Director of Digital & IT (CDIO)

Some career opportunities stand out from the crowd: offering greater scope and challenge and a wider remit where your skills can flourish. This role presents the opportunity to draw on your professional expertise and take on a wider corporate perspective as part of Reading’s leadership team

This will be a pivotal leadership role in defining and delivering an ambitious and bespoke digital strategy for Reading BC, harnessing the full potential of technology to enable our staff to deliver even better outcomes for our residents.

As a part of the Council’s Senior Leadership Group, you will be integral to organisational decision-making, drawing on your professional insight to support all service areas in their use of technology to create greater capacity and more efficient delivery models.

You will establish a clear and ambitious digital strategy, bringing together technology, data, information governance and service transformation within a coherent roadmap for delivery. You’ll help to establish Digital and IT as a strategic corporate partner within the organisation, ensuring a proactive approach and early engagement with customers enables your team to add maximum value and bring their professional and technical expertise to bear at the early stages of service design.

Success in this role will be as much about people and culture as it is about technology. You will help lead organisational change, building confidence in new ways of working and fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration and continuous improvement. We are looking for a leader who can bring people with them through change, build trust across the organisation and ensure digital becomes a genuine enabler of transformation.

Ongoing professional development will be a vital ingredient in embedding this approach, and you’ll foster this commitment across your team – identifying and nurturing talent and creating opportunities for people to develop and diversify their skills.

We expect that you will already have leadership experience in a multi-disciplinary setting where you have successfully brought about transformation and established your credentials as a strategic advisor and enabler. It’s important that you have a pragmatic and informed appreciation of the complexity and diversity of local authority service provision, and the need for different approaches in different settings.

We’re also looking for someone who has good commercial awareness and an understanding of the principles of effective contract management.

This a role with real potential. Your contribution can make a real difference to how the Council operates and what we can achieve for our residents. It’s a career opportunity that you won’t want to miss.

Visit www.team-reading.co.uk or contact Steve Guest at Solace in Business on 020 7976 3311 for a confidential discussion.

Closing date: 21st September 2026