If you’ve been following this space, you know I’ve been running an experiment I call Featured Gigs. These are conversations with hiring leads for consequential nonfaculty roles at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change.
If you are conducting a job search that aligns with the goals of the series, get in touch. If your gig is a good fit, featuring your gig is 100 percent free.
Early on, I decided the same four questions would anchor every Featured Gig so that readers could compare roles across institutions and time. These questions were suggested to me by Kemi Jona, UVA’s vice provost for online education and digital innovation.
- What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?
- Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?
- What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?
- What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?
Why run a Featured Gig series? Because hiring tells a story. A job posting is a public artifact of institutional/organizational strategy—what leadership is prioritizing, how the work is organized and which outcomes will matter. By analyzing these postings, we can surface patterns in how universities, companies and organizations are investing in online learning, teaching excellence, AI capability building and cross-campus/organizational collaboration.
Another goal of the series is to provide practical guidance to candidates and hiring teams: clear mandates, realistic success metrics and transparent pathways. To date, I’ve profiled 21 roles across research universities, selective privates and mission-driven institutions, plus a few adjacent roles in nonprofits and ed tech.
With some help from my AI collaborator (GPT-5), I’ve analyzed the entries so far in the series for common themes.
- Strategy-First Mandates: These jobs are not about tools; they are about institutional direction. Whether it’s an online education build-out, scholarship-informed teaching capacity or portfolio-level innovation, the mandate ties directly to mission: access, quality and long-term resilience.
- Placement Signals Collaboration Power: Reporting lines cluster around provosts, CTLs, online units and academic technology. Real impact comes from horizontal authority: the ability to convene deans, IT, libraries, enrollment, finance and communications—regardless of where the role sits.
- Success Metrics Are Time-Phased and Relationship-Heavy: Year 1 focuses on laying the groundwork, including stakeholder mapping, trust-building, clearing governance paths and delivering a few high-visibility wins. Years 2 to 3 move to scale and outcomes: measurable improvements in learner experience, faculty engagement, retention and sustainable program economics. Beyond three years, the through line is contributing to building organizational/institutional capability.
- Hybrid Career Pathways (Academia ↔ Ed Tech): The series consistently shows a lattice, not a ladder. Learning designers step into director roles; CTL leaders move into AVP or online strategy roles; some pivot to (or from) ed-tech partners in partnerships and product strategy. The common denominator is fluency in both academic mission and product/portfolio thinking.
- From Technologies to Change Leadership: Across categories—learning design, academic tech, online leadership—the most predictive skills are not tool-specific. They’re change competencies: coalition-building, faculty partnership, data storytelling, product management and, increasingly, AI literacy as a strategic enabler.
In thinking about this Featured Gig series and the themes that run through the series, two conclusions are apparent. First, a combination of a position description and a Q&A about the position provides a more nuanced and grounded description of the role.
In some cases, I heard from my collaborators who wrote the answers to the four Featured Gig questions that they worked on the responses with the full hiring committee, a process that generated both good conversations and a clearer set of goals for the search. Working on this series, I’ve begun to wonder if every advertised job should include some discussion (or conversation) about the role that contains information not captured in the position description.
The second conclusion to draw from the Featured Gig series is that there are some amazing roles at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change to be found. We are at a difficult point in higher education, one where research-intensive universities are under attack from the executive branch of the federal government. The loss of research funding and the general uncertainty around grants and the ability of international students to enroll have resulted in university budget cuts and layoffs.
Digital innovation, centers for teaching and learning, and online education units have not been immune from cutbacks. At the same time, we see from these Featured Gigs that universities, companies and organizations are still recruiting. The competition to land these roles is intense, but they do exist.
