The Opportunity

Social Finance are looking for an Associate to work in the Advisory Team. You will typically work on 3 to 12-month projects as part of small teams of 2 - 4 people. You will be responsible for defining and delivering your own workstreams on the project, supporting a Director and other team members, ensuring your work feeds into the desired outcome. All team members work closely with our partners and clients. The core skills and competencies you will use are:

• Systems thinking and research – conducting primary or secondary research to understand complex social issues, the experiences of people facing those issues, the appropriateness of potential solutions and the policy context; drawing conclusions from imperfect or contradictory data sources.

• Problem solving – creating structure amid ambiguity in order to find a clear path through; looking at a problem with a creative lens and suggesting alternative solutions to the norm.

• Quantitative analysis – developing appropriate analysis to shed light on a problem or issue; understanding and articulating how robust the data and analysis is; delivering analysis with high accuracy; Excel proficiency.

• Modelling – creating financial and operational models to support business cases, investment cases or cost benefit analyses.

• Giving advice – making judgements based on evidence and providing clear and supported recommendations that are practical in the real world and compelling to decision-makers from diverse backgrounds (government, investors, service providers in the 3rd and private sectors).

• Partnership building – building effective working relationships, both within and outside Social Finance; summarising and disseminating information effectively, with excellent writing, listening and inter-personal skills; demonstrating credibility; listening profoundly and building trust; proficiency in PowerPoint and Word.

• Teamwork – working with others both junior and senior to support their work and their development; being receptive to feedback and using it to continually improve; working transparently and collaboratively with clients, adapting to their pace and priorities.

• Managing multiple projects – structuring your workload to a budget and timeframe by prioritising and working efficiently; identifying and mitigating risks; managing your workload between multiple projects and multiple clients; participating in the full life cycle of a project from helping land the project to ensuring the learnings are shared internally and externally.

• Commitment to Social Finance – thinking through social and ethical responsibilities; demonstrating Social Finance’s core values; feeling personal ownership and accountability over your projects; having a passion for tackling social and development problems.

About You

• We are looking for someone who has many or all of these attributes:

• Passionate about making a difference to entrenched social issues

• Intellectually curious, able to quickly understand new issues and new clients

• A strategic and creative thinker, able to pull insights from complex information and challenge the status quo

• Analytical, with experience of financial and / or data analysis

• Able to work independently and apply structure to problems to steer a path forward

• Adaptable and resilient to changing demands and environments, including experience working across multiple projects at once

• Commercially aware in order to work to a timeframe and budget and identify potential opportunities with clients

• Lived experience of marginalisation or working in marginalized communities, or experience of developing inclusive services

• A natural collaborator who can build good working relationships with a variety of internal and external partners

• A strong communicator who can share complex information simply and shape thinking around an issue

• Patient, kind and solicits diverse contributions both internally and externally

To view the full job advert please visit: https://www.socialfinance.org.uk/careers/vacancies