We’ve all experienced the impact of extraordinary technological change over recent years. All of our clients are impacted by digital advancements, and so our propositions need to respond to that. We are also seeing that our clients are changing how they work – increasingly working remotely and across multiple locations. For PwC, this means designing an operating model where we’ll improve quality, deliver outstanding value to our clients, and create a better experience for our people.

Our Assurance Competency Centre is one of our key priorities to respond to this challenge. The centre will support our client facing teams across the UK in delivering non-judgmental aspects of an audit whilst supporting our objectives to drive efficiencies, reduce costs and improve quality.

As well as overseeing and driving improvements to quality and efficiency, through more focussed delivery, the Competency Centre will play a critical role in driving ongoing innovation in what we do and how we do it - most particularly how we further automate delivery of audit based activities. The Activity Leader will be absolutely fundamental to us achieving not just our growth strategy in terms of hours to be delivered under this model, but also in achieving full automation potential. The selected individual will be highly motivated to help drive this strategically significant change in our business.

A key objective of the Competency Centre is to support PwC's social mobility agenda and as such we are looking for someone who is able to be open minded and creative about how and who we recruit and deploy on audit work, whilst understanding key quality criteria. Therefore being part of the Competency Centre provides you with the opportunity to make a real difference by supporting PwCs social mobility agenda as well as building highly sought after and transferable skills that will help you develop and progress more widely at PwC.

ResponsibilitiesIn this role, the successful applicant will have the opportunity to be at the forefront of Assurance strategy by working with the central implementation team to

Drive high quality and timely business implementation of this new initiative, including such elements as

• Operating processes, working practices and supporting collateral

• Recruitment and resourcing

• People strategy, including career model, moderation processes, people experiences, etc.

• Supply and demand strategy

• Marketing new initiative to the business

Driving ongoing delivery and continuous improvement of the service, including

Leading delivery of the activity from a people, client service, quality and efficiency perspective

Managing a large team of people, including development, coaching, mentoring, and pastoral care

Overseeing, monitoring and evaluating the quality of work performed by your Supervisor and Performer teams - including

• Coaching and supporting your activity supervisors to drive continuous improvement within their Performer teams

• Driving understanding of and compliance with activity technical and other operational requirements

• Thematic reviews of internal quality reviews, root cause identification and action plan development

• Responding to quality review findings and technical updates

Act as an internal technical (and operational) expert for the activity, including resolving Competency Centre team member consultations and escalations

Implement and maintain ongoing Competency Centre Learning and Development activities, including formal activity training curriculum, ad hoc learning and sharing, and a formal and effective coaching and mentoring structure

Contributing to Assurance wide training programs (e.g. EAT) to develop an understanding of the work performed by the Competency Centre

Working with Competency Centre Business Support Leader to support overall Competency Centre operations

Driving activity thought leadership and ongoing innovation (what we do and how we do it), including standardisation, automation, outsourcing, methodology enhancements, etc.

Skills Required

ACA qualification

Experience working in a professional services environment, ideally Big 4

Excellent people skills, including motivating and coaching more junior team members

Strong leadership skills

Strong written and oral communication skills, at all levels

The ability to think creatively and innovate with new solutions

Excellent organisational / project management skills

Pro-active and self-motivated

This role is available on a flexible basis and can also be considered part-time.