Learning Design Specialist, Rwanda
Position Overview
Educate!, a fast-growing and award-winning social enterprise, is seeking an enthusiastic and self-driven Learning Design Specialist to join our Rwanda Team. The role requires a creative thinker with a passion for user-centered design, superb organizational and management skills, and a drive for constant learning and improvement. The Learning Design Specialist will design and adapt components of our Educate! Experience program materials. In addition, you will oversee our innovation & learning systems as part of Educate!’s culture of impact-oriented program design based on learning and experimentation.
Educate! lives a culture of impact-oriented and iterative program design based on learning and experimentation. The Learning Design Specialist will work with our design teams to develop content and materials to empower:
- youth with entrepreneurship and work readiness skills; and
- teachers to apply skills-based education and to promote students’ leadership, entrepreneurship, and workforce skills in East Africa.
The right person for this role is a highly strategic designer – with experience in learning design or learning experience design, and educational program design – who is energized and driven to empower multiple teams ensuring our programs create a lasting impact on students and youth. The ideal candidate has extensive experience in hands-on, interactive, iterative and collaborative education design approaches , education reform or youth development.
About Educate!
What if there was a way to measurably change the trajectory of the lives of youth across Africa? Since its launch in 2009, Educate! has worked to do just this, delivering outsized impacts at scale and at disproportionately low cost, towards the aim of addressing youth unemployment. As a disruptive, nonprofit social enterprise, our team leverages an obsession with evidence and entrepreneurial drive to tackle one of our planet’s greatest challenges — unlocking the potential of its youngest continent.
Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We’ve created a 100-hour experience that delivers the most essential skills youth need to transition to work, combining training, mentorship, and practical experience starting a business. We deliver this experience to youth in 3 ways: directly to schools, integrated into education systems, and through bootcamps for out-of-school youth.
All three delivery channels have been validated by several independent evaluations, and to date, more than 200,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted by this model across Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. Along the way, Educate! has become the largest youth skills provider in East Africa.
Educate! is a team of over 160 largely African staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. We prioritize building an engaging, fulfilling and growth oriented work environment. 50% of our top 30 leaders have been with us for over 5 years, 10+ alumni have started other organizations and 5 current or former team members were Acumen Fund East Africa fellows.
We have been backed by top foundations such as Imaginable Futures, Big Bang Philanthropy, and Echidna Giving. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE’s Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, and The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies in their global scaling education learning initiative. Educate! was also selected by the UN’s Generation Unlimited as 1 of 20 innovative youth solutions and by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator.
Educate!’s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year. Our plan is to grow our reach 3-5x over the next 3 years.
Performance Objectives
Content design and training – 50%
- Contribute to ideation and strategy work collaboratively with various team members on program ideation, product strategy, design and implementation of the training strategy.
- Contribute to program strategy and proposal development Contribute to pre and post-evaluation discussions and translation of impact results to support program strategy scoping and proposal development as informed by evaluation and impact results.
- Lead design output development Oversee and, lead the content design outputs related to the Program, including but not limited to program training materials and guides, as informed by program strategy and end-user feedback.
- A/B testing work with the product strategist on A/B testing within the broader program to inform product design based on curricula
- Timely content delivery and training lead, manage and track the end-to-end content design process to ensure timely delivery. Support the training of trainers for various teams expected to deliver content designed.
- Create and manage the implementation of design work plans Set the design systematic work plan and manage the team to design milestones. Review team drafts ensuring they meet product design principles and language.
Experiments and A/B Prototype Design-20%
- Contribute to experimentation strategy work with product leadership and teams to set program experimentation strategy
- Lead Product/ Program Experiments Design; Develop experiment hypotheses and indicators, define learning path and create data collection and analysis tools. Create experiment budgets.
- Manage experiments implementation teams Create implementation plans, set up the experiment’s implementation team and roles, and manage the team to results.
- Develop experiments report and product iteration proposals Lead documentation of experiment lessons, and data analysis and develop experiments reports with clear proposals for product iterations to strengthen product quality.
Team leadership Support: Support the Experiment Team-20%
- Manage the Experimentation Team Establish and maintain a strong, positive, and engaged team culture. Support the team to deliver experiments & results in a timely way by providing continuous feedback loops and 1:1 conversations.
- Help create and manage the implementation of experiment work plans Set the experiment periodic work plan and manage the team to experiment milestones. Review experiment results and the learnings to inform product design and/or program implementation.
Program learning strategy-10%
- Coordinate Product learning Strategy and Agenda Collaborate with different department leads to set and align the product’s learning agenda. Set up periodic touchpoints to check the progress of the learning strategy implementation.
- Create learning tools and templates Lead the creation of product strategy learning data collection tools and reporting templates.
- Analyze data to inform product design Analyze data from the learning agenda, and develop reports with recommendations to inform product design
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree
- Experience in program development – either program, (user) experience or education design- or research & development for program development
- Knowledge and experience in designing and implementing behavioral change
- Understanding and application of human-centered or iterative design approaches
- Engaging and interactive communicator Highly strategic thinker
- Collaborative, data-oriented approach to problem-solving
- Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here
Terms
- Based on our growing office in Kigali
- Must enjoy writing and design since a lot of time will be spent in designing teacher training programs.
- Compensation will be competitive for the social enterprise sector and commensurate with experience.
Why You Will Brag About Working At Educate!
- We’ve got the impact.
- Educate! is designed for scale. We quadrupled operations in 2019, Serving more than 1200 schools. We carefully measure our outcomes, and — here’s the best part — we are maintaining quality at four times the size.
- We believe in local leadership — 96% of our staff is African.
- Our model has gone nationwide in Uganda — Educate!’s model is now incorporated into the national curriculum and exams, impacting many thousands more students than we can reach directly.
- Educate is a well-oiled learning machine. We built our model by methodically testing hundreds of assumptions and we are constantly experimenting, evaluating, and improving.
- We’re honored that luminaries and leaders like Oliver Wonekha, the Ugandan Ambassador to the US, and Ann Veneman, a former Secretary of Agriculture and head of Unicef, believe in us enough to have joined our advisory board.
What Is Educate! About?
We’re ambitious. Are you? Educate! is growing fast, so new opportunities are opening up and expanding all the time. We’re inspired by people with drive, and we love to help them reach their full potential. We expect everyone at Educate! to contribute above and beyond their job description, grow their skills, and advance their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.
- We Put Youth First – The youth we serve come first. Always. In everything. That means we wake up thinking of ways we can serve youth even better and get the highest impact out of every dollar that we spend. It means Educate! doesn’t own a single vehicle, because we’d rather take the bus if it means one more student can participate. It means making every decision like the future depends on it — because if we get our way, it does.
- We Are Always Learning – When you work at Educate!, educating yourself is part of your job too. We encourage every employee to find the best book on management; share the latest article on graphic design; bring in your favorite college mentor; or meet the researcher pushing the edge of the field. We are always thirsty for knowledge and love to share.
- We Only Solve a Problem Once – We are allergic to band-aids so we love the person who brings the new system to solve the problem for good, even problems we haven’t recognized yet.
- We Are Flexible – We thrive on change — we’re driving it. We are growing every day, so we have to adapt quickly to meet new challenges, and our team keeps up.
- We Exceed Expectations – We assume we can achieve the impossible because we already have, year after year. We want our staff to create your own challenges, ask the toughest questions, and dream scary big!
Every person at Educate! — from interns to the executive director — is evaluated by how they live up to these five cultural tenets. They are at the core of how we achieve our mission and why we work as well as we do.
Educate is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all who interact in our community. In creating this environment, we encourage people from a variety of cultures, backgrounds and life experiences to join our diverse team.
Interested candidates should apply using the “Apply“ button below not later than 28th November 2022.
Click here for details & Apply
