Head of Operations: Visitor Services and Security

Head of Operations: Visitor Services and Security Visitor and Security Services

Full-time, 41 hours per week (including one hour paid lunch break)
Permanent

£75,185 per annum

Application deadline: 12pm (midday) on Wednesday 7 May 2025

We are seeking an exceptional professional to oversee all visitor services and security activities and provide strong leadership and culture change.

The British Museum's collection is the most remarkable in the world. The first public national museum in (and about) the world, the Museum's eight million artefacts make it the largest and most comprehensive collection, spanning two million years of human history and art across all cultures, from prehistory to today.

We were founded in 1753 on an ingenious and generous premise which remains relevant: that everyone should have free access to a complete history of human knowledge and endeavour. Three centuries on, we seek, as we always have, to make that ideal real.

This is an exciting time for the British Museum. We are embarking on our Western Range project - one of the biggest museum redevelopment projects anywhere in the world. This physical transformation is in the service of an intellectual transformation. We are rethinking how we display our collection - the most holistic and ambitious redisplay in the Museum's history. We have appointed world-renowned architect Lina Ghotmeh to rejuvenate and redevelop our Western Range - accounting for over a third of our galleries.

This will be the biggest building project the Museum has undertaken since the Victorian era - indeed it will be one of the biggest and most exciting cultural renovations in the world. And that makes it a uniquely exciting time to join the Museum.

We are also designing a new visitor welcome experience that will open in summer 2026 to give our visitors the welcome they deserve; whilst embarking on a 4 year programme of works to build a new energy centre, helping us achieve net zero.

The British Museum is proud to be one of the world's most visited museums. In 2024, its home in Camden received 6.5 million visitors, more than any other museum in the UK.

You will be responsible for developing a visitor experiences strategy to embed a visitor centric culture which delivers brilliant visitor experience, whilst keeping visitors, colleagues, the collection and building safe and secure.

You will be an inspirational, inclusive and collaborative leader with senior management experience in a similar role in a customer-facing industry, and the ability to successfully lead and motivate diverse teams. You will have achieved outstanding results and be able to demonstrate a resourceful and flexible approach when faced with obstacles.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the visitor services and security teams to deliver excellent visitor experience, and a safe and secure provision
• Maintain a clear understanding of the security threats to the Museum, liaising with the external security services as necessary in order to keep abreast of changing security threat levels and risks, and ensuring that the Museum's processes and procedures are adapted accordingly and regularly tested.
• Take responsibility for the communication of security issues across the Museum ensuring that colleagues at all levels are appropriately aware of changing circumstances and specific risks.
• Lead a programme of cultural change across the Museum with regard to visitor services and security.

Benefits

The Museum offers a competitive benefits package including:

• Generous annual leave allowance of 25 days (rising to 30 days after 10 years' service) plus 2.5 privilege days and plus bank holidays.
• Membership of the civil service defined benefit pension scheme (find out here what benefits a civil service pension provides).
• Free entry to a wide range of museums and exhibitions
• Participation in private and public Museum activities, including talks by leading curators from around the world and behind-the-scenes opportunities to learn how museums care for and manage their extraordinary collections.
• Interest-free travel, bicycle, and rental deposit loans
• Professional and personal development opportunities
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Discounts on food and gift shop purchases

Additional details

For more information about this role, please see the job description.

If you have any additional needs that we should be aware of in order to support you with your application, please provide details

We offer a flexible way of working that allows our employees to work remotely in a way that suits them and the organisation. We welcome questions and conversations at interview stage about how flexible working could work for you.

The Museum adheres to the HMG Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) for pre-employment screening of Civil Servants.