Bid Manager

Bid Manager

Full time (35 hours pw) – Fixed Term Contract until June 2025

Our offer to you

We pride ourselves in being a great place to work, providing a supportive culture with opportunities to grow and develop your career, achieve a healthy work life balance and to be recognised for the great work you do. You will receive:

• Competitive salary and pension scheme
• 33 days holiday (inclusive of bank holidays) - increasing to 38 days over 5 years
• Hybrid, Flexible working
• Cycle to work scheme 
• Electric Vehicle Scheme
• Health and Wellbeing portal – access to financial, health and wellbeing support and an Employee Assistance Programme
• Discounts – you will have access to Blue Light and NHS Discounts as well as discounts on mobile phones, gym membership, cinema tickets, restaurants, holidays and shopping

About Us

This is a fantastic opportunity to join a team of over 1,200 employees and over 29500 volunteers, united by our goal of saving lives through essential first aid services, training and campaigning.  As a charity with rich heritage and a long history of serving humanity, we are proud of our past and excited about creating a healthier, safer, more resilient future. 

St John Ambulance works at the heart of communities, supporting and enabling them to access and receive physical and mental health first aid. We do this through developing and providing effective community response and outreach services (e.g. Ambulance response, Falls response and Night Time Economy) and using our longstanding expertise to empower people with vital clinical skills and the confidence to use them (e.g. our Volunteers and Community Advocates, NHS Cadets and Young Responders programmes). There is also a buoyant social enterprise network which delivers first aid training and supplies medical consumables to businesses and consumers.

Job Summary

This is an exciting opportunity to join SJA’s Bid Team, managing and producing tender responses across a variety of business areas including Commercial Training, First Aid and Health & Safety Supplies, Events, Urgent & Emergency Care, and other services. The role of the Bid Manager is to support the organisation in achieving revenue targets, business growth and strategic objectives through managing the Bid process and ensuring completion of high-quality tenders within the stipulated timeframes. Every win helps us to support and deliver more lifesaving initiatives throughout the country.  

You will maintain and develop a bid library, tender pipeline and supporting processes, sharing best practice and learnings from bids which are won and lost whilst also analysing trends from tenders and recommending improvements or change to optimise the number of bids for which we can tender.    

You will be driven and self-motivated with the ability and proven track record in producing high quality and timely tender submissions. A team player with excellent communications and writing skills you will also possess the ability to prioritise, plan and coordinate projects accurately and assess financial risk as an essential part of this role.  

Required Knowledge, Skills & Experience

• Experience in managing, writing, or coordinating bids, tenders, proposals, or grants 
• Strong project management skills, with the ability to prioritise work to tight deadlines 
• Ability to work under pressure, working on multiple simultaneous deadlines 
• Understanding of what makes a winning proposal and ability to see a bid through a client’s eyes 
• Research and analytical skills to understand the commercial context of opportunities and how we can add value 
• In-depth knowledge of tender and proposal processes, with knowledge of public sector procurement an advantage 
• Good copywriting skills and attention to detail 
• Excellent spelling and grammar 
• Influencing skills, to help and advise internal partners at each stage of the tender and proposal process 
• Continuous improvement attitude – sharing knowledge and best practice in workshops and training sessions 
• Approachable and personable with an ability to build relationships quickly 

About the Role 

Manage the Bid Management process, ensuring all bid documents meet deadlines and have undergone appropriate levels of scrutiny. Chairing and organising bid kick off meetings with internal stakeholders. You will need to feed the information into the Bid Writer in a timely and organised fashion and ensure all bids are of consistent high quality to meet the customer or commissioner’s expectations.

• You will also, where required, need to lead on writing, creating and preparing expressions of interest, prequalification questionnaires, ITT responses and standalone proposals and presentations working closely with operational/technical specialists within the organisation & ambulance operation to ensure excellence in quality, accuracy and presentation
• Lead on the creation and support bid presentations; including the preparation through to participation of delivery to key decision makers
• Maintain the Bid library working with functions and the operation to collate relevant, up to date supporting information for proposals, ensuring its accuracy and accessibility
• Complete the bid/no bid tool and agree with relevant key stakeholders to ensure any tenders are aligned with both the relevant departments strategy, operational capability e.g. skills, vehicles and capacity

Please see the job description for more detail (this can be viewed on our website or once you click apply) 

For all other candidates, or St John Ambulance volunteers wishing to apply please apply below

The closing date for this vacancy is the 02/10/2024 however, we reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive high volume of applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.

Please note: St John does not accept speculative CVs and will only review CVs sent in application for an advertised vacancy.

St John Ambulance are committed to increasing the diversity of our team and making sure we best reflect the diversity of the communities we serve.   At St John, everyone is valued and supported to thrive, we have several networks including Multi Culture, Disability and Accessibility, Pride, Family and Carers and Women’s groups.  We do not tolerate any form of discrimination and engender a sense of belonging for all, by creating an environment of mutual respect, where we value unique differences and demonstrate authentic allyship. We believe passionately in equality, diversity and inclusion.