The Technical and Quality (T&Q) Senior Consultant role, or ‘Senior Technical Consultant’ in the UK is a critical role in delivering positive change for our clients and for workers. T&Q Senior Consultants’ main purpose is to provide expert technical and quality support to impactful consulting projects for clients across numerous sectors and countries and addressing a range of human rights issues. In addition to advising clients, T&Q Senior Consultants support multiple projects and meet internal operational requirements. They support the delivery team further by creating and improving training and development resources, further Impactt’s profiling, marketing and thought leadership, and improve operational efficiencies making it easier for consultants to sell and deliver work.
Key responsibilities
Project delivery
- Work closely with clients and their partners to ‘diagnose’ human rights risks in their operations and value chains and, with the oversight of colleagues, advise on solutions to address these.
- Deliver human rights assessments, investigations and similar work at the sites of clients / their partners (following comprehensive internal training and support). This work will include working with colleagues to interview management and workers and assess relevant documents. It will require international travel.
- Conduct desk-top research and analysis.
- Think creatively to develop innovative solutions to difficult issues, working closely with colleagues in the delivery team.
- Draft high-quality, insightful and clear reports for clients, and/or provide technical support and review to other report drafters.
- Deliver advice and support directly to clients through leading presentations, workshops and training.
Technical and quality support for project management
- Working in the ‘technical support role’, the TQSC will work closely with Project Leads and Project Managers, provide expert support to numerous small- and medium-sized consulting projects simultaneously, juggling priorities to ensure that they are scoped fairly, budgeted accurately, and delivered on time and budget and to a high standard. This begins with Project Approval Processes (PAP) and proposal support, and runs through the project.
- Provide technical support and review over draft project budgets and resourcing plans in line with the projects’ methodology.
- Brief project delivery teams on approaches, standards for assessment, methodologies, etc.
- Throughout the delivery on the project, monitor technical and quality progress and issues which may arise, identify risks and escalate any concerns to the Project Lead / Head of T&Q in a timely manner
- Follow internal processes and support others to do the same.
Business development and client management
- Attend PAPs and input ideas and lessons learned from T&Q’s ‘knowledge hub’, to support a scope of services which will address this need and deliver positive results for clients and workers.
- Technically support proposal developers to draft compelling proposals which clearly explain the project approach. Occasionally lead on some proposals.
- Support Impactt’s thought leadership activities, through development of new internal and external resources to showcase Impactt’s expertise.
- Where necessary (in lieu of TQ Consultant / Head of TQ) attend Closure of Proposals and Projects meetings (CPAPs), collate learnings, and share actions with owners
T&Q Strategic work
- Use existing Impactt experience of assessments, field work, worker interviews, and client strategy work to drive a new innovative use of qualitative and quantitative learnings from assessments and worker interviews, to improve project delivery and marketing/commercial.
- Working on innovative / strategic billable and non-billable relationships with partner entities, for example with legislators, international labour organisations (ILO, IFC, IOM), AI partner(s)
T&Q Billable time:
- Able to consistently reach a 2025 utilisation target of 60% through a combination of: (a) Pre-planned tech support roles, (b) 1-2 long term Project lead roles for strategic /bespoke projects, (c) Ad hoc support requests from the project team
- Use existing Impactt experience of assessments, field work, worker interviews, and client strategy work to, at all times be informing the technical support being provided to colleagues
Strategic T&Q non-billable time:
- Use existing delivery experience to support improvement, creation and delivery of training and development resources to inform the project teams.
- Work with the Commercial Director and Head of T&Q to drive internal and external webinars from a technical perspective. The T&Q SC is not expected to deliver all internal/external webinars: but rather to help select topics, technically refine content, and support consultants to do so in a way that appeals to our client base.
- Guidance and oversight of the T&Q Consultant as they are streamlining the ‘knowledge hub’ aspects of what T&Q offers within Sharepoint informed by practical experience from having worked on project management tasks prior to this role.
Required knowledge, skills and experience at this grade:
- Minimum 5 years working experience with evidence of some experience in, and passion for, human rights, sustainability, ethical trade/sustainable sourcing, social compliance, investigations or similar.
- Experience of working with clients in a professional setting, ideally in consulting or similar.
- Strong understanding of business and commercial perspectives.
- Excellent project management experience (project management qualifications are not required).
- Experience of analysing situations, developing solutions and implementing changes as part of a team.
- Attention to detail.
- Strong written communication skills and report writing experience.
- Strong verbal and interpersonal skills – and the ability to empathise and quickly build trusting relationships.
- Proactivity and initiative, and the ability to work autonomously and escalate where needed.
- Ability to work at pace, under pressure and in ambiguous and dynamic environments. Comfortable with multi-taking and quickly switching between tasks.
- A curious and determined mindset to really understand and solve problems.
- A passion for excellence and innovation in pursuit of business growth and success.
Additionally, for this specific T&Q team role it is desirable to be:
Strong presentation, training or facilitation skills, especially with regard to coaching and upskilling peers internally.
Available during morning/daytime UK hours (supporting the T&Q Principal Consultant in this primary ‘firefighting’ ad hoc request time)
Strong at commercial/business acumen, translating field knowledge and expertise into new business, e.g. strong and proactive engagement in new concepts, products, and at PAPs
Able to show a proven track record in report review, methodology development, sign-off processes
Willing to drive profiling, thought leadership, webinars (internal and external) with technical champions, with a track record in such non-chargeable work
Willing to develop key resources (handbooks, guidance notes, etc) to support core aspects of our work, e.g. handbooks, cheat sheets
Strong at management / organisational skills to oversee and guide the T&Q Consultant’s re-structuring of knowledge and resources hubs at Impactt