Planning, exercising, and assurance

• Oversee the creation, refresh, quality, and maintenance of continuity and resilience plans across the enterprise, ensuring they are aligned to service priorities and usable in practice rather than static documentation.
• Design and lead a structured annual exercise and testing programme, including tabletop simulations, targeted service-level recovery tests, cross-functional scenario walkthroughs, and lessons-learned reviews.
• Translate testing into measurable assurance by tracking outcomes, remediation actions, residual risks, and evidence that recovery assumptions have been validated for leadership and audit purposes.
• Provide regular executive reporting on resilience maturity, plan coverage, testing progress, critical dependency risks, unresolved issues, and overall readiness, ensuring leaders receive decision-useful insight rather than disconnected metrics.

Cross-functional leadership and operating model

• Work across business divisions, enterprise risk, technology, cyber, supplier management, internal audit, and crisis management to build a coherent end-to-end approach to resilience that clarifies ownership and reduces fragmentation.
• Act as the central point of leadership for divisional continuity leads and plan owners, creating a sustainable operating rhythm of governance forums, reviews, escalation paths, management information, and follow-up actions.
• Ensure the Operational Resilience capability complements and strengthens adjacent disciplines such as IT disaster recovery, cyber incident response, crisis management, enterprise risk, and third-party resilience, with clear boundaries that avoid duplication.
• Influence senior stakeholders across a matrixed global organisation, balancing pragmatism with rigour while driving accountability for resilience activity that often sits outside direct reporting lines.

People and organisation

• Establish and lead a small but high-impact central Operational Resilience team, setting direction, priorities, ways of working, and performance expectations for a function intended to grow in credibility and maturity over time.
• Build a culture of practical resilience, collaboration, and accountability by coaching team members and business stakeholders to focus on usable plans, evidence-based readiness, and continuous improvement rather than compliance alone.
• Support workforce planning, role design, onboarding, development, and capability building for the resilience function, creating clear expectations for specialist, analyst, and divisional continuity lead roles.
• Create an operating rhythm that supports both UK and US time zones, enabling the central team to work effectively with distributed stakeholders across Pearson’s global environment.

What You Bring

• Significant experience leading operational resilience, business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, or a closely related enterprise resilience function in a complex global organisation.
• Demonstrated ability to build frameworks, governance models, and cross-functional programmes that depend on influence rather than direct control, particularly in matrixed environments with multiple stakeholder groups.
• Deep experience with business impact analysis, critical service identification, dependency mapping, service tolerances, scenario testing, continuity planning, and resilience or recovery assurance.
• Strong understanding of the relationship between business continuity, IT disaster recovery, cyber resilience, supplier resilience, enterprise risk, audit, and crisis management, with the judgement to define clear boundaries between them.
• Experience building or maturing capabilities, introducing standards, and creating sustainable governance, reporting, and assurance mechanisms that stand up to executive and audit scrutiny.
• Strong analytical and reporting capability, with experience translating resilience data, interdependencies, and complex risks into clear executive insight and action-oriented management information.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and influencing skills, with the ability to work credibly with senior leaders, operational teams, and control functions across a large matrixed organisation.
• Experience leading teams, developing specialist capability, and building a culture of accountability, clarity, and practical delivery in a new or evolving enterprise function.
• Comfort working with ambiguity and complexity, with the resilience and judgement needed to make balanced, risk-aware decisions in areas where standards are still developing.
• Relevant qualifications in business continuity, resilience, risk, or security would be advantageous, for example CBCI, CBCP, DRI, ISO 22301-related training, or equivalent practical experience.

Why Pearson?

This is an opportunity to build a genuinely important enterprise capability at a pivotal stage in Pearson’s resilience maturity. As Pearson becomes more dependent on digital services, shared platforms, suppliers, coordinated recovery, and credible assurance, the need for a clear and effective operational resilience capability is increasing. The organisation is still early in its maturity journey, which makes this role both challenging and unusually high impact.

This role offers the chance to shape how Pearson defines what must keep running, how it prioritises during disruption, and how it gives leaders confidence that critical services can be sustained and recovered in a controlled way. It is a rare opportunity to create lasting structure, influence enterprise decision-making, and establish a capability with visibility across leadership, risk, technology, security, and the wider business.