About the company: 

Our client is an educational services and products provider headquartered in Dubai, U.A.E. that offers scholarly content to academic institutions throughout the Middle East and North Africa and delivers bespoke trainings for institutional clients. 

The Partnership Relation Manager will join a great and fast-moving team and a growing company with a progressive and inclusive culture. Today they are over 50 colleagues. This will be the first pure partnership relations role, meaning you need to have a high degree of self-leadership. It also means you will play a crucial role in the success of the partnership relations role. Our headquarters is in Dubai, United Arab Emirates but this role could work from anywhere in the world.

What are we looking for

We are looking for a dynamic individual to handle partner relations for the company. The Partnership Relations Manager looks after the relationships with all third parties such as publishers and other providers who deliver content or solutions for inclusion. Our client is looking for someone who likes to build lasting connections with people and someone who will be instrumental in managing, maintaining and expanding direct partnerships across the product offerings. The Partnership Relation Manager’s main goal is to create and maintain strong and effective relationships with all the providers, covering all aspects involved.

This position will require a detail-oriented, confident and flexible team player who has very strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to produce strong reports on the progress. As the first point of contact for our partners, your position will act as a “knowledge center” to provide support to existing partners of all sizes and stages.

Skills: 

• A self-starting team player who can work independently and excellent in communication
• Aligned with our values: learning, authenticity and inclusion
• Sensitive to confidential information and material

What you will do

• Establish strong relations with publishers and other partners, becoming a trusted advisor
• Manage partner onboarding
• Manage the day-to-day relationship with partners through regularly scheduled outreach
• Coordinate and organise all provider materials including orders and contracts
• Understand and analyses revenue performance, provide meaningful insights to our partners derived from data. Identify, track and report partner KPIs
• Collaborate with partners to develop and establish new market efficiencies and digital business models
• Facilitate partner understanding of, engagement with, and reliance on our products and services through creative relationship building

• Act as the primary liaison between departments (i.e. tech, content, marketing) to make sure all needs are met in a timely manner

• Implement and oversee effective procedures and company systems to scale the partnerships department and build out efficient communication channels between necessary departments
• You will be in charge of growing the direct provider partnerships by identifying new content partnership opportunities including sourcing, analysis, and negotiating these deals - as well as day-to-day management of these relationships. You need to deeply understand their business to navigate an ever-evolving ecosystem. A successful candidate will proactively identify partnership opportunities, and take ownership of all deal-making and relationship management throughout the life cycle of a partner. This role will have strong relationship-management skills, and will be able to act as the face of the company with our external partners. This is a unique and exciting opportunity to work with top tier publishers and to grow and nourish an established network.
  

Qualifications:

• Background and/or experience in publishing and/or educational technology
• Strong interpersonal and organised skills
• Entrepreneurial spirit
• Curious, analytical, and adaptable problem-solving skills
• Ability to collaborate with and influence external and internal partners
• Track record of launching and managing successful partnerships
• Experience in administration and account management
• Experience of working with various types of contracts
• Understanding of the Open Access publishing landscape

Desired extras

• Knowledge and appreciation of the advances in digital publishing
• Experience building financial models and using them to assess KPIs for a partner

• BA/BS degree in Business Administration, Communications or relevant field