OHL Strategic Planner

National Grid are recruiting a new and exciting OHL Strategic Planner to join our ET Property Team!

They are responsible for driving the optimisation, prioritisation, resourcing, and scheduling of a multi-year strategic plan, ensuring clear alignment between long-term objectives, the tactical year-ahead programme, and the rolling 0–1-year operational plan.

A key focus of the role will be to integrate new teams, capabilities and workstreams into established planning systems, ensuring they are effectively embedded across strategic, tactical and operational planning timescales. This includes strengthening interfaces with emerging stakeholders, improving visibility of demand and constraints, and driving continuous improvement across existing planning processes to enhance consistency, efficiency and delivery performance.

Through a proactive and strategic approach, they maximise campaign efficiency across sites by intelligently bundling outage and non-outage activities, minimising disruption while enhancing delivery outcomes. By shaping and continuously refining the forward portfolio, they enable the most effective use of operational time and resources, directly supporting the achievement of area performance targets and overall organisational success.

This role will require some travel to National Grid offices and operational sites. We’re happy to discuss any additional flexibility in working patterns or requirements that you feel could help to make this job work for you!

What You'll Do

Strategic (Multi-year) Plan Management

• Support the Planning & Performance Manager and Network Outcomes in building a deliverable strategic plan, translating long-term requirements into a workable portfolio.
• Ensure area non-outage work allocation and emerging risk-based maintenance are reflected across the multi-year timescales and fed into the tactical year-ahead plan.
• Escalate work not delivered / planning action from operational timescales into the tactical and strategic plan cycles, maintaining a clear audit trail of deferrals and constraints.
• Provide updated standard job times and unit costs into strategic/tactical planning assumptions and support scenario planning for resource and outage availability.
• Review and ensure trained and competent resource assumptions are built into the strategic plan, highlighting capability gaps and required interventions.

Operational (0 1-year) Plan Management

• Consult on planning changes within 0 1-year timescales, liaising with Asset Management, Strategy Manager and Network Outcomes for any System Operator review needed.
• Maintain regular contact with Operations Managers, Team Engineers, Project Engineers and Project Leaders to review strategic delivery plans.
• Identify opportunities to bundle outage and non-outage work to optimise efficiency.
• Resolve escalated planning deliverability risks and re-prioritise work not delivered.
• Confirm trained and competent staff are allocated to work delivery and prioritise work using all available information (e.g., monetarised risk).
• Ensure timely risk assessments are initiated to Network Outcomes after assessing impacts from constraints and mitigating actions where maintenance has been deferred, and review/sign off demand at risk within 12-week timescales.
• Track work delivery for the zone and assist with reporting on deliverables across all OHL portfolios, ensuring Outage and Non-Outage Maintenance Compliance targets are met.

What You'll Have

• Minimum ONC (GNVQ level 3) in an Electrical or Mechanical Engineering discipline or relevant experience in a previous role.
• Full UK Driving Licence.
• Knowledge of planning processes and systems e.g. Ellipse/Maximo, DWM, Digital Planning Tool (DPT) and eNAMS etc.
• Establish and implement planning systems to add new workstreams and stakeholders to the OHL Planning portfolio across all timescales
• A good understanding of Asset Maintenance policy and application, with ability to translate strategic drivers into deliverable work scopes.
• Able to allocate resource requirements in line with utilisation and commercial targets using standard job times; confident in forward resource and outage profiling.
• Ability to bundle work during delivery including outage and non-outage, and to shape work banks to maximise campaign efficiency.
• Knowledge of National Grid Safety Rules, National Safety Instructions and Working Procedures.
• Ability to manage and prioritise conflicts in real time; communicate complex issues and their resolution to stakeholders.
• Ability to multitask and prioritise; manage resource plans and other constraints in an operational environment; proven flexibility to adapt positively to change.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply for jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At National Grid, we are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace for everyone. So, if you’re excited about this role but your experience or qualifications don’t match the job description exactly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You might just be the right person for our growing business in this role or another one.

What You'll Get

Salary up to £54,090 dependent on experience.

Plus:

• Annual Bonus (based on personal and company performance) and annual salary review.
• Competitive contributory pension scheme (we double-match your contribution to a max company contribution of 12%.
• 26 days holiday (plus the opportunity to buy more each year).
• Life Insurance at 10 x your basic salary.
• Financial support to help cover the cost of professional membership subscriptions, course fees, books, exam fees and time off for study leave – relevant to your role.
• Family care benefits including a back-up care service for when your usual care arrangements fall through (six paid days each year as standard with the option to purchase further days).
• Access to apps which support health, fitness and wellbeing.
• Career development, ongoing training and support, career progression and plenty of opportunity to progress!

Further Information

The closing date for this vacancy is midnight 2 July 26, with interviews due to take place w/c 6 July 26 onwards. We encourage candidates to submit their applications as early as possible and not to wait until the published closing date. National Grid’s recruitment periods can and may vary. We reserve the right to remove this advert or close it to further applications at any point during the recruitment process.

About us

Every day we deliver safe and secure energy to homes, communities, and businesses. We are there when people need us the most. We connect people to the energy they need for the lives they live. The pace of change in society and our industry is accelerating and our expertise and track record puts us in an unparalleled position to shape the sustainable future of our industry. To be successful we must anticipate the needs of our customers, reducing the cost of energy delivery today and pioneering the flexible energy systems of tomorrow. This requires us to deliver on our promises and always look for new opportunities to grow, both ourselves and our business

At National Grid, we work towards the highest standards in everything we do, including how we support, value and develop our people. Our aim is to encourage and support employees to thrive and be the best they can be. We celebrate the difference people can bring into our organisation, and welcome and encourage applicants with diverse experiences and backgrounds, and offer flexible and tailored support, at home and in the office. Our goal is to drive, develop and operate our business in a way that results in a more inclusive culture. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, the innovation from diverse teams & perspectives and business need. We are committed to building a workforce so we can represent the communities we serve and have a working environment in which each individual feels valued, respected, fairly treated, and able to reach their full potential.

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