Senior Planner Nuclear BU
Arcadis · United Kingdom
Arcadis is the world's leading company delivering sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets.
We are more than 34,000 people, in over 30 countries, dedicated to improving quality of life. Everyone has an important role to play. With the power of many curious minds, together we can solve the world’s most complex challenges and deliver more impact together.
Role description:
We work to protect our natural environment, water resources, and energy systems while helping to power our world for future generations. Around the world, communities are experiencing the effects of climate change, rapid urbanisation, and biodiversity loss. Large-scale, unforeseen events such as floods and wildfires are becoming more frequent, increasing the need for resilient and sustainable solutions.
The Nuclear programmes we support require strong project and programme controls capability, with planning acting as a key integrator across cost, risk, change, and delivery functions. Lead Planners play a central role in enabling governance, assurance, and decision-making in complex and highly regulated environments.
Arcadis is seeking flexible, dynamic individuals who meet UK nationality and security requirements. This role requires candidates who are eligible to obtain and maintain up to Security Clearance (SC). Supporting confidential clients and working on highly challenging and rewarding programmes, the role requires strong analytical capability and a structured, governance-led approach.
Role accountabilities:
As a Lead Planner within the Nuclear team, you will be required to:
- Lead the development, integration, maintenance, and assurance of project and programme schedules, ensuring they are robust, logic-linked, auditable, and aligned to scope, delivery strategy, governance requirements, and reporting cycles.
- Establish and maintain effective planning standards, processes, and schedule management controls that support consistent delivery, baseline integrity, and assurance readiness across the programme.
- Own schedule baseline management, progress update routines, change impact assessment, and schedule traceability, ensuring changes are controlled, understood, and reflected accurately in the integrated plan.
- Drive integration between planning, cost, risk, change, scope, and reporting functions to maintain a coherent project controls baseline and a clear performance narrative.
- Provide schedule assurance and constructive challenge across discipline, area, supplier, contractor, and delivery partner programmes, testing logic, assumptions, compliance, constraints, interdependencies, and forecast credibility.
- Lead planning input to governance forums, integrated baseline reviews, schedule quality assessments, change control reviews, readiness reviews, and performance assurance activities.
- Analyse schedule performance, critical path, trends, float, interfaces, risks, opportunities, and emerging variances to provide clear advice on delivery confidence, impacts, mitigations, and recovery options.
- Lead or coordinate planning inputs to reporting packs, dashboards, senior stakeholder briefings, and governance submissions, translating complex schedule data into concise, evidence-based insight.
- Oversee contract-driven planning activities, including review of supplier and contractor programme submissions, acceptance criteria, reporting obligations, schedule updates, and compliance with contractual planning requirements.
- Support delivery strategy, programme phasing, option development, business case input, investment decision making, and scenario planning through robust schedule analysis and planning insight.
- Facilitate planning workshops with multidisciplinary stakeholders to agree scope, logic, sequencing, assumptions, dependencies, constraints, interfaces, milestones, and decision points.
- Provide line management, coaching, and development support to planners, including setting clear objectives, reviewing performance, guiding workload priorities, supporting career development, and building planning capability across the team.
- Champion continuous improvement in planning processes, tools, schedule quality, reporting outputs, and ways of working, ensuring lessons learned and good practice are embedded across the team.
- The scope of accountability will be aligned to experience and programme needs, ranging from schedule assurance through to integrated controls leadership.
Qualifications & Experience:
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in planning, project controls, engineering, construction, programme management, or a related discipline.
- Hold, or be working towards, a relevant professional qualification or chartered status, such as APM, ACostE, PMI, CIOB, RICS, or equivalent.
- Demonstrable experience leading the development, integration, management, and assurance of project or programme schedules within complex delivery environments.
- Strong working knowledge of planning tools such as Primavera P6, Asta Powerproject, or Microsoft Project, including the ability to interpret, assure, and constructively challenge detailed schedules produced across multiple delivery disciplines.
- Experience applying planning governance, baseline management, change control, progress measurement, schedule quality analysis, and reporting processes.
- Experience reviewing supplier, contractor, or delivery partner programmes within structured contract environments, including NEC or similar forms of contract.
- Strong understanding of integrated project controls, including the relationship between schedule, cost, risk, change, scope, and reporting.
- Proven ability to engage confidently with multidisciplinary stakeholders, facilitate planning workshops, explain schedule performance, and support evidence-based decision-making.
- Experience line managing, coaching, mentoring, or supporting the development of planners or wider planning capability across teams.
- Experience in nuclear, defence, energy, infrastructure, or other highly regulated sectors.
- Familiarity with Managing Successful Programmes (MSP), programme lifecycle governance, and programme-level planning approaches.
- Experience using schedule risk analysis, critical path analysis, earned value, or other performance measurement techniques to inform delivery confidence.
- Knowledge of reporting, business intelligence, document control, or data management tools used to support integrated planning and project controls.
- Experience supporting governance, audit, independent assurance, or readiness review processes.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication capability, with the ability to translate complex schedule information into clear delivery insight.
Why Arcadis?
We can only achieve our goals when everyone is empowered to be their best. We believe everyone's contribution matters. It’s why we are pioneering a skills-based approach, where you can harness your unique experience and expertise to carve your career path and maximize the impact we can make together.
You’ll do meaningful work, and no matter what role, you’ll be helping to deliver sustainable solutions for a more prosperous planet. Make your mark, on your career, your colleagues, your clients, your life and the world around you.
Together, we can create a lasting legacy.
Join Arcadis. Create a Legacy.
Our Commitment to Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
We want you to be able to bring your best self to work every day which is why we take equality and inclusion seriously and hold ourselves to account for our actions. Our ambition is to be an employer of choice and provide a great place to work for all our people. We believe that by working together diverse people with different experiences develop the most innovative ideas. Equality, diversity and inclusion is at the heart of how we improve quality of life and we work closely with our people across six ED&I Workstreams: Age, Disability, Faith, Gender, LGBT+ and Race. A diverse and skilled workforce is essential to our success.