Community Solutions Hiring for Learning & Development Lead Job at Remote Full Time

Position Overview:

As Learning & Development Strategy Lead (L&D), you will design and deliver a strategy for equipping our people to achieve the ambitious aims in our strategic plan while embedding change management practices matched to the dynamic nature of our work. Your role will support and assist all staff in achieving their performance and development goals in a learning environment that requires constant adaptation to changing information. Using a quality improvement framework, our team aims to achieve, with partners, a lasting end to homelessness that leaves no one behind. This necessitates our team having competencies in Improvement Science, Human-Centered Design, Data Analytics, and Outcome-Oriented Facilitation – along with the crosscutting lens of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA), and an openness to acquiring new skills that may be needed to achieve our ambitious aims.

Community Solutions is a unique, field-building institution, and one-size-fits-all rarely works well here. Formal training opportunities are necessary milestones on most learning journeys, but they are typically where the learning starts for our employees, not where it develops most deeply. As such, you will be tasked with assessing the organization’s learning and development needs, equipping team members to work in a learning environment where change is the norm, and developing and improving a portfolio of both formal and on-the-job growth opportunities to ensure our people have everything they need to keep growing here, and to be successful regardless of race, gender, department or the starting point for their expertise. You will play a critical role in shaping the culture of high performance through competency-based L&D solutions aimed at furthering our learning practices and ability to adapt quickly to a rapidly evolving issue.

Finally, this is a servant leadership position – your job will be to create a responsive program that builds up others. To be successful, you will need a passion for Community Solutions’ mission to end homelessness; a strong knowledge of our work and core competencies; significant management, change management and employee development experience, including performance management; deep experience with the quality improvement process or other iterative design methodologies; experience in teaching, training or other adult learning environments; and excellent written and oral communication skills. You must also bring real humility and a human-centered desire to learn from the CS staff and leaders you support. Their trust in you, and your willingness to be responsive to their needs, will be essential to your success.

Defining Success for this Position:

We define success in this position in five areas:

• Supporting a High Performing, Inclusive, Equitable Learning Organization. Learning and Development plays a key role in positioning Community Solutions to be a high performing, inclusive and equitable learning organization. This requires that critical learning and development priorities across Community Solutions be clearly identified and addressed as needs emerge. Ongoing needs assessments will be the primary source of a data-driven learning strategy.
• 
  Equipped for change. Learning and development supports a culture of ongoing change management and preparing staff to adapt quickly to emerging insights and priorities.
• 
  Performance + Role Clarity. Lead the performance management cycle for all roles at Community Solutions, the skills, core competencies, and levels of mastery required for success are clarified, tied to clear performance standards, and straightforwardly assessed through a regular, user-friendly performance review process.
• 
  Fully Equipped Teams. All staff members are equipped with the right skills and core competencies, at the right levels of mastery, to enable success in their respective areas of work. Community Solutions has in place a sustainable, targeted, and well-adopted system of training and development that can rapidly skill up new team members and support ongoing skill improvement and development in vital areas.

• Field Building and Pipeline Development. The pipeline of appropriately trained talent to Community Solutions and the communities we support is increasing over time as a result of creative partnerships, thought leadership and learning dissemination.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Shaping the Learning Organization
  • Develop key strategies in service of advancing Learning & Development’s top line goals
  • Conduct regular deep dives with managers, senior leaders, and staff to assess the ongoing state of organizational learning and development
  • Develop a reusable infrastructure for this type of diagnosis and knowledge capture
  • Leverage proven external diagnosis tools and surveys as needed
  • Taking the CS Strategic Plan as a starting point, identify critical risks and opportunities related to learning and development and propose effective responses

• Performance Management and Role Clarity
  • Clarify the core skills, competencies and performance standards required to fulfill each position at CS successfully
  • Break down core skills and competencies into clear concept areas and learning objectives
  • Group key concept areas and learning objectives into manageable levels of mastery within each competency to enable more concrete job scoping, curriculum design and trainer identification
  • Oversee the refining of all job descriptions to include required levels of mastery for each core skill or competency, and facilitate effective hiring and straightforward training plans for underskilled hires
  • Work with managers to revise all CS job descriptions to incorporate clearly defined performance standards
  • Lead improvement efforts to CS’s performance management system to align with performance standards articulated in job descriptions
  • Work with staff and managers to devise and/or improve tools for:
    • equitably assessing performance on a regular basis
    • surfacing performance improvement areas + setting improvement goals
    • scoping improvement-aligned development opportunities
    • identifying necessary training and development resources
  • Lead cyclical execution performance management process, ensuring all CS staff are trained and supported to implement equitably and effectively

• Training & Development
  • Use revised job descriptions and competency articulations to develop learning trajectories for each core skill and competency required at Community Solutions
  • Clarify all training that can be completed in house and devise clear implementation plan, including staffing needs, technology needs, and associated budget
  • Where required, identify best-in class external trainers and collaborate to shape custom offerings aligned with the key learning objectives in each skill or competency area
  • Support managers through resources, convenings and direct training to implement on-the-job staff learning and development opportunities, including short-term project leadership roles, shadowing and mentorship programs,
  • Prepare and maintain a menu of ‘deep’ (more intensive, more expensive) and ‘shallow’ (inexpensive and rapidly deployable) development opportunities associated with each core skill and competency to support managers in the ongoing work of employee professional development
  • Develop start-up training and development infrastructure to ensure skill equity (within one year of hiring date, all staff have the training required to do their jobs effectively, regardless of race, gender or starting place when hired)
  • Regularly gather relevant data to assess effectiveness of training and development offerings in improving employee performance, identify race- and gender-specific disparities, and work with managers to continuously and equitably improve offerings over time

• Field Building and Pipeline Development
  • Distill and capture key learnings from L&D over time
  • Work with the Communications team to disseminate key learning within and outside of CS for thought leadership and ongoing sector improvement
  • Build and support CS partnerships with other, aligned field building entities working to improve training and development in the social change sector (e.g. STRIVE Together, IHI, Race Forward, Neighborworks America, etc.)
  • Develop partnerships with core feeders into the social change sector (e.g. social work schools, real estate development programs, public policy institutions, etc.) to advance reimagined curriculum opportunities and new training elements
  • Identify race-explicit pathways to increase the pool of BIPOC sector entrants with mastery of skills and core competencies

Professional Experience and Qualifications:

• At least 5 years experience in managing complex projects and/or programs from initiation to completion, especially using agile methodologies
• At least 3+ years staff and/or organizational development experience in a learning organization, including performance management (this does not have to be explicitly in a Learning & Development role)
• Significant experience guiding change management efforts and supporting teams in adapting and thriving in agile work environments.
• Significant experience with Quality Improvement or other continuous improvement methodologies, user-centered design, and outcomes-oriented facilitation approaches
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Experience with instructional design and learning frameworks
• Functional understanding of adult learning theory and learning evaluation frameworks
• Designing and implementing strategy when the problem is not defined at the outset
• Comfort with distilling challenges into clear problem statements and accompanying objectives
• Collaborative design
• Strong listener who focuses on problem solving with the stakeholders.
• Data-driven decision-maker
• Designing and leading change management initiatives
• Facilitative listening and relationship-building skills
• Ability to pivot between looking at the big picture and the fine details
• Practical experience with Learning Management Systems (LMS)
• Experience coordinating and shaping deliverables with external vendors and instructors
• Experience designing and leading complex partnerships and other modes of managing without authority

Supervisory Responsibilities:

N/A as of now, but may supervise in the future. Separately, you should be as comfortable with execution as with strategy and evaluation. Building a kitchen cabinet of skilled learning and organizational development thinkers and advisors will also be essential. Perhaps most importantly, you should lead with a lived experience of what it’s like to supervise people— to be on the giving and receiving end of performance reviews and staff development conversations in an ambitious, high-ownership environment.

Software/Apps Used:

• Google Drive and business applications, in particular, Sheets and Slides
• Microsoft Office, in particular, Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint
• Asana
• Performance Management Software
• Zoom Video Conferencing
• Slack
• Learning Management Systems

Salary Range:

CS offers competitive salaries and benefits packages for every position. The salary range for this position is between $90,842 to $118,095 and will be based on experience.

Work Environment:

This is a fully remote position. The person must live within the United States, with a preference for candidates in Central and Eastern time zones. Travel may be required at times (4-6/year) for company retreats, planning meetings, and learning & development programming.

Diversity and Inclusion:

We strive for inclusivity and diversity by attracting extraordinary people from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences. We seek to employ an all-star team of people who vary by their race and ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, age, culture, religion, veteran status, physical and mental abilities. We promote equal opportunity in the recruitment, selection, training, compensation, promotion, and benefits of all employees.

COVID-19 Vaccination Mandate:

COVID-19 vaccination is mandatory for all Community Solutions staff—full-time, part-time, and contracted. Vaccination documentation must be provided to Community Solutions. Vaccination information is completely confidential between the staff member and HR.