Senior Consultant – UK

Reporting to: Managing Director, UK

Location: UK (Remote / Hybrid working offered)

We are looking for an ambitious and high-performing Consultor sênior to join our UK team. You will combine strong consulting capability with a deep understanding of the UK water and wastewater sector, helping our clients address complex strategic, commercial, regulatory and operational challenges.

We are particularly interested in candidates who have developed their sector expertise within a water or wastewater company, water-related technology provider or contractor, regulator, investor, or consulting/advisory organisation serving the water sector.

About Isle

Isle is a UK-headquartered global consultancy. Our work spans technical, strategic, and client partnership advisory focused on navigating challenge and uncertainty across the water value chain, adjacent market sectors, and an all-assets framework.

Our client portfolios and market sectors:

• Water Utilities: Serves as Isle’s primary core market, focusing on asset performance, water resource resilience, innovation capability, trial-to-scale adoption, and delivery assurance.
• Regulation & Policy: Working with regulating bodies (such as Ofwat) and policy makers on independent evidence generation, programme design, sector learning, coordination, and policy interpretation.
• Technology Providers, Investors & Corporates: Providing market entry and validation services, technical and commercial due diligence, customer validation, and trial or deployment support for solutions.
• Industrial Water Users: Focused on water-intensive industries to advise on areas including water consumption, efficiency, and pollution management.

Our consulting Practice Areas:

•  Technical Advisory: Delivers physical asset management advisory, technical due diligence, technology roadmaps, resilience diagnostics, trial-to-scale support pathways and operational optimisation.
• Strategic Advisory: Focuses on operating model design, strategic asset-management health planning, regulatory response strategies, collaborative challenge and funding programmes, market and commercial advice, and challenge framing.
• Client Partnerships: Long term Innovation assurance partnerships, retained technology intelligence, portfolio management, and ecosystem orchestration through partnership approaches and peer to peer forums .

Purpose of the Role

As a Consultor sênior, your primary mandate is to OWN. At this level, you step up from delivering individual tasks to taking full ownership of workstreams, client relationships, and defined project outcomes. You work independently on complex problems, anticipate project issues early, and help make colleagues more effective.

Key Accountabilities Aligned to Isle’s Six Core Capabilities

All colleagues at Isle build evidence across six core capabilities. As a Senior Consultant, your responsibilities map directly to these areas:

1. Client & Market (Relationship Ownership &Value)

• Build Client Trust: Develop effective, ongoing relationships with key client counterparts, understanding their organisational context and drivers.
• Connect Analysis to Decisions: Ensure outputs clearly connect technical analysis to practical client decisions and measurable value.

2. Consulting & Technical Excellence (Specialist Guidance & Quality)

• Adapt Methodologies: Apply and adapt technical methods to specific project contexts, integrating complex evidence and data.
• Specialist Advice & Peer Review: Act as a reliable source of specialist guidance within the team, reviewing the work of junior consultants to ensure scientific rigour.

3. Delivery Excellence (Workstream Management)

• Independent Execution: Manage workstreams or smaller projects end-to-end, taking responsibility for plans, quality, risk management, and dependencies.
• Proactive Communication: Work independently on complex problems, anticipating potential delivery roadblocks and escalating issues early.

4. Commercial Excellence (Proposal & Scope Input)

• Proposal Support: Provide credible technical and commercial input to scopes of work, fee estimates, and proposal risk assessments.
• Personal Chargeability: Manage personal utilisation effectively and understand how efficient workstream delivery drives project margins.

5. People & Leadership (Support & Feedback)

• Knowledge Sharing: Support junior colleagues by explaining technical concepts clearly and sharing reusable tools and methods.
• Constructive Feedback: Provide day-to-day guidance, coaching, and constructive feedback to help team members improve their output.

6. Business Contribution (Reusable Assets & Insight)

• Building Intellectual Property: Capture project lessons, decision frameworks, and case studies to create reusable tools and playbooks for Isle.
• Market Insights: Contribute to market research, blogs, or client presentations that showcase Isle’s technical and market capabilities.

Essential experience

• Typically 5+ years of relevant professional experience, with a track record of delivering high-quality work in consulting, strategy, corporate development, regulation, investment, technology, infrastructure or the water sector.
• Demonstrable experience in the UK water and wastewater sector, gained through direct employment with a water company, technology provider, contractor, regulator, investor or specialist consultancy.
• A strong understanding of the UK water industry, including its regulatory, commercial and operational environment, and familiarity with the priorities and perspectives of water companies, Ofwat, the Environment Agency, government, investors, technology providers and the wider supply chain.
• Experience of working on strategic or commercially important projects, such as business strategy, market assessment, growth strategy, transformation, regulatory strategy, investment appraisal, performance improvement, operating model development, technology adoption or major infrastructure programmes.
• Strong quantitative and analytical capability, with the ability to interrogate data, identify meaningful insights, develop hypotheses and translate analysis into clear, evidence-based recommendations.
• Excellent research and synthesis skills, including the ability to rapidly understand unfamiliar topics, assess evidence from multiple sources and turn complex information into concise, compelling outputs.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience producing high-quality reports, presentations and client materials.
• Experience working directly with clients and senior stakeholders, with the confidence to build credibility, understand client needs and communicate challenging messages constructively.
• Experience managing your own workstreams, including defining the approach, structuring analysis, managing deadlines and ensuring high-quality outputs.
• Strong commercial awareness, including an understanding of how consulting engagements are scoped, resourced and delivered and, ideally, experience contributing to proposals or business development.
• Demonstrable ability to work effectively in small, multidisciplinary teams, collaborating with colleagues with different skills and perspectives.
• The ability to work independently and remotely, taking ownership of priorities and maintaining momentum without requiring close day-to-day supervision.

Personal skills

We are looking for someone who combines intellectual rigour with the interpersonal skills required to be an excellent consultant. In particular, you will demonstrate:

• Structured problem solving – able to break complex and ambiguous problems into manageable questions and develop logical, evidence-based solutions.
• Client management – able to establish trusted relationships, understand stakeholder priorities and communicate effectively with different audiences.
• Facilitation and presentation – confident facilitating engaging client workshops, presentations, design sprints and other interactive sessions. Able to communicate complex ideas clearly, engage diverse audiences, encourage constructive challenge and ensure sessions result in clear insights, decisions or actions.
• Engaging outward-facing communication – comfortable representing Isle in client meetings, industry events and other external settings, with the ability to deliver compelling presentations tailored to the audience.
• Collaboration – willing to share ideas, seek challenge and contribute positively to a high-performing team.
• Ownership and accountability – takes responsibility for delivering excellent work and follows through on commitments.
• Curiosity and learning agility – genuinely interested in understanding how organisations, markets and technologies work and able to learn quickly.
• Organisation and prioritisation – able to manage multiple priorities, work to demanding deadlines and maintain quality under pressure.
• Adaptability – comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where questions and priorities may change.
• Team contribution – contributes to the development of colleagues and to the wider success of the business, rather than focusing solely on individual project delivery.

Desirable experience

The following would strengthen an application:

• Experience working on UK water regulatory or strategic processes, including PR24/AMP8, business plans, performance commitments, regulatory submissions or related programmes.
• Experience across one or more of water resources, asset management, wastewater, water quality, environmental performance, digital/technology, infrastructure, regulation, investment or operational transformation.
• Experience with market analysis, financial modelling, business cases, benchmarking or investment analysis.
• Experience developing proposals, responding to tenders or contributing to business development.
• Experience presenting findings to Executive, Board, investor, regulator or other senior-level audiences.
• Experience designing or facilitating strategy workshops, stakeholder sessions, design sprints or innovation programmes.
• A relevant degree or postgraduate qualification. Professional qualifications are welcome but are not essential.

What Isle Commits To

• Clear performance expectations and honest, timely feedback.
• Access to meaningful stretch opportunities to support your progression toward Principal Consultant.
• Equal recognition for technical specialist authority and strategic business leadership.
• A flexible, supportive, and collaborative working environment.

Application Process

As an equal opportunities employer, we welcome applicants from all sections of the community regardless of age, sex, gender (or gender identity), ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and transgender status. If you have a disability and require reasonable adjustments during the application process, please let us know. All appointments are made on merit.

Interested?

To apply, please email [email protected] with your CV and a covering letter, stating your earliest possible starting date and confirming your right to work in the UK.

Closing Date: 21st October 2026. (We review applications on a rolling basis and reserve the right to close the advert early if a suitable candidate is identified.)

Your personal information
We will use the information you provide to assess your application and manage our recruitment process. Your personal data will be handled in accordance with UK data protection legislation and retained only for as long as necessary for recruitment purposes and any applicable legal obligations.