Advanced Specialist, Project Manager

Pearson is the world's lifelong learning company, helping people build skills and transform their lives. The Advanced Specialist, Project Manager role focuses on managing the delivery and governance of statewide English language assessments in Texas and Arizona, ensuring effective project control and coordination across various teams.

Responsibilities:

• Lead delivery, governance and operational control across the TELPAS and MOWR statewide assessment programmes — managing contractual milestones, SOW deliverables, scoring-service dependencies, risk, budget and reporting obligations
• Maintain delivery cadence across recurring annual cycles, live administrations, Versant AI engine-training windows and validation reporting
• Own programme and project control: governance, RAID logs, dashboards and KPIs, with clear escalation of risks and issues
• Coordinate across Versant AI Scoring Services, R&D, Test Development, Psychometrics, Engineering, Scoring Operations and Finance, plus external delivery partners
• Coordinate the managed exit from the AZELLA contract — document archiving, lessons-learned and controlled data-deletion — while keeping ongoing programmes on track
• Choose and adapt the right delivery approach (waterfall, Agile or hybrid), run retrospectives and lessons-learned, and support quality initiatives including ISO 9001 and ISO 27001
• Coach colleagues in effective project management tools, disciplines and ways of working
• As the role expands, support delivery across the wider PTE portfolio and contribute to government recognition and bidding activity

Requirements:

• Proven experience delivering complex projects or programmes, ideally in education, assessment or regulated environments
• Comfort managing contractual delivery — SOW milestones, deliverables and reporting obligations — ideally in public-sector or statewide assessment contexts
• A strong grasp of project governance, risk and issue management, and dependency planning
• Confidence operating in global, cross-functional, matrixed teams, working alongside technical and psychometric colleagues
• Fluency across both traditional and Agile / hybrid delivery approaches
• A project management qualification (e.g. PMP/PMI, PRINCE2, M_o_R, Agile, equivalent) is required and we're also looking for good experience running complex, cross-functional initiatives