Market Development Manager, Huntingdon PE29 6PY

About the role

The Market Development Manager plays a pivotal role within the Adult Social Care Commissioning and Market Development service, shaping how local care and support markets evolve to meet the needs of communities across Cambridgeshire. The team works collaboratively across commissioning, contract management and market shaping, ensuring the Council meets its statutory duties while delivering high-quality, sustainable services that make a real difference to people's lives.

In this influential role, you will lead and drive market development activity, championing innovation, continuous improvement and high standards of care across the sector. You will work closely with providers and partners, building strong, trusted relationships while overseeing key projects that support a resilient and responsive care market. Using insight, data and market intelligence, you will identify opportunities, address gaps in provision, and proactively manage risks to ensure the right services are in place both now and for the future.

Your work will have a direct and lasting impact-supporting the Council to navigate financial and market pressures, strengthen service sustainability, and deliver better outcomes for residents. By embedding commercial best practice and leading on value-for-money and benefit realisation, you will help shape commissioning decisions, support local economic growth, and ensure adult social care markets contribute positively to community wellbeing and independence across Cambridgeshire.

For more information or to chat about this opportunity please contact Gurdev Singh .

Appointment to this post will be subject to the outcome of an Standard Disclosure obtained through the Disclosure and Barring Service. The Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and vulnerable adults and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

What will you be doing?

As Market Development Manager, you will take a leading role in shaping and strengthening local care and support markets across Cambridgeshire. You'll work at the heart of commissioning, contract management and procurement activity, ensuring services are high-quality, sustainable and able to meet both current and future demand.

Day to day, you will drive forward innovative approaches that improve efficiency, quality and outcomes. This includes developing cost-effective solutions, enhancing oversight of provider performance, and ensuring services remain financially viable and resilient in the long term.

You will provide strong commercial leadership across a range of commissioning and contract management activities, influencing how services are sourced, contracted and delivered. This will involve embedding robust pricing approaches, leading commercial challenge, and strengthening supplier engagement to ensure the Council achieves maximum value for money.

A key part of your role will be working closely with providers and partners to build a diverse, responsive and resilient market. You'll champion inclusive growth by supporting local providers, enabling innovation and helping to create a market that contributes to wider community wellbeing, economic development and strategic priorities.

You will also lead on savings, benefits realisation and performance tracking-ensuring that efficiencies, improvements and commercial gains are clearly defined, actively monitored and fully realised across programmes. Using insight and data, you will continuously review sufficiency forecasts and strategies, ensuring commissioning approaches remain proactive, evidence-based and responsive to emerging needs.

Alongside this, you will have opportunities to deputise for senior leadership, providing additional strategic oversight and contributing to wider service direction when needed.

About you

We are looking for a person who is motivated and forward-thinking, who can bring strong leadership, commercial insight and a passion for improving adult social care markets. You will be someone who enjoys working collaboratively, thrives on delivering improvement, and is confident in influencing both peers and senior stakeholders.

You may already have direct experience within care and support markets, or you may bring transferable skills from a related sector-You will demonstrate the ability to think strategically, interpret complex information, and translate this into impactful outcomes.

You will bring experience of developing and delivering strategic plans, working collaboratively with teams to support long-term organisational goals, identifying and leading continuous improvement and efficiency initiatives, with a clear focus on tracking performance and realising tangible benefits.

You will have experience of leading and developing high-performing teams, setting clear expectations and using insight to drive performance improvement, as well as managing projects from initiation through to delivery, ensuring outcomes are achieved and benefits are realised.

Your application will demonstrate effective project and resource management, the abiity to balance priorities within a dynamic environment, the application of risk management and governance principles, including experience of market oversight and responding to provider or market challenges, driving improvement, transformation or efficiency through commissioning, procurementor service redesign.

You will be someone with experience of contributing to market and commercial strategy development, ideally within care and support or a related sector, delivering measurable commercial outcomes through commissioning,procurementand supplier engagement activity, managing contracts across their lifecycle, with a strong understanding of compliance,performance and risk management.

You will be able to embedd commercial awareness across multi-disciplinary teams and confidently influence decision-making at a senior level. You will be someone who can demonstrate these strengths through a variety of professional experiences and someone committed to making a positive difference to communities and residents.

Please use your supporting statement in your application to outline how your skills and experience meet the essential criteria outlined in the Job Description/Person specification.

We kindly ask that if you have previously applied for this role within the past 3 months, you refrain from reapplying at this stage, as your previous application is still on record.

Our benefits

We value our colleagues in Cambridgeshire County Council and have developed a number of benefits in addition to the basics like annual leave, sick pay, pension and mileage...

• A comprehensivewellbeing packageto coverall aspects of wellbeing, both in and out of work, which can also be accessed by your family
• Buy up to4 weeks additional annual leave(pro-rata) through our salary sacrifice scheme
• Take your bank holidaysflexiblyto better suityour personal circumstances
• MakeAdditional Voluntary Contributions(Shared AVCs) to your pension with tax and National Insurance savings
• Access todevelopment opportunities, apprenticeships and qualified coaches to supportyour personal and professional growth
• Paid volunteering hourseach year so you can make apositive impact on our communityduring your normal working day
• Access toPeer Support Groupsthrough our IDEAL staffequality, diversity and inclusionnetwork
• Opportunities to nominate and receiveEmployee Recognition Awards
• AnOur Cambs Rewardsaccount, giving you access to in-store and onlinediscountsas well as ourCar LeaseandCycle to Workschemes

Take a look at our Employment Benefits Brochure attached to this advert to find out more.

About us

Cambridgeshire is a great place to work and live with a diverse population, an urban centre in Cambridge, historic Isle of Ely, Huntingdon and St Ives as well as more rural landscapes.

Our four values are central to our culture, driving everything we do.

We are proud to serve the diverse communities of Cambridgeshire and want our workforce to be reflective of this diversity, which we firmly believe benefits our colleagues, the organisation and our communities. If you don't meet every single requirement in the job role but think this could be you, please don't be put off. We are committed to building a workplace that is compassionate and inclusive as well as diverse, so if you think you could be a good candidate for this role please consider applying and speak to the recruiting manager if you have any questions.

Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, along with our employee network'IDEAL'and self-organised peer support groups help us to foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment where people feel valued, respected, and empowered. We collect relevant diversity data for monitoring as part of the recruitment process to understand the diversity of our applicants and monitor any trends throughout the recruitment processes so that we can take meaningful action.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Leader. We fully support providing reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process, as well as when you join us, and we encourage candidates …