Vp Technology - English Language Learning

Job Description - VP Technology - English Language Learning (2105316) Job Description VP Technology - English Language Learning - ( 2105316 ) Description Learning is the most powerful force for change in the world. More than 20,000 Pearson employees deliver our products and services in nearly 200 countries, all working towards a common purpose – to help everyone achieve their potential through learning. We do that by providing high quality, digital content and learning experiences, as well as assessments and qualifications that help people build their skills and grow with the world around them. We are the world’s leading learning company. Learn more at pearsonplc.com. At Pearson, we believe in the power of difference. Harnessing the unique skills, perspectives, and backgrounds of every employee helps us foster innovation and create the most effective solutions for learners around the world. That’s why we’re committed to ensuring that diversity and inclusion are embedded into everything we do. We foster a work environment that’s inclusive and diverse — and where our people can be themselves — so we can reflect the customers and learners we serve. Pearson is delighted to be committed to the Race Charter, and to be confirmed by Stonewall in the Top 100 Employers LGBTQ+ employers in the UK. We are a Disability Confident committed employer and were recognised in the Best Employers for Diversity 2019 awards. We are featured on The Forbes list of Best D&I Employers and are a Working Mums Top Employer and Age Positive employer. Pearson is listed on both the London and New York Stock Exchanges (UK: PSON; NYSE: PSO). We are proud to offer an exceptional and supportive environment to develop your professional career. Purpose: This is a newly created role that will support the English Language Learning division globally. The role will report to the President of the English Language Learning Division and have a strong link to both, the divisional technology peer group and the Enterprise Technology organization. In this new moment for Pearson as we pivot our business, this is a unique opportunity to help us accelerate the growth in ELL and achieve our ambition to deliver revenues of $1bn over the next several years. This role is instrumental in ensuring that businesses and technology are tightly aligned throughout this journey. You will be a top technical expert, deeply experienced in driving consumer value and adept at putting the Consumer at the heart of everything we do. As a VP Technology for ELL, you are the most senior technical leader across the ELL organization and will be responsible for overseeing the technology delivery roadmap whilst ensuring the company’s IT infrastructure supports the ELL business and product goals. With accountability over ELL’s technology stack, you will manage product engineering, platform maintenance, incident management, monitoring and information security functions. You will play a crucial role in developing the overall engineering culture within ELL and define the tools, technologies and processes to ensure Engineering excellence. The ideal candidate will have led global technology teams and should have strong familiarity with apps, games, mobile, video, or streaming services. You will also closely collaborate with the business delivery leadership to implement technology capabilities aligned to business strategy and day-to-day business as well as customer needs. You will partner with our Enterprise Technology organization to align, drive and implement IT security, data and hosting strategies and to identify, protect, respond and recover from cybersecurity threats. Your greatest focus will be to maintain a secure, stable, reliable production environment and foster innovation as well as customer obsession. Key Accountabilities: Set the vision, goals and overall direction of ELL’s technology roadmap, inspiring the engineering teams to delight our consumers. Further enhance our technology capabilities across our markets, while in parallel be a trusted advisor and valued peer on creating and supporting an innovative DTC strategy identifying and building best in class products and services with focus on a superior consumer experiences at the heart of our thinking. Partner with ELL’s digital product teams to deliver highly scalable digital applications. Key success criteria for the Technology organisation will be measured by lead-time (how long it takes to go from idea to delivered software), development velocity (how quickly the engineering team pushes out new features) and performance of the applications (application resilience and quality of code). Design the technology roadmap to serve business priorities, supporting our growth ambitions. Work closely with the product leadership teams to develop the product strategy and design as well as deliver new scalable products and services within the English portfolio. This will require aligning the technology strategy in line with customer expectations and to meet Pearson commercial and product lifecycle management requirements. Ensure all development projects are delivered using sound project management methodologies, including agile, and with effective quality and risk management frameworks. In partnership with Enterprise Technology organisation establishing a framework for identifying key risks, issues and interdependencies and provide appropriate governance and mitigation strategies. Measure, evaluate and improve the full monitoring of our product offerings and make timely recommendation to further develop customer experience and satisfaction. Responsible for end-to-end monitoring and critical incident management, including liaison with customer services and communications teams. Manage the selection and interdependencies of programming languages, frameworks, operating systems, internet-cloud, web-application servers, databases, and delivery modalities. Manage the technology as part of the product development lifecycle by collaborating across teams to evolve these including functional requirements analysis, design specification, technical code review, project planning, and implementation of applications and systems. Accountable for information and data security and required ISO practices as well as has responsibility of design and management of SLAs with customers, suppliers and hosting partners. Develop and drive clear customer value management strategy and consumer focused growth enabling technology solutions to support and enhance our product proposition that deliver long-term value for our customers and partners, across each region/ geography/ city. Keep up to date with new trends and technical innovations, identify market opportunities and competitor threats at an international and local level, supported by deep knowledge and ongoing analysis of our customer data. Allocate technology spend to exploit market opportunities, create an agile as well as innovative technology infrastructure and counter threats, noting that this needs to pivot on a month-by-month basis. Establish and manage regular business performance management reporting, review and communications cadence with global teams to ensure technical and business outcomes are reached within the defined governance structure. Actively drive an ELL-wide culture of data-driven thinking. Ensure data collection and availability across key dimensions of our products, internal tools, and business metrics. Evangelize a culture of innovation and be a creative technologist that develops top talent. Lead by example, educate, inspire, motivate and mentor teams, creating a sense of community amongst the various members of the technical areas. Assemble Tiger Teams when urgent and strategically important projects arise: act at speed to pull together a cross functional team to react in an agile way, dig deep into insights to understand the problem and recommend a strategy to solve. Gain key stakeholder buy in and then execute at pace. Measure/learn and improve all activity. Qualifications Superior ability to set out technology and organizational direction while ensuring feasibility of initiatives and approaches for large, global organisations Ability to connect business requirements to technology standards and architectures Strong commercial acumen, judgement and expertise across all aspects of area of responsibility Results-driven and relentless in achieving as well as exceeding goals, effectively exercising pragmatism when required, to deliver business outcomes Strong understanding of customer segmentation and how it can feed into technology requirements Extensive technology acumen from business application though infrastructure Superior knowledge of reporting and analytics tools and techniques as well as the ability to analyse and interpret data to generate insights that inform investment decisions and strategy Excellent track record with large scale initiatives or transformations including budgets and a broad portfolio of projects Experience developing and reporting on metrics and KPIs for business goals, process improvements and technology management Deep understanding and accountability to pragmatically address operational risks including resiliency, recovery, availability and security Very accustomed to managing a high level of ambiguity across geographies, markets, products and services Extensive experience building technology for secure environments that contain sensitive information (e.g., consumer profiles etc.) and deep interest in as well as extensive know-how of privacy and security issues affecting consumers online Understanding and technical knowledge in scalable distributed systems; proven track record of implementing new systems and products as well as experience in building highly scalable systems Track record of responsibility for product delivery and management including development tools and technologies, release and version control, contemporary testing methodologies, and deploy...