Career Services Director, Break Through Tech (NYC)

About Break Through Tech

Break Through Tech works at the intersection of academia and industry to propel more underrepresented folks into technical careers -- with a particular emphasis on Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and first- generation college going women and non-binary students.

Launched in 2016 in New York City as a partnership between Cornell Tech and the City University of New York (CUNY), Break Through Tech has since expanded nationally, serving undergraduate students across the country through our Sprinternships™ and AI programs. Our north star is our focus on placing our program participants in internships or full-time roles post-graduation. Today, we achieve this through our in-program training and experiential learning programs, but some early experimentation has shown that we have an opportunity to enable even more career success for our participants if we invest in wrap-around career services - including career fairs, resume workshops, career coaching and hiring partnerships - to help ease the path to post-program outcomes.

Position Summary

Break Through Tech is seeking an experienced player/coach to join us as our first Career Services Director. In this role, you will build and lead the systems and teams that will define and launch our new Career Services function. This function will be mission critical for the organization as it will define our systems and approaches to achieving our North Star of internship and job placement for our participants.

In this role, your work will contribute to enabling successful career outcomes for our program participants and alumni across the nation. This role will manage a small direct team and also be responsible for matrix managing members of other teams as well as vendors and partners to achieve our goals. In this role, your responsibilities will include:

• Leveraging learnings from Break Through Tech’s pilots as well as best practices from your prior experience to define and launch a suite of Career Services offerings to all participants and alumni across all programs:

• Successfully delivering Career Services offerings to Break Through Tech participants and alumni, in partnership with program delivery teams and external partners.

• Defining and tracking measures of success, including leading and lagging indicators.

• Cultivating and maintaining collaborative relationships with other departments and external partners to support the work.

• Serving as a member of Break Through Tech’s Program Leadership team, informing and shaping the future of operations and participant experience across our organization

While position responsibilities vary, all people leaders are expected to foster a culture of belonging and a psychologically healthy work environment by being trustworthy; respecting all individuals; being flexible; supporting work/life integration as well as healthy boundaries; inviting new ideas, alternatives, and perspectives; speaking up and taking action if others are being excluded or treated inappropriately; and recognizing the contributions of others. 

Successful candidates will need to have and display the following competencies as part of this role: 

• Builds effective teams, with appropriate and diverse mix 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
• Develops talent by placing high priority on developing others through coaching, feedback, exposure, and stretch assignments; Aligns employee career development goals with organizational objectives; Encourages people to accept developmental moves.
• Directs work to provide clear directions and accountabilities; Delegates and distributes assignments and decisions appropriately; Monitors progress by maintaining dialogue on work and results; Provides appropriate guidance and direction based on people’s capabilities; Intervenes as needed to remove obstacles
• Organizational savvy, being sensitive to how people and organizations function Anticipates land mines and plans approach accordingly; Deals comfortably with organizational politics; Knows who has power, respect, and influence; Steers through the organizational maze to get things done.
• Strategic Mindset to anticipates future trends and implications accurately; Readily poses future scenarios; Articulates credible pictures and visions of possibilities that will create sustainable value; Creates competitive and breakthrough strategies that show a clear connection between vision and a