Learning Experience Designer

at  Cognician

An experienced Account Director to help us 10x the Cognician Universe.
History and purpose
Cognician is a multi-award-winning online learning company with offices in Cape Town, London and San Francisco. Our founding belief is that people are capable of great things when their behaviour is driven by powerful ideas and deeply felt emotions. Driven by this belief we bring together a unique approach to learning and a world-class tech platform to activate behaviour change in large, global organisations. What does that mean? It means we deliver significant, measurable behaviour change to our clients in 30 days or less.
Cognician was founded in 2010 by Barry and Patrick Kayton, who grew the company and platform out of their previous instructional design agency, Bright Sparks, founded in 1999. After being joined by Robert Stuttaford, CTO, and Michael Leeman, CFO, the core founding team went on to grow Cognician into a team of 60 strong, and the world’s best-kept secret in corporate learning. And now we’ve had the good fortune of expanding our Leadership Team to include Colin Sloman, as our inaugural Chief Strategy Officer.
Our primary global partner and client is Accenture. Via Accenture and other partners, we have acquired an enviable list of Fortune 500 clients. Our aim now is to accelerate our growth through content marketing, driving the sale of our packaged products and maintaining a compelling dialogue with clients and prospects.
Industry
Online corporate learning, operating at the intersection of learning and change management.
Job description
We’re looking for a Learning Experience Designer or as we like to think about the role, a Behavior Activation Expert, who has the courage – the will – to be great, just like the great ideas we hope to spark. Someone who can create powerful learning experiences that ultimately change lives and the world!
You’ll work with Cognician’s clients, fellow LXDs, other team members, and on your own, in a stimulating environment where AI and innovation is embraced, to create content that is thought-provoking, engaging, but most of all, genuinely useful. We’re looking for someone who finds the work we do at Cognician to be personally meaningful.
Co-creation is a core to your approach and you’re skilled at coming alongside clients to not only understand their needs but anticipate them. Whether it be business priorities, challenges or leadership and change agendas, you’re confidently able to map every instance back to the Cognician offering and translate them into Cognician change quests.
You will report directly to the Studio Manager.

What will you do?

• Design engaging and impactful behavior activation experiences that drive measurable outcomes for participants.
• Develop interactive and multimedia-rich content that enhances learning retention and application.
• Ensure alignment of activation solutions with client goals and Cognician’s standards of excellence.
• Continuously evaluate and improve activation experiences based on feedback and performance metrics.

How do you know this job is for you?
Here’re a bunch of “you” statements that should resonate:

You love to learn, and you think that education is the foundation of growth and greatness in people and in economies.
You’re fascinated by ideas, and you’re deeply moved by powerful human stories.
You’re curious about impact and data and building experiences around those concepts is an exciting prospect. >You believe AI has its place as a tool to contribute to efficiency
You believe that large organisations can be a force for change in the world. When working with large companies you can have an impact on 10,000, 20,000… 500,000 people, and the millions of people they serve.
You’re energised by creative pursuits of all kinds.
You love stories and storytelling, and you especially get a kick out of telling stories that folks haven’t heard before.
You’re fascinated by human behaviour, and how well-crafted learning experiences can influence an audience and be a force for good.

Also, think about the extent to which these statements apply to you:

• You’re a voracious reader and an insatiable learner. You love reading books, blog posts, web sites, magazines. If you could get paid for reading, you’d be the happiest person in the world.
• People would probably describe you as a listener, rather than a talker. Your friends like to talk to you because you listen, and you ask questions that help them to come to terms with the challenges in their lives.
• You’re also good at expressing ideas in ways that are easy for others to understand, particularly in writing.
• You’re good at framing ideas in new and creative ways that cause people to pause and think differently about things.
• You’re fascinated by design theory - come to think of it most theories!
• You’re a thorough planner. You love huge spreadsheets that organise your time and activities in great detail.
• You’re the kind of person who creates documents – presentations, discussion documents, infographics – to extend your mind, organise your thoughts and share them with others.
• When you have a feeling that something isn’t quite right about a piece of content, you don’t feel good sharing it with the world until it’s not just fixed, but great!
• You seek out the opinions and support of others, knowing that there is an enormous amount of knowledge and experience in the business, and you firmly believe that, as a team, we’re capable of far more than we are as a group of individuals.
• You love communicating with people, both in the business, and with our customers.
• You’re energised by making strong connections with other people.
• You take curveballs, setbacks, disappointment and stress in your stride. These are all part of the terrain of the working world, and you’ve developed a fitness for long distance journeys across this landscape.
• You prefer simple, clear, coherent writing to business jargon, and you’re passionate about perfect spelling and grammar.
• You’re generally known to be smart and creative.

A typical day
[Before you kick off, we hope you’ve had a good night’s sleep, a good breakfast, and perhaps a walk or a run, with lots of fresh air. We value wellbeing, and it starts with how you organise your day.]

Morning

• Good morning, Asana! You review your tasks for the day, to make sure you’ll meet your deadlines ahead of schedule.
• It’s time to connect with your project team. With content matrix at the ready, you determine whether there are any updates that need to be worked into today’s content development session.
• You check Teams messages from the LXD team and read their thanks for completing a super detailed and how-to guide on using our home-grown AI assistant to generate alt-text.
• A quick dip into one of your live programs next. It brings on an almost immediate air punch after reading some of the insights generated. Seriously gratifying to see your work having this sort of impact. The number of likes and shares are off the charts. You feel proud to have been part of creating the space for social learning at this high level.
• Next, you review your notes from your most recent client discovery call, and you flag a few things that need to be brought to the project manager’s attention.
• You spend 15 minutes, updating the latest case study for one of your programs that has reached a global audience of more than 2500 people. Woohoo!

Late morning

• Meet with a client to unpack the requirements for a program called Sustainable Future. You expertly guide them through the discovery call, playing back the requirements gathered to nuke ambiguity. As the call ends, you commit to having your content matrix ready for review within the next two days.
• You huddle with your project team for a post-call debrief, sense checking the requirements with the project AM and partner LXD. You’re chomping at the bit to get research under way.
• Research Activated! You find, review and categorise resources relating to sustainability and how to get the most value out of sustainability tools and platforms.
• You distil 10 key ideas from your research resources and begin formulating 10 action-focused challenges to steer users through an experiential learning journey.
• You set out the challenges visually in a document for the client to review and you decide to code one up to experience its potential. It’s looking good!

Early afternoon

• You hop on a Teams call with your development lead and chat about sourcing accessible images as part of designing for humanity - you just love the way WCAG is not just an acronym, but a practice taken seriously in designing learning experiences.
• Reviewing a program for a colleague is up next and you spot a coding error that you know just how to sort.

Late afternoon

• Is it that time already? Phew, time to prep for the next day.
• You make sure your calendar is up to date. NB! Book time with the design team to understand their new ways of working and how your deliverables dovetail with their process.
• A quick Viva Engage read of a new joiner’s read-me bio. Love this inclusive team!
• Waving hand emoji on Teams:) - till tomorrow folks!

Ticking these off in a job description makes your heart sing:

• Creating thought-provoking questions that will help people explore new concepts and apply them to their own contexts.
• Researching and writing rich content to establish context for new concepts.
• Working out Activation outcomes.
• Contributing to knowledge libraries.
• Testing or reviewing programs from other LXDs.
• Leveraging data and AI.
• Participating in writing and other relevant workshops and learning opportunities.
• Mentoring junior LXDs.
• Mastering rapid prototyping.

Experience

Must-haves

• A degree/qualification in one of the following fields or a related field: Education, Psychology, Philosophy, Linguistics, English, Journalism, Copywriting
• A minimum of three years’ demonstrated experience working as a business or life coach, writer, journalist, instructional designer or content editor, ideally in a publishing environment, preferably in a digital medium
• Proficiency in using e-learning and multimedia design tooling.
• Experience with data analytic tools to measure effectiveness and improve content-based insights
• Experience in HR, L&D, change management or related fields
• Client and project management skills
• Superior communication skills

Great-to-haves

• Experience in working with a content-management system
• Basic HTML, CSS and SEO skills
• Experience with Microsoft Suite
• A quirky sense of humour
• And a pet! Why else have meetings other than to gush over fur-kids!

Culture

• We’re a “Top Culture Company”. We have an award to prove it:)
• We value Questioning, Integrity, Excellence, Action, Teamwork, Empathy, People, and Wellbeing. We don’t expect you to recite the definitions, or even remember the list. We hire people who share our values, though.
• There are a lot of parents among us. We do school drop-offs and pick-ups, and we know what it means to balance family and work life.
• We have quarterly internal awards, which we call Mind, Heart and Hands. This is one of the ways in which we recognise and appreciate our people for living up to our values, as well as exhibiting great thinking, emotional investment, and strong action orientation.
• Weekly team meetings end in appreciation sessions, which can often run over time. We genuinely care for each other, and for the ways in which we work together.
• Everything we do is about meaningful work. Our work improves the lives of the people who take our programs. And it improves the organisations who run them.

Perks

• We cover your home Wi-Fi costs in full.
• You’ll have access to the very best digital coaching programs we offer, and numerous opportunities for learning and development.
• Every five years you get an extra month of paid leave as a sabbatical.
• We use Macs, so you can breathe a sigh of relief. If you’re not breathing a sigh of relief, we will get you through this.

• Design engaging and impactful behavior activation experiences that drive measurable outcomes for participants.
• Develop interactive and multimedia-rich content that enhances learning retention and application.
• Ensure alignment of activation solutions with client goals and Cognician’s standards of excellence.
• Continuously evaluate and improve activation experiences based on feedback and performance metrics