Vice President, Dean - School of Technology

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

As the Vice President and Dean of the Department of {Cyber Security, Software, Cloud & IT Management} at WGU’s College of Information Technology (COIT), you will play a key leadership role in driving the education and successful outcomes of students in your field. You will have comprehensive responsibility for growing the department by developing new, innovative, and market-relevant competency-based program offerings. In collaboration with other WGU organizations, you will lead industry partnerships and design go-to-market strategies to attract and enroll the right students into these programs.

Your role will also focus on ensuring successful educational and employment outcomes for students by leveraging and optimizing faculty support and employer partnerships. Your success will be measured by the ability to build, deliver, and scale programs profitably while maintaining a high level of retention and return on investment for students, particularly those from underserved populations.

This position reports to the Senior Vice President of COIT and emphasizes building strong, scalable programs that contribute to the university’s mission of delivering high-quality education with tangible career benefits.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Direct P&L ownership experience with managing over $50M+ P&L
• Drive a culture of continuous experimentation, measurement, and learning from data to rapidly improve the quality and delivery to students
• Strong people leader to directly or indirectly lead a diverse team of 50+ people including academic program leaders, instructional faculty, and student coaches/mentors
• Influences Others and Communicates Effectively: Communicates to improve and promote teamwork, decision making, and problem solving. Listens and responds effectively to the reactions and positions of others and encourages the expression of diverse ideas and opinions. Adjusts message and style to fit the audience. Provides timely and helpful feedback. Communicates appropriately to win support with all audiences.
• Collaborates: Works cooperatively with others across the organization to achieve shared objectives. Represents own interests while being fair to others and their areas. Partners with others to get work done. Credits others for their contributions and accomplishments. Gains buy-in, trust and support of others.
• Manages Ambiguity: Deals comfortably with the uncertainty of change. Effectively handles risk. Can decide to act without the total picture. Is calm and productive, even when things are up in the air. Deals constructively with problems that do not have clear solutions or outcomes.
• Drives for Results: Has a strong outcomes-based orientation. Persists in accomplishing objectives despite obstacles and setbacks. Has a track record of successfully achieving goals. Pushes self and helps others achieve results. Has a continuous improvement mindset.
• Builds Effective Teams:   Forms teams with appropriate and diverse mixes of styles, perspectives, and experience. Establishes common objectives and a shared mindset. Creates a feeling of belonging and strong team morale. Shares wins and rewards team efforts. Fosters open dialogue and collaboration among the team. Creates a team that works well cross-functionally.
• Organizational Learning: Learns quickly when facing new situations. Experiments to find new solutions. Takes on challenges of unfamiliar tasks. Extracts lessons-learned from failures and mistakes. Expands knowledge base through ongoing curiosity.
• Performs other related duties as assigned.

Knowledge, Skill and Abilities:

• Customer or student obsession with a focus on driving successful outcomes for them
• Industry or academic leader in the discipline {Cyber Security, Data Science, Software, Cloud & IT Management}
• Understanding of the industry trends, job opportunities, and educational market trends in the discipline
• Credible voice of the department in external partnerships and presentation o