transformation
Standard Life plc
Salary undisclosed
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Description
If you’re someone who enjoys working across teams to translate priorities into delivery, Standard Life could be the place for you. We’re looking for a Head of Workforce Transformation to join our Integrated Talent Journey team.
Job Type: Permanent
Location: Hybrid, with access to our offices in Birmingham, London, Telford and Edinburgh.
Flexible working: All roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process. You can read more about flexible working here.
Closing Date: 04/11/2026
Salary and benefits: £120,000 - £130,000 DOE plus an indicative bonus range of 30-60%, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.
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Who are we?
We’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.
Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return we expect curiosity, connection, accountability and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day.
The Role
As Head of Workforce Transformation, you will lead the programmatic delivery of Workforce Transformation, ensuring the different elements are mobilised, sequenced and delivered as one connected programme. You will bring challenge and judgement to how priorities are translated into delivery, working across Centres of Excellence and specialist teams to test assumptions, shape proposals, identify overlaps, gaps and trade-offs, and bring their inputs together into a practical, coherent and deliverable transformation plan.
You will work closely with the leaders responsible for workforce strategy, workforce planning and skills development, taking their strategic direction, workforce insight and capability priorities and translating them into coordinated delivery activity.
The role will initially focus on mobilisation: establishing the delivery approach, confirming accountabilities, bringing together the different areas of activity and working across Centres of Excellence, Business Partnering and other specialist teams to challenge and integrate their respective priorities and proposals into a joined-up transformation plan, ensuring priority initiatives are ready to move into implementation.
As the programme progresses, the role will focus on coordinating delivery across workstreams, managing cross-programme dependencies, resolving delivery issues and ensuring new capabilities, processes and ways of working are successfully implemented and transitioned into ongoing ownership.
What are we looking for?
- Experience leading the delivery of large, complex transformation programmes across multiple functions or business areas involving people, processes and technology.
- Demonstrable experience coordinating multiple workstreams and accountable leaders; challenging assumptions and making informed trade-offs to create practical delivery plans
- Strong judgement and the ability to manage complex dependencies, resolve delivery challenges and make progress in ambiguous environments.
- Strong leadership and stakeholder management capability, with experience taking transformation from mobilisation through implementation and into ongoing business ownership.
- A strong understanding of agile principles and how to apply them at programme level, with the judgement to identify and deploy the right specialist resources; formal agile practitioner credentials are not essential.
About the programme
Standard Life is investing in a multi-year Workforce Transformation programme to create a more skilled, agile and future-ready workforce.
The programme responds to significant changes in how work is evolving, including increasing use of artificial intelligence and digital technology, changing customer expectations, the need for stronger leadership capability and a requirement to deploy talent more dynamically across the organisation.
The programme is focused on four connected outcomes:
- Build the workforce and skills foundations needed to create a reliable view of roles, skills and capability across the organisation.
- Anticipate future workforce and capability needs so leaders can identify gaps earlier and make better workforce decisions.
- Build and acquire critical capability through development, hiring, external partnerships and other workforce interventions.
- Deploy talent to priority work so people and skills can move more effectively to the areas where they are needed most.
These outcomes are owned and delivered through a number of specialist areas across the People function and wider organisation. The Workforce Transformation programme provides the coordination, sequencing and delivery structure that brings them together and enables the changes to be implemented successfully.
We want to hire the whole version of you.
We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you.
If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.
We’re reviewing applications as they come in and may close this role before the closing date, so apply early to avoid missing out.
Find out more about working at Standard Life
Guide for Candidates: standardlifeplc.pagetiger.com/guideforcandidates
Find or get answers from our colleagues: www.standardlifeplc.com/careers/talk-to-us
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About this role
Standard Life is launching a multi-year Workforce Transformation programme to build a more skilled and agile workforce in response to technological change, evolving work patterns and shifting customer needs. As Head of Workforce Transformation, you would lead the programmatic delivery of this initiative, working across multiple specialist teams and centres of excellence to translate strategic priorities into coordinated, practical action. The role spans mobilisation—establishing delivery approaches, confirming accountabilities and integrating proposals from different areas into a joined-up plan—through to implementation, where you would manage cross-programme dependencies, resolve delivery challenges and embed new capabilities into business-as-usual operations.
This is a leadership role that demands strong programme delivery experience across complex, multi-functional transformations involving people, processes and technology. You would need proven capability in coordinating multiple workstreams and accountable leaders, challenging assumptions to create realistic delivery plans, and navigating ambiguous environments where trade-offs are inevitable. Experience taking transformation initiatives from mobilisation through implementation into ongoing ownership is essential, as is a pragmatic understanding of agile principles at scale—though formal credentials are not required.
The permanent, part-time hybrid position is based in Birmingham with access to offices in London, Telford and Edinburgh. Standard Life offers a salary of £120,000–£130,000 depending on experience, plus a bonus range of 30–60%, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, life assurance and three volunteering days annually. The company emphasises flexibility and is open to job-shares and other working arrangements negotiated during recruitment.
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