Bid Team Job Descriptions

With 283 job titles recorded among 1,422 professionals in our 2025 Salary Survey, job hunting can be particularly fraught and often clouded with ambiguity. In our opinion, the bid management profession can be simplified into six core bid roles.

This classification reflects the markets we serve and the vast majority of our clients’ requirements. It provides a good starting point for understanding our profession and attracting winning talent to your business.

Bid Lifecycle & Core Roles

It’s important to note that job titles differ depending on geographical location and industry. Within each job description we provide a number of alternative job titles that may be more familiar to you.

The six core roles are typically recruited at four levels:

Entry Level / Apprentice
No formal industry qualifications. Less than 2 years’ experience
Skilled
APMP or other recognised industry qualifications
Managerial
Team Leader role or Team Manager with direct reports outside of live bids
Director
Multi-industry / geography experience and manage large bid and proposal teams

If you are finding the plethora of terminology confusing or difficult to grasp and would like help creating or updating job specifications, help is at hand. Please contact a member of our team on 0208 1583952.

Learn about the Bid Lifecycle

Click on a role to see when and how it gets involved.

View all Job Descriptions View Salary Survey

Effort Level

High Low

FAQs

What's the difference between a Bid Manager and a Proposal Manager?

It’s the question we’re asked most often — and because there’s no universal agreement across the profession, job titles alone can mislead. The way we define it: a Bid Manager owns the pursuit end to end. They’re the only one of our six core roles involved in all twenty-four stages of the Bid Lifecycle — first to engage, last to exit — driving everything from early capture and win strategy, through the submission, to the presentation, negotiation and handover. A Proposal Manager is focused on the written submission itself: typically engaged as the PQQ or RFI arrives and exiting around best-and-final-offer, they own the RFP/ITT response — its structure, compliance, quality and on-time delivery. Put simply, the proposal is one milestone in winning the work: the Bid Manager manages the whole campaign, the Proposal Manager manages the document. In a large, mature bid function you’ll see both working alongside each other with clearly defined responsibilities; in a smaller business, one person often wears both hats — and several others besides.

Which bid role do I need to hire?

Start with the gap in your work-winning, not the job title. As a rough guide: Need someone to own the whole pursuit, set strategy and lead the team? That’s a Bid Manager. Winning the work but struggling to produce compliant, high-scoring submissions on time? You need a Proposal Manager. Strong process but weak persuasive writing? A Proposal Writer (Bid Writer) turns technical input into compelling, evaluator-ready answers. Drowning in the administration of bids — portals, deadlines, version control? A Bid Co-ordinator keeps the engine running.

Submissions that read well but look flat? A Graphic Designer makes your value proposition pass the five-second ‘billboard’ test. Reinventing the same answers for every bid? A Knowledgebase / Content Manager builds and maintains a reusable content library.

Then match the level to the need — Entry/Apprentice, Skilled (APMP-qualified), Managerial or Director. If you’re not sure, that’s exactly the conversation to have with us: we’ll benchmark the role and the salary using our UK Bid & Proposal Salary Survey data and help you write the spec. And if the need is immediate or short-term, you can bring in a vetted consultant on day rates rather than commit to a permanent hire.