Learning Designer at Educate!

Educate! currently achieves impact on youth life outcomes through direct delivery of our model in schools (what we call "School Solutions") and through the integration of our model into national education systems ("Education System Solutions"). In addition to these two solution areas, in 2019, Educate! launched a new and innovative pathway to sustainably impact out of school youth (OoSY) livelihoods at scale through the Kenyan led social enterprise NawiriPro.

NawiriPro wants to empower and train OoSY on running successful informal sector businesses, starting with the motorbike courier industry by teaching them how to increase their income and improve their livelihood. In 2021, we will be adapting our solution to other successful and dynamic informal sector businesses, starting with the micro-retail (kiosk) and potentially other industries in the long term.

NawiriPro is looking for a Learning Designer who will be a creative thinker with strong analytical, conceptual thinking, ability to identify user pains and build a superb digital product, instructional design, and writing skills. These skills will be applied to tackling exciting projects looking to solve the youth employability skills gap in the informal sector in Kenya and beyond. It requires an individual with a drive for constant learning and improvement, and passion for user-centred design.

The role will require a matrix reporting structure to the Product manager & Global designer. He/She will be part of a team to conceptualize and design curriculum for an innovative out-of-school-youth program focussed on motorbike couriers, women and people in rural areas engaged in informal sector businesses; Boda, Kibanda and Kiosk. This role presents an opportunity to impact livelihoods by developing training programs aimed at boosting incomes through bridging skills gaps.

You could be the perfect fit for this role if you:

• Have successfully launched a product- curriculum or content or service with a start-up company.
• Love talking to customers, and happy to get your hands dirty in the process of creating new products
• Are passionate about collecting and analysing engagement data to inform the user learning experience
• Are self-driven to keep iterating to finding more ways to create value to our customers
• Have demonstrable experience designing the right solutions to solve the correct problems for the right target market; starting with the customer and work backwards and working vigorously to earn and keep customer trust
• Have demonstrable experience in conceptualizing, planning, coordinating and producing engaging learning activities and compelling content
• Are impact-oriented and skilled to design experiments on user engagement and knowledge transfer

Performance Objectives

Curriculum Design

• Develop relevant, engaging curricula and assessments through research and engagement with both the youth and subject matter experts
• Manage projects from inception and design phase to production and release. This includes budgeting, planning, coordination, development and quality assurance of various programs and activities.
• Utilize instructional design concepts and principles to design and develop instructional interactions to create interactive and engaging course content
• Structuring course content for learner engagement and retention.
• Evaluating content for efficacy and implementing feedback from program reviews and experiments to inform content iterations.
• Manage and support the junior learning designers and perform quality assurance on their work
• Design and prioritize experiments, based on the product and business strategies
• Develop frameworks and templates for designing and documenting design experiments and validated learnings/insights
• Design experiments on user engagement, content development processes and methods of content delivery for improved content development processes
• Collect, analyze and interpret data to inform program design iterations
• Work closely with the Product Manager to research and test new approaches to content development and delivery and contribute to general innovation.

Learning User Experience

• Conduct user research through interviews, observations and other research methods
• Analyze and identify pain points from the users' perspective, based on your user research;
• Translate curriculum designs into user flows, wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes that lead to intuitive user experiences.
• Facilitate the product vision by researching, conceiving, sketching, prototyping, and user-testing our digital platform experiences.
• Make strategic design and user-experience decisions related to core, and new, functions and features.
• Take a user-centred design approach and rapidly test and iterate your designs.
• Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders.

Training

• Oversee training of trainers on delivering learning material and ensure quality standards are maintained
• Conduct routine training needs assessments of the trainers.
• Choose the most appropriate training methods per case (virtual, simulated, mentoring, job training, professional development classes, etc.)

Learning & Networking

• Complete internal designer training and certifications
• Knowledgeable of key trends, strategies, and language from the fields of education, leadership and entrepreneurship
• Learn from local field staff, experimentation, and referencing international research
• Proactively network with other organisations from diverse fields

Qualifications

• 3-5 years of experience in designing and implementation of blended learning in a start-up environment.
• Extensive knowledge of instructional design theories and implementation with the ability to complete full training circle (assess needs, plan, develop, monitor and evaluate)
• In-depth understanding and application of human-centred or iterative design approaches.
• Adequate knowledge of content management systems, learning management systems and other web delivery tools.
• Experience with analysing data and identifying trend lines and insights that will help improve the content development process
• Familiarity with traditional and modern training methods and techniques
• Experience working with out-of-school youth and/ youth from economically marginalized communities would be an added advantage.
• Advanced organizational skills with the ability to handle multiple assignments
• Strong communication skills
• Hands-on experience with running and managing exploratory and evaluative qualitative research