Job Description

Educate!

Job Vacancy: Global Designer

Global – East African Based (Currently Remote)

Position Overview: Educate!, a fast-growing and award-winning social enterprise, is seeking an enthusiastic and self-driven Global Designer for our Global Team to build out our capacity for program design across our countries of operation.

The right hire will lead new product development, provide product ownership, and design leadership, to build the training materials and learner experiences for (1) our new Out of School Youth product in Uganda and (2) our Business mentorship program in Rwanda.

Educate! lives a culture of impact-oriented and iterative program design based on learning and experimentation. The successful candidate is innovative and open to iteration.

In our first ten years, Educate! became the biggest youth skills provider in East Africa by scaling our proven in-school model to impact hundreds of thousands of youth in Uganda and Rwanda.

In 2021, our top priority across the organization is testing a boot camp model for out-of-school youth.

As a Global Designer you’ll develop and implement experiments that inform the design of the programs across countries, make recommendations on the program design, manage the design and experiments process and develop content and materials for Out of School Youth and Secondary school youth.

About Educate!

Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We are a non-profit social enterprise with 150 staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors.

We tackle youth unemployment by partnering with schools and governments to reform what schools teach and how they teach it so that students in Africa have the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs and drive development in their communities.

Our model is delivered through practically-trained teachers and youth mentors. Educate!’s goal is to make this practical, skills-based model part of national education systems.

Check out our COVID response page on our website to see how we’ve adapted to respond to school closures in East Africa in 2020.

In 2019, we partnered with the government to pilot in 60+ schools in Kenya, worked in 275+ secondary schools in Rwanda, and 800+ schools in Uganda (25% of the country), reaching over 46,000 students intensively and 470,000 more broadly.

Two rigorous external evaluations, including a randomized controlled trial, found that towards the end of secondary school, our program participants earn nearly DOUBLE the income of their peers.

A follow-up RCT found that four years later, our graduates demonstrate large and durable shifts in skills, coupled with significant improvements in education and gender equity-related outcomes. Girls achieve even greater results.

Our graduates change their lives and their communities, such as Daniel who leveraged both his medical education and the transferable and business skills gained through Educate! to open a rural health clinic in his community employing two people and conducting about 350 checkups per month.

We have been backed by top foundations such as MasterCard, Big Bang Philanthropy, Mulago, Echoing Green, Ashoka, and Global Innovation Fund.

Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize (and was featured in a video), a 2015 WISE Award, and was highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE’s Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, Forbes 30 under 30, 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.

Educate!’s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.

Performance Objectives

The performance objectives cover 2 areas, cross-cutting which are

• objectives applicable in both Rwanda and Uganda,


• and functional which are specific to design support required for Rwanda, and for the Out of School Youth in Uganda.

Global Design – Cross-cutting (required for both Rwanda and Uganda)

Learning technology research, testing, and management

• Research on, explore and perform a cost-benefit analysis of distance learning technologies, approaches, and tools to support program delivery and optimize the user experience


• Learn from other mobile learning products (apps and websites), break down key features and think creatively about how to adapt them for our specific context/learners


• Content design and technology SME supporting the testing and adoption of new technologies for program delivery and upskilling of teams in their implementation and use


• Learning technology management and administration


• Collaboration with the M&E team on collecting, building, maintaining and storing learning data analytics through various learning technologies implemented.

Experiments Management

• Identify and test different pedagogical methods to determine the best fit for achieving different program outcomes (ex. teaching v/s coaching v/s mentoring)


• Identify and assess design features in tech-based learning experiences through A/B testing and user journey mapping


• Generate hypotheses from data on user interaction and suggest trial designs to test these hypotheses

Global Design Function – Rwanda

Program Design, Development, and Management

• Support strategy implementation across all the programs and product lines (youth business competitions, virtual mentorships, and other product lines).


• Support program teams in the design of technology-enabled distance learning solutions that are responsive to the user journey and experience


• Design blended learning experiences that combine automated content delivery (through technology i.e. robocalls, SMS), and human interaction (phone calls, human to human SMS interactions, in-person teaching)


• Lead planning, management and implementation of design needs in Rwanda in collaboration and coordination with the strategist and other departments.


• Lead product design quality assurance and reporting


• Build team capacity to support design development through structured coaching and mentoring, to build internal design capacity and develop a pipeline of talent.

Global Design Function – Out of School Youth Program, Uganda

Manage the design and experiments process

• Manage design for the Out of School Youth (OoSY) Product to optimize the user experience and adhere to the design process in the development and approval of all related materials for learners, trainers, mentors and staff.


• Manage pilots and experiments for design and implementation of program strategy ensuring changes to program design are informed by data and user feedback


• Lead product design quality assurance and reporting


• Work closely with the OoSY Director of Program Implementation to ensure that price constraints are integrated into program design

Coach and support the design and training teams

• Support the design and training teams in the application and use of user-experience design for product development


• Support the design and training teams in data-driven decision making within the training environment


• Conduct regular check-ins with design team members


• Coach and manage design team members to build capacity, achieve results and develop professionally

Qualifications

• Experience in program/product development – either product, (user) experience or education design- or research & development for product development


• Knowledge and experience in designing and implementing behavioral change


• Understanding and application of human-centered or iterative design approaches


• Engaging and interactive communicator with passion for coaching team members


• 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

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 their 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.

CLICK HERE to apply online.

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