Vice President of Product Engineering job vacancy in Penn Foster – Jobs in Pennsylvania

About Penn Foster

Penn Foster is the leading digital workforce development platform for in-demand, middle-skills occupations. The company’s mission is to help people get better jobs by bridging the gap between education and employment. With over 130 years of impact and over 300 career-focused programs, the organization operates an accredited high school, career school, and college. It holds a long-term vision of becoming the primary partner for creating sustainable and renewing career success for middle-skills professionals.

The increasingly dynamic $44B US middle-skilled labor market creates unprecedented complexity for both jobseekers and incumbent workers, fueling a new marketplace for skills training. There are roughly 1,100 middle-skills occupations, 83M middle-skills jobs in America, 16M open middle-skills positions, and a widespread shortage of skilled workers to fill these roles. Traditional four-year academic models do not work well for this market, but forward-thinking institutions are looking to pivot their model to capture increasing demand. The acceptance and usage of digital training platforms is rising. This massive shift toward short-form, career-focused credentials present an enormous, impactful opportunity to bridge the gap between education and economic advancement.

Working directly with individuals looking to build their careers and through employers, job training organizations, and community-based providers, Penn Foster aims to close the skills gap by activating new populations of workers, unlocking the potential of those within and outside of the employment system.

Penn Foster is an organization in service of the target market. It helps “middle-skill, working-class people, who don’t have all the same advantages that a lot of white-collar professionals have.”. There are 150 million adults that work in the United States. About 75 or 80 million of them are defined as middle-skill.

Led by the brand promise to help individuals prepare for their next job through the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and accredited credentials, Penn Foster has built a scaled direct-to-consumer, on-demand, digital portfolio complemented by a talent development platform for Fortune 1000 enterprises.

• Focused on high volume, in-demand careers across healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, veterinary health, and business, the platform prepares workers for jobs that employers have today and will in the future
• Offers access to education to underserved populations of out of school youth and adult workers by reducing financial and access barriers. The company harnesses a pay-as-you-learn pricing approach and accepts no public student financing
• Helps businesses thrive by mobilizing workers and energizing communities with opportunities for growth and progress, recently expanding career development to serve enterprises such as Fiat-Chrysler, Lowes, GM, Disney, and Walmart.
• Delivers satisfied customers with over 80% of graduates that see improvement within their careers through Penn Foster
• Scaled platform supporting over 300,000 learners distributed nationwide

Opportunity Overview

Penn Foster is seeking a mission-drive Vice President of Product Engineering to lead a team of software engineers to build user-centered, data-driven experiences for students and businesses seeking to upskill/reskill their workforce. Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer and working closely with the Chief Product Officer, the VP of Product Engineering will blend strategic leadership, exceptional management, cross-functional coordination/collaboration, and close partnership with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

As VP Product Engineering, your work directly enables learners to achieve their potential, helping people get better jobs by bridging the gap between education and employment. Our ideal candidate brings a passion for our mission and excitement to help rebuild the economy.

Responsibilities

Team Building

• Build, develop, mentor, and lead diverse teams of high-performing engineers and leaders; attract, inspire, and retain great people while creating an inclusive culture
• Be a change agent; leading the technology transformation and unification across brands in support of strategic initiatives
• Enhance engineering capabilities, furthering commitment to be a continually improving, high performance product development organization

Technology

• Modernize, unify technology, and automate processes to improve operational efficiency and decrease the time it takes to deliver product to market
• Participate in architecture discussions, evaluate new technologies, processes, and build vs buy solutions, determining the best paths forward

Execution

• Lead the team to execute towards goals, creating space for autonomy and innovation, while decreasing time it takes to bring product to market
• Work in close partnership with Product leadership to prioritize operational projects, cocreating product and technology roadmap, leading overall execution of the plan, while balancing short-term and long-term goals
• Facilitate cross-team collaboration, using leadership expertise to drive groups with disparate interests to decisions, seeing these through to impact. You will make pragmatic decisions, balancing strategic and tactical needs. You will help manage engineering risk and ensure the right trade-off calls are made. vision, creating autonomy while holding them accountable

Strategy

• Contribute to the overall business strategy and planning; propagate knowledge through team so they are setup for successful independent decision making
• Drive strategic goals that improve learner success

Qualifications & Experience:

Our ideal candidate has experience building products at scale, collaborating across various teams in complex organizations, and excels at prioritization, process, and delivery. We’re seeking an inclusive leader who successfully has coached, mentored, and developed diverse technology teams to join us on our mission to become the primary partner for creating sustainable and renewing career success for middle-skills professionals.

Personal Characteristics – Seeking a leader who embodies the following values and models them to the organization:

• Data-driven: Rely on data, not hunches to make decisions. Listen to instincts, but validate through rapid test, learning and optimizing. Translating complex data into actionable insights for customers and team members.
• Move with a sense of urgency: There’s power in speed. Iterate quickly and often, continuously improving through each cycle. There’s a natural tension between speed and collaboration, so don’t move quickly as all costs.
• Collaborative: Partner, listen and leverage feedback from each other and customers.
• Embody behaviors you want team to demonstrate: Be intentional about how you show up, manage yourself, and take ownership of your decisions and the impact they have on others.
• Create a shared purpose: Tap into motivation by aligning people around a common purpose. Connect strategy and success by focusing teams on clear objectives and helping people understand how their individual roles impact our collective mission.
• Inspire ownership and accountability: Create a shared commitment to success and therefore a mutual accountability for results. Enable and empower others, but know when to roll up your sleeves and provide support. The best leaders develop more leaders.
• Communicate openly: Communicate proactively and clearly about goals, challenges, and opportunities. Listen with the intent to understand. Seek opportunities to collaborate across the business.
• Invest in growth: Embody a growth mentality. Challenge yourself and your teams to be curious and actively seek opportunities for learning and improvement, even when it’s uncomfortable.
• Cultivate environments of respect and trust: Demonstrate that you care about people, value varied perspectives and are committed to building a culture where everyone can show up as themselves and do their best work together.

Demonstrated Experience:

• Cross-functional collaborator, “team player” able to work closely with leader of multiple business units
• Vocal advocacy for Engineering, able to clearly communicate and set expectations around technology-specific limitations, challenges, and benefits to senior member of the organization
• Thoughtful balance between expedience to meet short-term demands and the rigor needed to long-term systems health and stability
• Visibility and action orientation, proven track record of leading through influence both inside and outside the organization, articulating and engendering buy-in to a technology vision
• Transformative leadership in both technology and teams, a history of instilling best-in-class processes and improving software platform to drive efficiency and scalability
• Experience hiring, developing talent, and managing a diverse distributed and inclusive team recognized for delivering results, intellectual horsepower, inclusiveness, and collaboration
• Entrepreneurial approach combined with the business acumen to strategically transform systems to support movement toward new market opportunities
• Experience leading engineering leaders, overseeing a team size of 30 engineers

Equal Employment Opportunity:

At Penn Foster we are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We are committed to creating a work environment that embraces and celebrates diversity. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, retaliation, parental status, military service, or other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

What We Offer:

We offer a competitive base salary, plus a robust benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, flexible spending, generous paid time off, paid charity days, parking & commuter benefits, a 401K with a company match, plus free access to all of our online programs.

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