Talent Assessment & Skills Manager

Talent Assessment & Skills Manager

Because you can see how we can be better. Innovate, your way.

Talent at Primark

What’s a career at Primark all about? The positive impact you’re making, the experiences you’re having and the people you’re with. You’re our inspiration. Embrace what sets you apart, own your career and develop in ways you never expected. Leave your mark. And do it your way.

What You’ll Get:

The work you do shapes the impact we have. We’re focused on providing you with the culture to reach your potential. Your wellbeing is our top priority.

Lifestyle at Primark: Healthcare, pension, and potential bonus. 27 days of leave, plus bank holidays and if you want, you can buy 5 more. Because Primark is all about tailoring to you, we offer Tax Saver Tickets, fitness centre, and a subsidised cafeteria.

This role is a hybrid opportunity, offering 1-2 days Working from home.

What You’ll Do:

In your role, you’ll collaborate with different people across a range of skillsets. Here’s a flavour of your day-to-day:

Purpose of the Role 

The Talent Assessment and Skills Manager is responsible for designing, governing, and continuously improving the organisation’s approach to talent assessment and skills. 

This role ensures that senior leadership and potential assessments are scientifically robust, inclusive and support development as well as selection decisions.  This includes enabling individuals to gain meaningful insight and grow capability while generating high-quality data for organisational decision making. 

In parallel, the role is responsible for the skills ontology and skills governance framework, establishing a single, trusted foundation for skills data across people, jobs, learning, and careers. This includes leveraging technologies and AI where appropriate to improve skills visibility, workforce intelligence and colleague growth experiences. 

Talent Assessment Responsibilities 

• Lead the design, development, and delivery of key leadership assessment projects – including implementing robust methods to identify high-potential colleagues at senior leadership levels, including quality feedback. 

• Lead the selection, implementation, and ongoing validation of psychometric and skills-based assessment tools, ensuring high standards of reliability, validity, fairness, and inclusivity. 

• Partner closely with key external vendors, evaluating their offerings and shaping impactful assessment solutions for use in selection and as part of development programmes. 

• Implement innovative platforms and tools to streamline senior talent assessment processes.  

• Work closely with stakeholders to understand business needs, tailor assessments to specific business requirements, create buy-in and collaboration to deliver results together 

• Provide analysis of group data trends to inform talent decisions; partnering with the Leadership & Change team on development initiatives grounded in insights. 

• Maintain compliance with legal, ethical and regulatory requirements related to talent assessment and management. 

Skills Responsibilities 

• Define, build, and maintain a robust skills ontology/framework, including skill definitions, proficiency levels, and links to roles and learning. 

• Establish and maintain skills governance, including clear principles, decision rights, and update cycles for skills data. 

• Partner closely with key external vendors, evaluating their offerings and shaping their use as part of our broader skills strategy.  

• Provide the latest thinking on skills-based organisations as well as insights into labour market trends and emerging skills. 

• Partner with internal teams, including Technology, to embed skills data into job architecture, colleague profiles, learning pathways, and career frameworks. 

• Provide guidance and leverage skills data to support workforce planning, internal mobility and personalised development. 

• Build internal buy-in and capability through guidance, training, and clear business cases for skills-based talent decisions and colleague experiences. 

Develop and embed a robust skills framework by defining and maintaining skills ontology, governance, and data integration across systems, while enabling workforce planning, internal mobility, personalised development, and building organisational capability through training and advocacy.

What You’ll Bring:

Here at Primark, we want everyone to feel valued – so please bring your authentic self to work, of course with some other key experience and abilities for this role in particular:

• Significant expertise in occupational psychology, senior leadership assessment, and skills focused roles.  

• Degree in psychology, occupational psychology, HR, or a related field. 

• Expertise in developing and deploying global skills frameworks/ontologies, and utilising skills data for learning, careers, mobility and workforce planning.   

• Track record of landing innovative assessment solutions into complex, matrixed organisations. 

• Proven ability to manage multiple tasks and projects simultaneously with sound judgment skills. 

• Experience working with HR technology platforms, talent marketplaces, or skills intelligence tools; comfortable working with AI-enabled tools and platforms, with a critical understanding of strengths, limitations, and governance requirements. 

• Highly adaptable, curious, and comfortable operating in evolving and ambiguous environments. 

• Amazing people partner who can influence and collaborate effectively across multiple levels of leadership. 

• Passion for coaching and developing people.

Ready? Good - because we can’t wait to see what you can offer. You’ll be joining a team of innovative and experienced people where you’ll truly belong, collaborating on projects that will shape the future of our industry. Apply to be part of our future and we’ll support you in developing yours.

About Primark

At Primark, people matter. They’re the beating heart of our business and the reason we’ve grown from our first store in Dublin in 1969 to a £9bn+ turnover business a over 80,000 colleagues and over 440 stores in 17 countries today. Our values run through everything we do. In essence, we're Caring and always strive to put people first. We're also Dynamic, bravely pushing the boundaries to stay ahead. And finally, we succeed Together.

#Li-Hybrid