Vacancy: Chief Financial Officer

This is a fantastic opportunity for a commercially minded CFO to help shape the future of one of the UK’s most critical professional bodies at a moment of genuine transformation and renewal. As a core member of the Leadership Team, the CFO will play a central role in stabilising BCS’s financial position, rebuilding confidence across the organisation, and unlocking significant opportunities for sustainable growth and value creation.

Role responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership and Commercial Business Partnering

• Provide strategic financial leadership and trusted advice to the Trustees, Group CEO, Leadership Team, and Council, acting as the principal financial and commercial interface at Board and Executive level.
• Shape and deliver the Group’s financial and commercial strategy, leading business planning, budgeting, resource allocation, and performance monitoring in alignment with agreed strategic objectives.
• Partner, challenge and support the CEO to influence the future commercial success and long term value of the business as a key member of the Leadership Team.
• Lead the development and delivery of the Group’s business planning, budgeting, and performance management framework, ensuring alignment to the agreed organisational strategy and clear accountability for outcomes.
• Deliver strong commercial challenge and insight to support confident decision-making on growth, investment, pricing, resource allocation, and value for money.
• Play an active role in the wider leadership team, contributing to organisational design, cultural change and capability building.

Finance leadership

• Lead and cultivate a best-in-class Finance function through inspiring people leadership that builds on strengths of the current team, and through continuous improvement to structures, systems, processes and controls.
• Own business performance management by providing timely, commercial MI, telling the story behind the numbers, championing data-driven decision making and driving accountability for outcomes.
• Ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the Groupby identifying, evaluating, and advising on commercial opportunities, diversification strategies, and new business models, balancing opportunity, risk, and reputation.
• Oversee cash flow, treasury, and investment activity, including the Institute’s investments in subsidiary companies, and assess the commercial viability and return on investment of proposed initiatives.
• Lead, develop, and performance-manage teams within the portfolio, fostering a commercially focused, high-performance culture and strong financial literacy across the organisation.
• Strive to live and role model the BCS values and support the organisation's purpose.

Governance  

• Lead and deliver a rigorous culture of compliance, ensuring all statutory, regulatory, and charitable obligations are met.
• Ensure robust risk management, treasury oversight and reserve planning, protecting the organisation’s financial resilience.
• Act as the principal point of contact with the Charity Commission and maintain effective relationships with auditors, advisers, and regulators.

Board and Committees

• Act as a key financial representative to Stakeholders and the Board, working closely with the CEO to communicate financial performance, projections and strategic insights.
• Provide clear, high-quality financial and commercial reporting to the Trustee Board and Risk, Audit and Finance Committee (RAFC), including oversight of reserves, income mix, expense ratios, and financial risk.
• Serve as a non-executive director on the Board of BCS Learning & Development Ltd (L&D), the Group's wholly owned trading subsidiary, providing oversight of performance, profitability and growth.
• Represent BCS on other related Boards and Committees, working closely with Chairs to ensure strong governance, strategic alignment, and commercial performance.
• Ensure commercial activity is aligned with BCS’s values, reputation, and long-term member trust, acting as a spokesperson for the organisation on financial, commercial and wider matters as required.

BCS is dedicated to providing training and development to help all staff realise their potential, and also offer a generous benefit package.

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT are committed to promoting equality at every opportunity as an employer. This statement and our policies are designed to ensure our recruitment and employment practices and procedures actively promote equality of opportunity and value diversity.

All applicants must be eligible to work in the UK upon application.

PLEASE NOTE: This vacancy may be removed before any listed closing date once a sufficient amount of applications have been received.

In the event that we receive a high number of applications for this vacancy, we may be unable to provide an individual response to every candidate, therefore if you haven’t heard back from us within 4 weeks of the closing date, please consider your application unsuccessful on this occasion.

No recruitment agencies please.

How to apply: Please apply by submitting your CV to alice.deakin@carlyleassociates.co.uk

What we offer