Portfolio Manager, Commissioning

This role offers an exciting opportunity to shape the future of higher education learning by managing a portfolio of market-leading educational products. Working at the intersection of publishing, technology, and pedagogy, you will use your understanding of the higher education landscape to identify opportunities for new content, develop digital-first product strategies, and ensure our resources continue to meet the evolving needs of students and educators. With a strong focus on innovation and student outcomes, you will help drive growth, digital transformation, and market impact across your portfolio. As Portfolio Manager, you will combine market insight, customer understanding, and commercial awareness to acquire new content, optimise existing products, and build compelling proposals for future product releases. You will work closely with colleagues across editorial, product, sales, marketing, and technology teams to develop content strategies that align with organisational goals and deliver measurable value. Alongside managing project budgets and financial performance, you will negotiate author contracts, identify opportunities to maximise intellectual property, and ensure resources remain competitive in an evolving educational market. Success in this role will be built on strong relationship management and collaboration skills. You will develop trusted partnerships with authors, faculty advocates, and key stakeholders, using their insights to inform product development and strengthen market positioning. Comfortable influencing across teams and engaging directly with customers, you will champion high-quality, digitally enabled learning experiences that enhance teaching effectiveness, support student success, and reinforce our reputation for excellence in educational publishing. This is a 12-month fixed term contract. We operate a hybrid working policy that requires a minimum of 2 days per week in the Oxford office.

• Previous experience of educational publishing, ideally in a Higher Education context.
• Proven track record of strong project management, cost/budget management, successful innovation, and consistent delivery of goals.
• Highly literate and numerate.
• Strong organizational, time management, and prioritization skills.
• Proven ability to work well on your own initiative, and to be proactive in solving problems.
• Able to demonstrate excellent attention to detail at all times.
• Experience of building, maintaining and utilizing networks within the publishing industry and relevant academic/professional communities.
• Ability to work cross-functionally in a productive manner (including within a matrix management structure) towards a common purpose and good.
• Excellent written communication as well as strong interpersonal and verbal skills.
  
  We are the world's largest university press. That means we serve the academic community as no other publisher can. We work in partnership with institutions and learned societies to bring a world of knowledge to the fingertips of students and researchers worldwide.
The goal is impact. Together with our academic communities, we curate and seamlessly connect together the ideas that push their fields forward, so they can learn from them, add to them, and continue a virtuous cycle of scholarship. And because we are a part of the academic community and guided in everything we do by our mission, we re-invest in our people, our publishing, and the world-leading research institution of which we are part.

We care about work/life balance here at OUP. With this in mind we offer 25 days' holiday that rises with service, plus bank holidays and Christmas closure (3-days) and a 35-hour working week. We are open to discussing flexibility in respect to working patterns, dependent on role. We also have a great variety of active employee networks and societies. We help make your money go further by contributing to your pension up to 12%, offering loans and savings schemes through our partnership with Salary Finance, in addition to travel to work schemes and access to a wide range of local discounts. This role comes with the added benefit of a discretionary annual payment.