The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success (PS) strategy seeks to transform colleges and universities to dramatically improve credential attainment and eradicate equity gaps for low income students and students of color.
We are currently seeking an exceptional Program Officer candidate for a limited term (LTE) 12-month role. You will have responsibility for providing support and leverage strategy execution across the postsecondary teams. There may be some grant or investment related responsibilities while the primary focus of this effort would be to collaborate with a senior program officer on behalf of 20 program officers with varied and interdependent responsibilities. To further the strategy’s impact, this individual will:
- Designing, revealing and following up with interrelated work efforts, grantee partner relationship management opportunities and interconnected investment/grant results across the breadth of the Postsecondary Success strategy.
- Plans, manages and executes a wide range of activities in support of strategic execution efforts while managing internal and external relationships.
- Support the Senior Portfolio Officer in the annual planning process.
- Understand and potentially manage internal processes and portfolio progress while ensuring appropriate documentation, grant budgeting and reporting. Improve operational efficiency and effectiveness ‘in between’ key portfolios and their expected results.
- Extensive project contribution and management experience.
- Proven ability to learn new topic areas, understand complex systems and maintain curiosity.
- Strong experience in identifying, structuring and designing improvements between interdependent functions, processes and people.
- Experience with large scale strategy and planning efforts that span multiple organizational silos or teams, including executive leadership.
- Knowledge and preferable experience with systems and/or process change within and between large organizations.
- Proven ability to remain organized, task oriented and persistent in the context of abstract strategies.
- Effective as a collaborator in complex internal and external organizations.
- Strong analytical, writing and verbal skills for communicating with a broad and diverse audience.
- Works with efficiency and diplomacy, with shared goal achievement in mind.
- Experience in higher education preferred.
Core Capabilities for Success in This Role
- DEI Mindset: Fosters diverse, equitable and inclusive practices and challenges practices which may be exclusionary.
- Strategic and Analytic Agility: Defines clear objectives and plans. Take a systems and hypothesis-driven perspective. Balances logic with creativity. Uses judgement and discretion in making trade offs"
- Project Management: Effectively uses the company's systematic approach to planning, organizing, directing, supervising and accomplishing the goals of a project(s) requirements and activities to meet objectives.
- Effective Communication: Ability to effectively communicate complex ideas and analyses internally and externally, written and verbal.
- Collaboration/ Relationship Building: Develops and maintains effective working relationships with team members and internal partners through strong interpersonal skills. Obtains cooperation from others; seeks and encourages win-win alternatives.
- Ambiguity: Effectively cope with change; able to shift comfortably; decides and acts without having the total picture; comfortably handles risk and uncertainty. Demonstrates the ability to function in unstructured work environments and/or uncertain conditions (includes the ability to work in situations where one has little/no control).