Guild, the leading education benefits platform and one of Denver's fastest growing startups, is increasing economic mobility for working adults in America and providing education and support to help every student survive and thrive in the economy of tomorrow. Our platform helps employers offer education as a benefit to their employees by connecting employers' workforces with our network of nonprofit universities and education institutions that focus on serving the needs of working adults. And, our team of retention coaches helps each employee navigate the path back to school, providing individualized support from day one through graduation. In order to accelerate our growth and achieve our mission to serve 1000s more students, we've raised over $70 million from top tier investors including Felicis Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Redpoint Ventures (among other social impact and VC partners!). Now, we’re looking for our Director of Retention (Customer/Student Success) to lead our student coaching team.

Supporting student (customer) retention is core to what we do and your team is responsible for our students’ ongoing success in their learning program. As the Director of Retention, you are responsible for the leadership, management and operational oversight of Guild’s overarching retention efforts and fast-growing student coaching team. We’ll look to you to spearhead Guild’s thought leadership and operational success in retention, including success coaching for school, work and life. From our headquarters in Denver, you will design and implement our retention solutions and lead the daily operations of your team of coaches and managers, who coach students across the country through a virtual coaching model, as our students navigate the challenges of balancing work and school.

A day in our open, collaborative workspace might look like:

• Strategic goal-setting for the student success team – from collaborating to establish key quarterly goals to capacity planning, to talent management and performance improvement
• Oversight & accountability on the key metrics and operational processes – you’ll be the source to know our data cold - from our contact rate with students each week to our retention metrics and progress towards goals - and manage towards results
• Partner with technology team to drive innovation in retention - identify challenges and opportunities to improve process and performance; using data to prioritize decisions and propose new enhancements around hiring, technology, student outreach strategy, and data and reporting based on trends you decipher from your analysis
• Managing, mentoring and developing your team, from managers to individual contributors - to strengthen their own performance and their ability to support our students more effectively, with an emphasis on setting high expectations and holding managers and coaches accountable to their goals
• Utilizing best-practice research and practices to implement strategy around coaching adult learners online, prototyping based on learnings, prior experience, and continued pulse on research and strategies in the field
• Building and maintaining relationships with academic partners, like universities and academic content providers, to ensure effective processes are in place and best practices shared
• Collaborating cross-functionally with teams like Enrollment, University Partnerships, Academic Operations, and Financial Services to build operational efficiency. Such collaboration may center around:
• Operational processes around course start and course end
• Data accuracy for billing processes
• Academic Partner relationships prior to and during program launches in partnership with University Partnerships team members
• Participating as a member of the organizational management team of Guild – engaging in needs, priorities, and decisions that affect the business as a whole

In this role, you’ll grow and expand your expertise by:

• Bringing your operational and strategic leadership in the higher education space to fruition – making space to improve efficiencies, set and meet key goals, and implement new innovative strategies to enhance the success of the team and organization
• Serving in a highly cross-functional, business-critical role where you’ll have visibility, access and exposure to key decisions and the people making them
• Being an external face and leader for Guild around coaching working adults to balancing work and school
• Creating innovative solutions that increase efficacy, efficiency, or retention outcomes through product, technology, process improvement, etc...

You’ll know if you’re successful by:

• Setting and meeting your team’s ambitious student success metrics – related to course and program completion, re-enrollment, and student satisfaction
• Seeing your operational changes and coaching strategy innovations improve student outcomes and efficiency metrics for your team
• Becoming a trusted partner for our universities and academic partners as an expert in student coaching for online learners

You’ll join a team:

• That is growing quickly and needs a cohesive culture that makes coaching an attractive career choice
• With various coaching backgrounds – from traditional higher education, to K-12 teachers, to athletic coaches and mental health professionals
• Of learners & problem-solvers dedicated to our dual mission of changing education in America while building a successful, high-growth company
• Committed to building a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment that you’d support every day

What you’ll add to Guild – as an individual and part of the broader team:

• Passion for higher education and our mission – Guild is pioneering a new path for education as a benefit in a complicated and regulated space – success means quickly and effectively adapting your expertise
• 5+ years experience leading online student affairs or student services teams in higher education
• A developed belief in scalable student retention models (125+ students per coach) with successes to highlight and lessons to draw from
• Expertise implementing, managing and improving CRM systems to support student success and retention, including Salesforce and a comfort with technology that will enable you to successfully improve existing technology and/or evaluate new tech to support success
• A record of data-informed decision-making with focus on best practice research in student support and retention practices, backed by leading research in the field
• Expertise extracting insight from multiple data sets and using such insights to make operational decisions and changes quickly and the ability to partner effectively with engineering, university partnerships, data science and product teams to enhance data availability and presentation
• A vision of what the culture of student success center should look like, and how you will build and cultivate that culture
• Evidence of your intellectual curiosity in the space – do you blog, tweet, speak or read everything that’s out there – tell us more!
• Experience in a startup or similar environment where there is frequent change and a need to demonstrate and act with a sense of urgency