We are hiring: Associate Program Manager

About The Synergist

The Synergist is a social venture that addresses a growing need to collectively face societal issues by addressing broken or inefficient systems and accelerating societal (co-)impact.

With globalization, the digital age, and increased mobility, we now have collectively more knowledge, capability, and capacity to solve the world’s most challenging social issues than ever before. But complex issues can’t be solved in isolation. The sheer number, variety, and interests of stakeholders on any given issue make it difficult to focus everyone’s expertise and resources on a shared goal.

The Synergist is an independent, neutral backbone and incubator for societal issues. It brings together the right people, organizations, and institutions to focus on solving societal issues both personally and with technology tools. We foster an organized and collaborative environment that enables collective impact by: co-defining a shared vision, goals and strategies with members; bringing on board relevant partners; establishing and maintaining a transparent and balanced governance structure; coordinating and driving activities and bringing to life concrete projects and solutions that have been shaped with and complemented by members.

The Synergist is a globally focused organisation based in Brussels, Belgium.

2021 annual report: https://www.thesynergist.org/annual-report-2021/index.html

Your role

The Program Management team is responsible for driving the Synergist programs on a day-to day-basis, including setting the long and mid-term strategy, designing and executing program activities, mobilizing internal team members and external stakeholders, and developing competencies and new opportunities.

As the Associate Program Manager you will support and provide scalability to the Program Managers and Program Directors, with an emphasis on helping to ensure that the day to day activities run smoothly, on time and to a high quality standard. This means a variety of things from purely project management responsibilities to participating and delivering tasks, organising meetings and logistics, engaging with partners and collaborators and handling other project work. The Program Coordinator acts as the main user of the Synergist’s programme specific online platforms ensuring the high quality of usability, engagement and content.

Responsibilities

● Confidently assists the Program Management team in delivering the best possible

results for the Program(s). Program management activities include but are not limited to

○ stakeholder engagement,

○ hands-on support for the co-creation of sustainable targeted solutions to

societal issues and ensuring good governance within programs,

○ leading meeting and events preparations, and

○ mobilization of educational campaigns.

● Works with the Programs Director and Programs Manager to put in place an efficient and agile project management structure, and co-leads planning and progress update meetings, helping the team to define the next priorities and tasks, flagging potential issues as they occur

● Takes ownership of the organisational project management tool (Asana) and responsible for ensuring its optimal usage to track the team’s progress on projects

● Takes charge of event planning/organisation by handling every aspect of it (i.e. coordinating travel and hotel bookings, helping to prepare meeting materials, taking minutes of the meeting and helping to create a meeting report, etc.) with minimal supervision.

● Acts as a Community Manager and together with other community managers shares the responsibilities of managing and growing one or more Synergist online platforms (e.g. the Synapse mapping and networking tool). This includes working with the IT team to ensure the best usability, assisting users in various needs (e.g. giving demonstrations to new users, helping with onboarding and answering community questions, adding and maintaining quality checks for user-content, participating in development of new features and helping to grow the number of active users)

● Adopts a Synergist mindset, aspiring to deliver excellence with an agile, collaborative, positive, proactive attitude.

The successful candidate will be expected to:

● Have an educational background equivalent to at least a Bachelor’s degree coupled with 1-2 years of working experience, OR 3-5 years of working experience in a quickly

changing environment in project coordination and management

● Have a keen interest in shared value initiatives

● Have an excellent command of written and spoken English, and excellent

communication skills

● Have prior business experience and be comfortable with working directly with senior or executive level employees and partners (project management, program management, stakeholder engagement, partnership management, client service)

● Have the ability to think conceptually and connect the dots to form an overview of projects and situations

● Have advanced technical skills (advanced user of MS Suite, Google Suite, ERP or CRM

tools, etc.) and be able to learn and adopt new technologies fast

● Have a solutions-oriented and innovative approach with a can-do attitude

● Be a self-starter who has a track record in handling multiple simultaneous projects at the same time without jeopardising delivery timeline or quality of outcomes

● Be stimulated by challenges and have a positive, proactive, can-do problem-solving mindset

● Be detail-oriented, very well organized, and at ease with balancing many conflicting priorities at once

● Be able to adapt to quickly changing priorities and environments and be able to handle and perform under pressure

● Be curious and open-minded, open to new ideas, concepts and people

● Have excellent academic credentials

Preferred:

● An EU work permit

● Experience working in the healthcare or environmental sector

● Professional or personal experience in social entrepreneurship or corporate social

responsibility

● Experience in EU and other funding systems for societal projects

● Fluency in one or more foreign languages

What's In It for You:

● The opportunity to work with global profit and not-for-profit players to address societal needs (like patient engagement, epidemics management, women's health, rare diseases etc);

● The opportunity to join a dedicated, dynamic, diverse and fun team that works to develop innovative and efficient programs aimed at solving challenges which others ignore or have been unable to resolve;

● Learn about societal issues and be part in helping to solve them

● The chance to constantly develop and refine new skills as The Synergist develops new partnerships and innovative ideas.

● Successful Associate Program Managers who wish to grow at The Synergist will have the opportunity to develop into Program Managers.

See the  origin story of the Synergist by Nicholas Brooke

Co-creation and collective intelligence in practice (Patient Engagement Open Forum)

Please send your  your CV and Cover Letter in English to matt@thesynergist.org