Senior Manager, Design & Development

Job Description

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
Grade:  609 Pay Range: $ - $

This position will be located in our Salt Lake City, Utah office and would require you to work a hybrid schedule in the office 4 days a week with one day remote.

• Operationalizes department strategy by leading a management team to implement existing processes and change initiatives to deliver outcomes for production and student success.

• Functions as a player-coach who understands the need for first-hand contribution and close (shoulder-to-shoulder) proximity to the programs at every stage of production and improvement.

• Manages the portfolio of work across their management team in terms of high-level objectives, project plans, budgets, resource allocation, vendor engagement, instructional quality, use of technology, and more.

• Leads in solving complex issues that require significant analysis, troubleshooting, and negotiation (for which exceptions or revisions to established processes and procedures may need to be made).

• Maintains an authoritative coaching relationship not only with their management team but with their managers’ production teams and contractors (~25+ resources)

• Builds upon their individual domain expertise in assessment, instructional design, educational psychology, AI, or learning project/program management to develop cross-disciplinary fluency and provide expert insight across the full range of skills essential to program production.

• Ensures that the vendors and contractors used by their management team have detailed requirements upfront and that they deliver at the level of quality agreed upon and within the established timeframe.

• Works laterally with other leaders on process engineering, innovation, quality, team culture, and other shared objectives.

• Represents and curates the best work of their managers and their teams, curating their most innovative work for purposes of advocacy, credibility, and cross-departmental education.

• Shares responsibility for fostering positive relationships with program stakeholders but provides specific consultation to anticipate and respond to concerns, troubleshoot issues, negotiate solutions, etc.

• Performs other job-related duties as assigned.

This job description includes a general representation of job requirements rather than a comprehensive inventory of all required responsibilities or work activities. The contents of this document or related job requirements may change at any time with or without notice.

• Experience in leading and developing first-level leaders

• Expertise in instructional psychology and technology, with specialization in some aspect of online program development

• Consultative rather than transactional stakeholder communications

• Leadership of digital transformation with a high degree of complexity and a high degree of personal accountability

• Effective change management and readiness enablement skills with the ability to promote, evaluate, and develop these skills on their management team

• Fluency in production, learning analytics, and reporting

• Strong aptitude for learning new…