Community and Innovation Associate

Permanent employee, Full-time · Reading

35,000 - 42,000 £ per year

The Role's Purpose

This role will be based in Reading.

This role has two primary functions:

To act as the first and primary point of contact for all our clients and guests, creating the best first impression to all visitors to one of our workspaces. The community team focus on providing service and community engagement to our members. You will be excellent at building relationships and establishing trust with clients, suppliers and colleagues alike, with a focus at all times on customer satisfaction. With an eye for detail, you will ensure that the centre provides the very best facilities and is always impeccably presented.
To work collaboratively with the Plexal team to deliver a variety of projects, with a focus on innovation programme delivery, supporting startups as part of their growth journey. You’ll engage with a diverse range of stakeholders, including startups, scaleups, corporations, government, non-profit organisations, investors and academia. The role is fast paced, varied and complex and will require a highly organised approach to manage multiple tasks simultaneously and a broad range of stakeholder relationships.

What You'll Do

Community responsibilities:

Creating a welcoming and friendly environment for all visitors to the space, ensuring the highest level of member/guest experience
Ensuring that the space is operating efficiently – keeping the centre functioning well.
Morning check of all areas prior to members arrival
Answer the phone and the inbox to deal with queries in a friendly and helpful manner
Confident to answer basic IT and facilities queries.
Helpdesk management - ensuring all ticketing is resolved quickly
Supporting with the operational delivery of events.
Understand the nature of the client within the space so that they can be supported

Innovation responsibilities:

Supporting innovation programmes through workshops, masterclasses and events
Staying informed about key technology trends, emerging startups and innovation themes 
Engaging with SMEs to understand their needs, challenges, and interventions that will support their growth 
Supporting the design and delivery of innovation programmes at Plexal
Creating high-impact outputs that help our clients make decisions
Proactively managing regular interaction, communication and collaboration with external stakeholders

Your Skills

Reliable, highly organised and able to provide a high level of customer service
Effective planning and prioritisation skills with the ability to keep track of multiple tasks and deliverables
Excellent Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint skills

Who You Are

Proven administrative experience of working in a fast-paced team environment, and working in a customer-facing role
Experience with working with multiple stakeholders, such as startups and corporate clients, but also understanding the practicalities of working in a small and growing company
Dealing with ambiguity and operating in constantly changing environment
Due to the nature of this position, our work, and our client engagements, you must be willing and eligible to achieve a minimum of SC clearance. To qualify for SC clearance, you must be a British Citizen or have resided in the UK for the last 5 years with no extensive periods outside of the UK. Pre-existing SC welcome. For more information about clearance eligibility, please see https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/united-kingdom-security-vetting

Why us?

Plexal’s Values:
Mission: We inherit the mission of UK government and deliver it in an agile and creative fashion.
Collaboration: We believe in the power of working together.
Equality: We strengthen ourselves as a team by embracing the different.
Care: People are at the heart of what we do; we care about our customers, members and colleagues.

As a start-up, we thrive in a dynamic and fast-paced work environment dedicated to empowering innovators. We embrace individuals who leverage technology and creativity to tackle our greatest challenges head-on. We strongly advocate for maintaining a harmonious work-life balance, our goal is to ensure every member of our team can authentically be themselves and live their best lives. We firmly believe that innovation and creativity flourish when we cultivate a diverse workforce, comprising highly skilled individuals with a wide range of perspectives to contribute.

In return we will offer you:

Salary: £35,000 - £42,000 depending on skills and experience
Annual bonus scheme
A generous pension scheme (with a company contribution of up to 10%)
Private healthcare, life assurance and critical illness cover
25 days holiday plus bank holidays
Volunteering day

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About us

Plexal is the innovation company solving society's challenges through collaboration with government, startups and industry. The business is closing the gap between organisations – small and large, local and global, private and public – and working towards a common goal: using science and technology to deliver national security and prosperity. It was founded in 2017 as the innovation centre at Here East and is owned by clients of specialist real estate investment advisory company Delancey.

Providing bespoke consultancy services and state-of-the-art workspaces for over 1,000 innovators, Plexal sources the right partners from our ecosystem of 15,000 connections. It supports entrepreneurs, startups and scaleups building emerging technologies and operates across multiple sectors including cyber, healthcare, intelligence and defence, government, public safety, financial services and telecoms.

Expanding on its existing presence in London and Manchester, Plexal acquired a majority shareholding in Hub8 – the Cheltenham network of co-working spaces for cyber-tech, digital and creative startups and SMEs. This is part of an ongoing mission to build the UK’s most connected cyber ecosystem, with GCHQ’s more than 70-year heritage in Cheltenham.

Plexal delivers projects for key government departments and global tech companies including the National Cyber Security Centre, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Amazon Web Services and IBM. The NCSC For Startups alumni of over 60 companies has collectively raised over £430m and created over 700 jobs, while 72 cyber startups that have gone through Plexal’s LORCA accelerators have collectively raised over £300m, generated more than £68m in revenue and hired over 800 people.

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We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Thank you for your interest in Plexal. Please fill out the following short form. Should you have difficulties with the upload of your data, please send an email to recruitment@plexal.com. If you require this job advert in another format (e.g. large print), are unable to submit via the application below, or have any other accessibility requirements please email recruitment@plexal.com.