Lead, Strategy Management (Remote)

Title:  Lead, Strategy Management

Department: Office of Strategy and Planning

Reporting to: Senior Director, Strategy and Planning

Location: United States

Compensation: $160K - $170K USD

 

Who We Are: 

World Education Services (WES) is a non-profit social enterprise that supports the educational, economic, and social inclusion of immigrants, refugees, and international students. For 50 years, WES has set the standard for international academic credential evaluation, supporting millions of people as they seek to achieve their academic and professional goals. Through decades of experience as a leader in global education, WES has developed a wide range of tools to pursue social impact at scale. From evaluating academic credentials to shaping policy, designing programs, and providing philanthropic funding, we partner with a diverse set of organizations, leaders, and networks to uplift individuals and drive systems change. Together with its partners, WES enables people to learn, work, and thrive in new places. For more information about WES, please visit our website at www.WES.org. 

 

About the Opportunity:

The Strategy Management Lead orchestrates and translates WES’s enterprise strategy into coordinated execution.  This role combines strategic leadership, operational execution, and change management excellence to deliver measurable outcomes across complex, cross-functional teams. The Lead will be critical in building a new function at WES tasked with managing organizational engagement with the strategy and strategic plan at all levels, including at the executive level and within business units. In addition, the Lead will help develop and support the governance structures and frameworks needed to ensure strategy development and execution across the enterprise. The Lead will partner with the Senior Director for Strategy, Planning, and Learning to ensure WES’s long-term vision, annual priorities, and cross-functional initiatives are aligned, measurable, and successfully executed by cross-functional teams across the organization. The Lead will also have exposure to WES’s Board of Trustees. 

 

What You’ll Do:

Strategy Management  

• Serve as a trusted strategic advisor to the broader Executive Leadership Team (ELT) on strategic priorities and readiness. 
• Lead the coordination of the full annual and multi-year enterprise strategy planning cycle, partnering closely with the Senior Director for Strategy, Planning, and Learning, other leaders in the Strategy, Planning, and Learning Team executive team, and leaders responsible for strategy execution. 
• Engage across WES to translate strategic goals into actionable workstreams, milestones, and measurable outcomes. 
• Establish and operationalize a governance model to track progress, escalate issues, support decision-making, and prioritize initiatives. 
• Coordinate alignment between strategic initiatives, budgets, and resource allocation. 

Alignment & Communication 

• Align business units, departments, and functional strategies with the enterprise strategy; build the enabling function to monitor strategic coherence, alignment, and understanding across the organization enabling leaders to course correct where necessary. 
• Cultivate strong partnerships across functional areas to ensure unified strategy delivery. 
• Represent the strategy at board, executive, and enterprise forums, providing insight on progress and impact. 
• Support stakeholder engagement, communication, and change management best practices to ensure organization-wide understanding and adoption of the strategic plan. 
• Build confidence and alignment through transparent communication, storytelling, and shared success metrics. 

 Organizational Capability Building 

• Build organizational capability within the strategy management team, in strategic thinking, prioritization, and execution discipline. 
• Model a culture of data-driven decision making, continuous improvement, and enterprise cross-team collaboration. 
• Build internal capacity for challenge identification and prioritization, change management, evaluation, and continuous improvement. 
• Develop documentation, playbooks, and frameworks to ensure continuity and momentum throughout the strategic implementation timeline. 

 People and Functional Management  

• Oversee the strategy management work with general people responsibilit