Arcadis

Arcadis is the world's leading company delivering sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets.

We are more than 34,000 people, in over 30 countries, dedicated to improving quality of life. Everyone has an important role to play. With the power of many curious minds, together we can solve the world’s most complex challenges and deliver more impact together.

Role description:

We work to protect our natural environment, water resources, and energy systems while helping to power our world for future generations. Around the world, communities are experiencing the effects of climate change, rapid urbanisation, and biodiversity loss. Large-scale, unforeseen events such as floods and wildfires are becoming more frequent, increasing the need for resilient and sustainable solutions.

The Nuclear programmes we support require strong project and programme controls capability, with planning acting as a key integrator across cost, risk, change, and delivery functions. Lead Planners play a central role in enabling governance, assurance, and decision-making in complex and highly regulated environments.

Arcadis is seeking flexible, dynamic individuals who meet UK nationality and security requirements. This role requires candidates who are eligible to obtain and maintain up to Security Clearance (SC). Supporting confidential clients and working on highly challenging and rewarding programmes, the role requires strong analytical capability and a structured, governance-led approach.

Role accountabilities:

As a Lead Planner within the Nuclear team, you will be required to:

• Lead the development, integration, maintenance, and assurance of project and programme schedules, ensuring they are robust, logic-linked, auditable, and aligned to scope, delivery strategy, governance requirements, and reporting cycles.
• Establish and maintain effective planning standards, processes, and schedule management controls that support consistent delivery, baseline integrity, and assurance readiness across the programme.
• Own schedule baseline management, progress update routines, change impact assessment, and schedule traceability, ensuring changes are controlled, understood, and reflected accurately in the integrated plan.
• Drive integration between planning, cost, risk, change, scope, and reporting functions to maintain a coherent project controls baseline and a clear performance narrative.
• Provide schedule assurance and constructive challenge across discipline, area, supplier, contractor, and delivery partner programmes, testing logic, assumptions, compliance, constraints, interdependencies, and forecast credibility.
• Lead planning input to governance forums, integrated baseline reviews, schedule quality assessments, change control reviews, readiness reviews, and performance assurance activities.
• Analyse schedule performance, critical path, trends, float, interfaces, risks, opportunities, and emerging variances to provide clear advice on delivery confidence, impacts, mitigations, and recovery options.
• Lead or coordinate planning inputs to reporting packs, dashboards, senior stakeholder briefings, and governance submissions, translating complex schedule data into concise, evidence-based insight.
• Oversee contract-driven planning activities, including review of supplier and contractor programme submissions, acceptance criteria, reporting obligations, schedule updates, and compliance with contractual planning requirements.
• Support delivery strategy, programme phasing, option development, business case input, investment decision making, and scenario planning through robust schedule analysis and planning insight.
• Facilitate planning workshops with multidisciplinary stakeholders to agree scope, logic, sequencing, assumptions, dependencies, constraints, interfaces, milestones, and decision points.
• Provide line management, coaching, and development support to planners, including setting clear objectives, reviewing performance, guiding workload priorities, supporting career development, and building planning capability across the team.
• Champion continuous improvement in planning processes, tools, schedule quality, reporting outputs, and ways of working, ensuring lessons learned and good practice are embedded across the team.
• The scope of accountability will be aligned to experience and programme needs, ranging from schedule assurance through to integrated controls leadership.