Program Management Associate/ Senior Associate

TL;DR version

Who: People passionate about planning and implementing projects & processes, while focusing on users' needs & experiences.

What: Supporting Kraftshala students with their learning journeys by creating delightful and impactful experiences.

Why: If you draw energy and satisfaction by helping people become a better version of themselves and have a knack for problem-solving, this is the role for you.

About us: Kraftshala is on a mission to help a million students launch their careers in marketing, sales, and more. We’ve already helped thousands of students launch their marketing careers in companies like Performics, Sokrati, GroupM, Nykaa, Tata Cliq, Coursera and are looking to add hundreds of thousands more in the coming decade.

Kraftshala is backed by a number of eminent investors including ex-unicorn startup founders and CXOs of global giants. 

Role Description 

As part of the Associate - Program Management profile, you will be responsible for student experience and taking them through an epic journey of growth and discovery! Your goal would be to lead and execute various activities that lead to a gold-standard experience for students. Please read below to know more about the role :

Program Management

• Take charge of the entire learning expedition, ensuring every student achieves their learning goals while enjoying a delightful learning experience.
• Be the friendly face that students turn to first, eagerly solving their questions and fostering positive relationships with them.
• Manage all aspects of Program Management, from arranging online sessions to coordinating evaluations and presentations. You'll get to interact with a diverse range of stakeholders, from senior managers and team leads to brilliant industry experts.
• Monitor each participant's progress closely, using program trackers to craft personalized support.

Process Optimization

While working with a large set of students, student experience becomes a function of the processes designed to deliver it and so, you’ll be:

• Discovering ways to improve efficiency in our daily processes in order to enhance student experience.
• Utilizing an array of tools, softwares, and platforms to automate processes in order to minimize human intervention and ensuring a flawless and effortless delivery of our programs.

Must-Have Skills

• Ability to clearly and crisply communicate ideas, both verbally and in writing
• High accountability and responsibility to ensure flawless execution on a day-to-day basis
• Working knowledge of MS Office (Excel and Powerpoint)
• Empathy and a high Emotional Quotient to actively engage with students, understand & solve their queries
• Demonstrated ability to take ownership and drive results to independently manage a set of programs
• Attention to detail - Spotting issues that could cause errors and delays, and affect quality, preferably before they snowball
• A structured approach to problem-solving, that involves struggling with the problem until you are able to isolate the Why before coming to a solution

Recruitment Process

As a small team, it’s imperative that we get to know each other before taking the leap. We want to ensure you succeed in your role within our team. Each conversation with us will last about 30-60 minutes. Typically the whole process takes between 8 - 15 business days depending on your and our schedules, and will be a mix of online and in-person interactions.

• Skill Assessment Task: This will be a task that assesses you on some of the core skills you’ll need to succeed in this role.
• Technical conversations: These will be calls with our current Program Management team wherein you can expect to be evaluated on the competencies needed for the job (mentioned above).
• Culture fit conversation: This will be a conversation with one of our founders to ensure that there is a fit with the Kraftshala Kode.
• Extending an offer: If all goes well, we will extend an offer that will mention the relevant details.

Location

Delhi

More about the company

We are Kraftshala. We are an online skilling institution committed to playing the long game of building a transformative educational experience for the masses. We call this ‘Scaling with Soul’.

Scaling with Soul, to us, means we always prioritise student outcomes– specifically our Placement Rate (percentage of students placed)- over other metrics, such as number of enrolments or company valuation in the coming year.

This is, of course, easier said than done. There are painful choices to be made at every stage, from admissions to training to placements, that wouldn’t have been needed were we willing to give up on either of high quality or scale.

But in the long run, we believe that our obsession over these student outcomes will earn Kraftshala the trust of Indian students, their families, recruiters and the broader ecosystem.

That’s why we make each of our Placement Reports public, capturing how many students are placed in each batch, in what companies, at what salaries etc.

We don’t need to. None of our competitors do (though we’d be happy to be proven wrong and have more educators join us!). Simply put, we have tasted the benefits of an education model grounded in high quality paired with the transparency of student outcomes and now cannot imagine doing it any other way.

We are not the largest in terms of enrollments. Nowhere close, actually. Not yet.

However, we are proud to be one of the largest, if not the largest already, in terms of actual, verifiable placements.

And in terms of Placement Rate, the metric that matters most to us, we are the absolute best in edtech. In the last 2 years, we have placed more than 1800+ students with a Placement Rate of 94% (and improving).

This is our long game- to Scale with Soul. We invite you to join us for the play. 

Funding

Kraftshala is backed by a number of eminent investors, including:

• Phanindra Sama and Sudhakar Pasupunuri, co-founders at Redbus and early investors in unicorns like Unacademy
• Amit Kumar Agarwal, Saurabh Garg and Akhil Gupta, co-founders at Nobroker.com (the world’s largest NoBrokerage Property Site and India’s first realty startup unicorn)
• Sujayathi Ali, Co-founder at ShopUp and Voonik
• Doreswamy Nandkishore (Former Fortune 100 CEO, Head of Asia, Oceania, Africa for Nestlé S.A. and Professor, ISB)
• Pallav Jain and Sarfaraz Khimani (co-CEOs of Performics, India's largest SEO/ performance marketing agencies)

What do we value (the Kraftshala Kode)

Kraftshala is on a mission to become the largest career launchpad in the world.

This is why Team Kraftshala is for the ambitious, the forever-learners, and most of all, for those who live to add value to others. In a world where education companies often lose sight of their core, we aim to Scale with Soul, to offer greater value to each stakeholder (including our team) everyday we get bigger. Joining Kraftshala now means becoming part of a story still in its early chapters- one you’ll help shape with your ideas, actions, and leadership.

Here are things we care for: 

• We seek a value-adding mindset in prospective team mates. Folks who demonstrate a capacity to understand their users' needs and combine it with a willingness to go the extra mile to deliver, fit right in.  
• We value problem-solving skills. We look at problems objectively, work backwards from the user, solve for root causes, and make decisions for long-term good instead of short-term gain. We don’t let processes or hierarchies get in the way of adding value.
• We believe speed matters enormously in business. We value people who move with urgency, have a bias for action, and are willing to take calculated risks in the face of uncertainty.
• We look for people with high learning agility, the truth seekers who pursue the best data, ideas, and solutions with rigour and open-mindedness, and are constantly working to become better today than yesterday.
• We admire people with ambition & courage to take on large goals. We are seeking to build a team of self-starters who demonstrate high ownership.
• We aim for consistency and reliability and expect the same from others. Predictability just makes everyone’s life a lot smoother.
• We believe people who demonstrate candour with care are the most effective: real, open and direct in communication, while still being highly empathetic. 
• We are practical optimists. Our team strongly believes in a better future and takes joy and pride in the fact that we are playing our part to make that future a reality.