Skills and Capability Director

Advert Close date: 30th September 2026

At The Crown Estate, our purpose is to create lasting and shared value for the nation. As the Skills and Capability Director, you will play a critical role in ensuring our organisation has the skills, capabilities and workforce readiness needed to deliver our long-term strategy and future ambitions.

You will be the enterprise lead for The Crown Estate's capability, helping the business understand the capabilities required for future success, identifying strengths and gaps, and shaping how internal capability is developed across the organisation. Working with senior leaders and key stakeholders, you will ensure investment in skills and development is focused on the areas that create the greatest value, resilience and agility for The Crown Estate.

This is a high profile leadership opportunity within People & Culture, reporting to the Head of Talent. The role is responsible for establishing and leading a practical, enterprise wide capability system that supports strategic decision-making, workforce planning, internal mobility and organisational performance.

Key responsibilities include:

• Defining and evolving The Crown Estate's enterprise capability framework, ensuring alignment with strategic priorities and future business needs.

• Translating organisational strategy into clear capability requirements and identifying internal capability strengths, gaps and risks.

• Providing meaningful insight and data that supports workforce, development and investment decisions.

• Enabling capability based career pathways and greater internal mobility across the organisation.

• Acting as product owner for skills, capability and learning technologies, ensuring tools are effective, user-focused and deliver business value.

• Shaping capability building activity delivered through leaders, People Business Partners, learning teams and external partners.

• Evaluating the impact of capability investments and ensuring focus remains on outcomes that strengthen organisational performance.

• Establishing governance, assurance and equitable capability practices that are consistent, accessible and inclusive.

Success in this role will be measured by the organisation's ability to understand, develop and deploy the capabilities needed to achieve strategic objectives, enhance workforce agility and build long-term organisational resilience.

We are looking for a strategic and commercially minded leader with significant experience of building organisational capability and enabling workforce readiness at an enterprise level.

• Experience designing, establishing or evolving enterprise capability, skills or workforce development approaches aligned to organisational strategy.

• Proven ability to translate business objectives into clear capability priorities that inform workforce planning, development and investment decisions.

• Experience identifying capability strengths, risks and gaps using data and insight to drive action and business outcomes.

• Experience leading or sponsoring people technology solutions, balancing adoption, usability, insight and organisational value.

• Strong track record of delivering outcomes through influence, partnerships and collaboration rather than direct control.

• Experience advising and influencing senior leaders on capability, organisational effectiveness and workforce readiness.

• Demonstrated commitment to fairness, transparency and creating long-term organisational value.

• Capability Strategy: Ability to identify the internal skills and capabilities that will have the greatest impact on organisational success.

• Systems Thinking: Connects workforce capability, learning, mobility, technology and performance into a coherent organisational approach.

• Insight and Judgement: Uses evidence, data and context to prioritise action and support effective decision-making.

• Technology Leadership: Shapes capability and learning technologies around user needs and business outcomes.

• Stakeholder Influence: Builds trusted relationships and creates alignment across diverse stakeholders and teams.

• Prioritisation and Resource Stewardship: Focuses effort and investment on the areas that create the greatest value.

• Executive Communication: Communicates complex organisational and capability challenges clearly, credibly and with impact.

• Future focused and curious about emerging workforce and capability trends.

• Outcome oriented, with a focus on organisational performance and resilience.

• Practical and pragmatic, balancing strategic thinking with effective implementation.

• Inclusive and values-led, ensuring capability practices are equitable and accessible for all.

Join us and help shape the skills, capability and workforce readiness that will enable The Crown Estate to create lasting and shared value for generations to come.

Our Offering / benefits:

As well as a competitive salary, pension and performance related bonus offering, we have a wealth of benefits available ranging from flexible working; market leading family policies and shopping discounts in the West End, to private healthcare; life and critical illness cover and 28 days holiday with the option to buy more. We value work life balance and your wellbeing highly, enabling you to be your best self to work.

Disability Disclaimer:

We are a proud disability confident employer and operate the offer of interview scheme Disability Confident employer scheme - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

We are happy to offer alternative application methods or formats and can be flexible on our process to enable you to have the best opportunity.

If you have any questions about our recruitment process or would like to talk about adjustments, please contact us directly, or at [email protected]

Please note that if we receive a high volume of applications, we may close this advert early. We encourage you to apply as soon as possible.