What Does a Community Manager Do.

The short answer

What does a community manager do? They run the conversation between a brand and the people who use it. Day to day that means replying, moderating, spotting problems early and reporting what the community says back to the business. There is a formal route in: the Level 4 Digital community manager apprenticeship, which typically takes 24 months.

What does a community manager do, in one line

The clearest definition comes from the government’s own apprenticeship standard for the job, published by Skills England as standard ST0345. It describes the role as being to “Facilitate and instigate direct communication online between the end user or customer and the organisation.”

Read that carefully. The job is not making content. It is the two-way line between the people outside the business and the people inside it.

The same standard describes the community manager as the organisation’s public face online. They manage its online channels, feed what the community is saying back into the organisation, and analyse community data.

A community manager’s day to day

The standard lists twelve duties. Grouped into plain terms, a community manager:

• Joins in conversations, answers questions and responds when the community asks for something.
• Writes clearly for forums and social channels, adapting tone to each platform and staying inside its rules.
• Watches forums and community sites for threats and opportunities, acts quickly and reports what they find internally.
• Leads discussions and creates or contributes to content for the community.
• Schedules posts using forum software and content management systems.
• Reacts to topics nobody planned for.
• Moderates, guides the conversation, and deals with inappropriate comments, escalating or enforcing conduct rules.
• Carries out communication plans that support the business, delivering both welcome and unwelcome information to the community.
• Reviews whether their own actions online worked.
• Builds loyalty and a good experience for the community.

Notice how much of that list is listening, moderating and reporting. Scheduling posts is one duty of twelve.

Where community managers work

The standard says these roles sit in organisations that talk to their customers online, and gives the videogame industry and software providers as examples. The employers named as having helped write it include Ubisoft, Rebellion and Sports Interactive.

The games influence shows in the job titles it lists: community manager, consumer experience representative and games community manager.

It also sets out who the role reports to: senior digital community managers, communications managers and communication directors. The standard says a community manager works on their own within the limits the organisation sets.

Community manager vs social media manager

The government’s National Careers Service describes a social media manager as someone who co-ordinates online content and communications strategies.

The tasks it lists for a social media manager include developing strategies and campaigns to grow an audience, co-ordinating updates to social channels, creating articles, blogs, video clips and reels, analysing campaign data and producing reports. It also lists responding to posts, discussions and customer feedback.

So the two jobs overlap on replies. The difference is weight. A social media manager is judged on what goes out and how it performs. A community manager is judged on what comes back in, and whether the business hears it. Those are two different jobs.

Why merging the two jobs loses the listening

Our view is that when one person holds both jobs, the outbound work wins. A campaign has a deadline. A slow build of complaints in the comments does not, until it suddenly does.

Imagine a games publisher that folds community into the social calendar. The posts still go out on time. What stops is the weekly note to the product team saying which bug players keep mentioning, because nobody has the hours to write it.

That is why the standard’s feedback duty matters so much. If no one owns carrying the community’s view back inside, the brand is talking and not listening. Our social media management work keeps those two jobs visible as separate pieces of work, even when one team holds both.

The apprenticeship route

The Digital community manager apprenticeship is the formal route into the job. The key facts from Skills England:

• It is a Level 4 standard, reference ST0345.
• The typical duration is 24 months, not counting the end assessment.
• It was approved for delivery on 14 August 2019 and is currently open for new starts.
• Skills England lists its maximum funding as £13,000.
• English and maths qualifications must be completed in line with the apprenticeship funding rules.

The apprenticeship finishes with a final assessment, which Skills England calls the end-point assessment.

A change from December 2026

Anyone looking at this route now should know the standard is being replaced. Skills England says a revised standard and assessment plan has been approved, and it replaces the current version for new starts on 18 December 2026.

The latest start date on the current version is 17 December 2026. Until the switch, the current standard and its assessment stay in place. An apprentice starting after that date will train against the revised version, so check which one a provider is offering before signing up.

What you need to get on

Skills England’s page for the standard has no separate section on entry requirements. The National Careers Service gives typical entry requirements for a higher apprenticeship, the level this one sits at: usually four or five GCSEs and A levels, or equivalent.

Employers set their own requirements on top, so the advert matters more than the standard.

Other ways into community management

The National Careers Service lists the Digital community manager apprenticeship as one route into social media management. Its career path section also names online community management as somewhere a social media manager could move, describing it as “acting as a link between consumers and businesses supplying online products”, with esports gamers and developers as its example.

The careers service treats the two jobs as neighbours: the community apprenticeship appears as a route in, and community management as a next step. For pay, the National Careers Service gives social media managers an average salary of £25,000 at starter level to £50,000 when experienced; it does not give a separate figure for community managers. We cover the wider pay picture in what a social media manager earns in the UK.

What a brand should decide before hiring one

Before you write the job advert, decide three things:

1. Who the community manager reports to, and who acts on what they report. Feedback with no owner is noise.
2. What they are allowed to say without sign-off. A community manager who has to wait two days for approval to answer a question is a social media manager with extra steps.
3. Which spaces they cover. Your own comments, a Discord server, a subreddit and review sites are different jobs with different rules.

Get those right and the hire can do the job the standard describes. Get them wrong and you have bought a second scheduler.

Next step

If you are hiring for social or moving into it yourself, our guide to becoming a freelance social media manager in the UK covers the other side of the career. And if your team is posting regularly but still feels stuck, NBK can help find the constraint in the system.