Lead, Information Security

Job Title:

Principle, Information Security
- Operational Resilience

CF: OCTO

Function: GRC, Cybersecurity

Career Arch: Technology / Security / Information Security

Tier: E35 (to start as the person does not have a team) and then M38 when they hire a team - hire for an M38

Title: Principle, Information Security
- Operational Resilience

Reports to: Kate Beverly

Location: London, UK

Build resilience into the way Pearson operates. Define what must keep running. Give leaders confidence in disruption.

Pearson is seeking a Principle, Information Security -
Operational Resilience to establish and lead its central Operational Resilience capability. This is a highly visible enterprise role responsible for defining the framework, governance, and operating rhythm needed to sustain Pearson's most critical services through major disruption. The role will lead the development of the Minimum Viable Company approach, set standards for planning and exercising, coordinate activity across business and technology teams, and provide executives with credible, evidence-based assurance on resilience readiness.

The ideal candidate will be an experienced resilience, continuity, or risk leader who can bring structure to an evolving environment, navigate complexity with confidence, and influence across a large matrixed organisation. This role requires someone who can translate resilience concepts into practical operating requirements, align business, technology, cyber, supplier, and crisis stakeholders, and establish a capability that is credible to senior leadership and practical for operational teams.

As a senior leader at Pearson, you will be expected to embody and role model our leadership dimensions. You will align the resilience capability to Pearson's purpose and strategy, simplify complexity into clear operational priorities, build a collaborative and high-performing culture, and deliver measurable results. This role requires visible leadership, sound judgement in ambiguity, and the ability to bring people together across business, technology, risk, and security around a shared understanding of what matters most in disruption.

• Define and own the long-term vision, strategy, and implementation roadmap for Operational Resilience at Pearson, moving the organisation from fragmented planning to a credible enterprise capability with clear standards, effective governance, and demonstrable readiness.
• Translate resilience concepts into a practical operating model for a complex global business, creating clarity on critical services, minimum acceptable service levels, prioritisation, tolerances, and recovery sequencing.
• Act as a senior subject matter leader for operational resilience and continuity, bringing thought leadership, external awareness, and disciplined execution to how Pearson matures its capability.
• Lead a shift in how Pearson approaches resilience by moving the focus from document collection alone to service-level understanding, tested recovery capability, decision-useful data, and practical executive assurance.

• Own and maintain Pearson's enterprise operational resilience framework, associated standards, policy requirements, templates, governance forums, and reporting mechanisms needed to run the capability effectively and consistently.
• Lead the development and ongoing refinement of Pearson's Minimum Viable Company approach, ensuring the organisation can articulate the minimum operating state required to continue safely, legally, and sustainably through severe disruption.
• Define and oversee the methodology for identifying critical services, important processes, recovery priorities, and service tolerances, including the relationship between business requirements, technology recovery, supplier dependencies, and crisis decision-making.
• Ensure resilience requirements are governed in a proportionate, practical, and auditable way, with clear accountability for plan ownership, review cycles, evidence retention, remediation tracking, and executive escalation.

• Oversee the creation, refresh, quality, and maintenance of continuity and resilience plans across the enterprise, ensuring they are aligned to service priorities and usable in practice rather than static documentation.
• Design and lead a structured annual exercise and testing programme, including tabletop simulations, targeted service-level recovery tests, cross-functional scenario walkthroughs, and lessons-learned reviews.
• Translate testing into measurable assurance by tracking outcomes, remediation actions, residual risks, and evidence that recovery assumptions have been validated for leadership and audit purposes.
• Provide regular executive reporting on resilience maturity, plan coverage, testing progress, critical dependency risks, unresolved issues, and overall readiness, ensuring leaders receive decision-useful insight rather than…