UK Sport have a great opportunity for a learning experience designer … the official title is Head of Coach Development.
The closing date for applications is 4 January 2017.
I used Wordle to extract some keywords from the job description.
Learning appears four times in the job description and makes it onto the bottom left corner of the Wordle.
One of the key responsibilities for the successful candidate will be to:
Support the Head of Performance People Development on visionary activities, working closely with the Head of Performance Leadership Development and Director of Science and Technical Development (EIS) to provide an aligned culture and pathway of learning centred on WITTW.
Another key responsibility is to:
Ensure Coach Development Programmes and initiatives deliver effective, innovative and target specific learning.
The successful candidate will have “extensive experience in the design, development, delivery and evaluation of learning and development programmes in a high performance environment” and “personal experience of professional coaching and the application of psychology, adult learning and development methodologies”.
My text search did not pick up any reference to ‘education’ or ‘personal learning environments’ in the job description.
I wondered how an applicant for the post might persuade the interview panel that the next iteration of coach development might be to focus on personal learning. The leadership expectation of the post holder might also generate conversations about how we could use a ‘thinking machine‘ approach to support a radical, differentiated learning-as-a-coach experience.
We are on the cusp of remarkable opportunities to design learning experiences. It is a world we are going to and so framing a position description for this new age takes a substantial paradigm shift.
Some time ago, I was interested of the appearance in Denmark of knowledge pilot opportunities in learning organisations.
I think my paradigm shift now includes the coach learning experience designer being a co-pilot with coaches as we enter an entangled learning world of leading and following.
Whatever the dynamics and technologies involved, I believe learning is at the core of what we do in the enterprise described as coach development.
