Chief Operating Officer, Wonderseekers

Deadline: 6 Jan 2025

Organisation: Wonderseekers, Winchester Science Centre

Job title: Chief Operating Officer

Location: Winchester

Salary: £60k - £70k

Are you a passionate, commercially astute and visitor-focused operational leader? Do you possess an entrepreneurial spirit with a forward-thinking and growth-orientated vision, keen to deliver quality within all areas of the visitor experience? Come and join our leadership team to help shape the future direction of our Charity and visitor attraction.

This is a key period of growth for our Charity, with the delivery of our new strategy and exciting capital and activity Masterplan in the pipeline. This will be the single largest development in our 38-year history, whereby we are investing over £6m in further expanding our base of operations in driving further financial resilience and reducing risks to the charity. The growth will enable our Charity to maximise its social impact: empowering thousands of children to develop the science skills and nature agency to act on the climate and biodiversity crises.

This newly-created role will play a vital part in enabling and shaping the very exciting future of Wonderseekers.

The post-holder will lead all of our Charity operations at Winchester Science Centre including:

• Visitor experiences (including customer services, exhibition, retail and catering),
• Events (for families and adult audiences),
• Curiosity (education, planetarium, and live science engagement),
• Marketing,
• Working alongside the Chief Financial Officer, the post-holder will deputise for our CEO from time to time representing the charity to external stakeholders and partners.

The Chief Operations Officer (COO) will be a commercially astute and visitor-focused operational leader who possesses an entrepreneurial spirit. Through their inspirational, values-based, and collaborative approach, they will always look for new opportunities to innovate and drive growth.

The post holder will bring their wealth of experience as an operational leader with a proven track record within a large visitor attraction to provide expert knowledge to lead a large and diverse team to success.

The COO will be an integral part of the SLT to support business planning by translating the vision, goals, and strategy for the Charity into operational and business plans. They will demonstrate strong financial leadership helping to provide best value and deliver on agreed targets.

Full details on the role and how to apply can be found here.