Learning and Development Manager

About us

Our mission is to get 3-6 year old children in rural Africa to thrive. We have developed an award-winning Early Childhood Development programme, proven its impact through rigorous evaluation and scaled it through governments in both Ghana and Uganda. It is currently reaching over 300,000 children per year, and we aim to reach 1million children per year by 2028.

We’re a lively ambitious organisation, determined to have a major positive impact on the world. As an organisation of approximately 100 staff (across Ghana, Uganda and internationally); we work hard at a fast pace, in a challenging environment. We expect everyone to give their best to achieve the best possible results. Our work is demanding but provides plenty of opportunity for innovation, responsibility, growth, collaboration, creativity and fun. We want all staff to be happy, fulfilled and to feel appreciated and valued in their work.

As Lively Minds has developed as an international ECD expert, working with governments, major bilateral funders, well renowned research and grant institutions as well as the thousands of teachers, mothers and children we operate with on a daily basis, we have continued to evolve our organisation. Rightly it is our people that are at the heart of our organisation and we need to develop our capacity and capability, across all our people related activities and processes, to ensure we support the organisation in the best way. One of the principal areas of focus is to create an effective and dynamic end to end learning and development cycle for our people.

Further to this, our strategic aims for the next 3 years include a number of exciting growth projects both within the countries we operate in and expansion to new countries. These projects will require significant focus on leadership and support across learning and development projects and, as such, we are looking for a seasoned L&D Manager.

The role

The L&D Manager will work as part of the HR team and will lead on our L&D strategy and all organisational capacity and capability building initiatives.

Main Duties and Responsibilities
L&D Strategy
• Develop an effective L&D strategy that proactively supports our expansion and scaling ambitions by firstly conducting an in-depth skills and behavioural gap analysis and understanding the reality of how we work
• Ensure that our L&D strategy speaks to our own people requirements, but also the requirements of our eco-system of funders, research and government partnerships and other significant stakeholders/partners
• Ensure that our L+D strategy not only develops the leaders, and future leaders of our organisation, but deveops all of our staff in a way that is meaningful and motivating and is understood to be part of the Employee Value Proposition
• Ensure that we have the right platform, processes and tools to manage L+D in an appropriate manner for our organisation

Capacity and Capability Building Initiatives
• Create an ongoing suite of creative, clear and measurable L+D initiatives to deliver the strategy in a timely manner and demonstrate value for money
• Test new initiatives (where required) in a pilot environment and manage expectations accordingly
• Use your experience, network and best practice to leverage/create and manage structured “learning opportunities” within, and external to, the organisation as well as virtually.
• Create “new country” briefings, that includes culture and behaviour training, for staff before we start working in different countries

Create L&D courses, Deliver and Measure Effectiveness
• Create a range of L+D courses (including co-creation of activities with external partners where required) for different cohorts (including leadership)
• Deliver courses, this will be a blend of remote and in person learning activities.
• Monitor the progress and impact of courses, analysing feedback and making improvements as needed and ensure that they deliver value for money
• Identify external learning opportunities and manage relationships with external L&D providers, ensured these are aligned with the L&D strategy and within budget

Career Paths and Succession Planning
• With the support of the Head of HR, L&D create structured career paths across teams in the organisations and design learning and support interventions to support these
• Support the Head of HR, L&D in succession planning L+D activities (including at an individual level)
• Design a process to flag and monitor “flight risks” working closely with the HR team

Onboarding and Quality Assurance of L&D
• Create and manage (including delivey of specific modules) effective onboarding training that includes activtiies at pre-join, first month, first 100 days etc.
• Support, train and monitor hiring managers/teams in the onboarding process
• Onboard any contractors (in existing countries and in new entry countries) and ensure they can “live and breathe” the LM values and behaviours