Head of Post Course Strategy

Braven • Chicago, IL

9d • $154,500 - $224,400 • Hybrid

About The Position

Braven is a national nonprofit that prepares promising college students to secure a strong first opportunity after college graduation through a career-accelerating program. Braven is hiring a Head of Post Course Strategy Execution who will build the strategic and operational infrastructure that drives strong career outcomes for Fellows after they complete the Accelerator, which is every Braven Fellow's 10-15 week entry point into the program. This is an entrepreneurial role over a newer and still forming body of work that sits at the intersection of strategy and execution. The post-Accelerator Fellow experience is inherently adaptive: it is shaped by regional labor markets, individual Fellow profiles, and employer partnerships that evolve over time. This role brings structure and intentionality to that complexity, establishing a strategic PAF experience floor that guides regional teams while preserving the local latitude needed to optimize for each market. The Head of Post Course Strategy Execution holds the cross-regional view that no single campus team can hold, and uses that perspective to ensure that local execution is grounded in shared goals and the best practices emerging across Braven's network. This role is on the Product Team and reports directly to the Chief Product Officer.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of professional experience, with at least 3 years in a role that involved strategy development, program design, or organizational leadership
• 3+ years of people management experience, including experience developing and holding direct reports accountable to outcomes
• Demonstrated experience working in or designing programs that support workforce development, career outcomes, or post-program student support
• Experience influencing across teams or functions without direct authority, such as in a cross-functional or multi-site environment
• Authorized to work in the U.S.
• Braven doesn’t offer employment visa sponsorship

Nice To Haves

• Experience working in or with a nonprofit, education, or workforce development organization serving first-generation college students or communities historically underrepresented in professional careers
• Comfort building structure and accountability systems while also executing, you can hold strategy and day-to-day delivery at the same time
• Track record of cross team and organization collaboration.
• Track record of translating high-level strategic direction into clear, actionable goals and accountability structures for a team
• Experience working with or through regional or local teams in a multi-site organization, particularly in a role that required influencing without formal authority
• Comfort designing or deploying programming that reaches people at scale through a mix of live, asynchronous, and technology-enabled approaches, you understand that impact at scale requires thinking beyond the room, and you bring curiosity and creativity to how interventions reach the most Fellows most effectively.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a growth orientation toward data, you don’t need perfect information to make progress, and you actively build toward more rigorous evidence over time
• Strong communicator across levels and functions, able to translate between strategy and execution, between central and regional, and between different levels of the organization
• Experience with innovation and ongoing evolution of product experiences and the ability to be nimble in order to test innovation, as well as structured to ensure best practices are followed.
• Demonstrated commitment to building strong, inclusive cultures that develop others
• Experience that has informed your belief in Braven’s mission and has prepared you to work with, or for, Braven’s student Fellow population predominantly people of color from low-income backgrounds navigating the transition from college to career
• Demonstrated commitment to building strong and welcoming cultures that help to develop others.
• Exemplification of Braven’s core values.
• Experience that has informed your belief in Braven’s mission and has prepared you to work with, or for, Braven’s student Fellow population.

Responsibilities

• Hold accountability for post-Accelerator outcomes, not just whether programming is delivered, but whether Fellows are building genuine momentum toward strong opportunities after college.
• Watch cohorts closely while in the Accelerator course and afterward, and stay attuned to what’s happening in the field: the outcomes data, the qualitative patterns emerging from regional teams, the things that aren’t in any report yet but are visible to someone paying close attention. Name what you’re seeing and act on it.
• Discover and make intervention decisions when the picture isn’t right: determine what response is needed, draw from Braven’s program resources, or commission the Design team to build something new, and work with colleagues across functions to get it to students.
• Define and steward the post-Accelerator program strategy: articulate what Fellows are working toward after the Accelerator, what Braven is accountable for driving, and what core practices every delivery context is expected to implement, grounded in Braven’s program logic model and findings from the Research team.
• Serve as a formal input into Braven’s research agenda by bringing qualitative intelligence from the field, the patterns, the outliers, what cohorts are telling you about what they need —directly to the Research team as evidence that outcomes data alone cannot provide.
• Bring a longitudinal perspective to program direction: you see how student needs and expectations shift year over year, and that perspective provides a structured basis for how Braven assesses whether the program is keeping pace with the Fellows it serves.
• Collaborate with other Central Teams and the regions to assess outcomes and determine in a collaborative way, what should change and what should stay.
• Stay current on the external field career readiness research, employer expectations, evolving labor market trends, including how AI and shifting hiring practices are reshaping the opportunities Fellows are entering, and how highly-resourced colleges are evolving their career preparation and bring that knowledge into Braven's PAF strategy.
• Lead and develop the team responsible for Braven's centrally-run post-Accelerator programs, including Career Communities, the Professional Mentor Program, et cetera.
• Hold the team accountable to clear goals and outcomes, while building the conditions for each direct report to lead their area with increasing ownership and independence.
• Ensure that every centrally-run program is designed to be actively usable at the regional level — translating central offerings into tools and practices that strengthen the local Fellow experience.
• Continuously evaluate the PAF program portfolio, identifying where existing central or local supports need to evolve and where new ones need to be built so that the full arc of post-Accelerator programming remains responsive to what Fellows actually need to achieve strong outcomes.
• Stay proximate to the Fellow experience across delivery contexts, engaging directly with programming, regional teams, and Fellows themselves so that strategic decisions are grounded in what's actually happening, not just what's being reported.
• Develop and maintain the cross-functional relationships, rituals, and shared accountability structures that make PAF programming real — not just in theory, but in practice across the Central teams whose work directly shapes what Fellows experience.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration to enhance program impact and operational efficiency. For example: Volunteer & Employer Teams: Integrate meaningful volunteer engagement into programming and create pathways for Fellows to access job opportunities and sponsorships. Data Team: Define regional use cases to ensure outcomes data is visualized in ways that are actionable for daily frontline use. Systems Team: Translate program strategy and user needs into technical requirements for the MyBraven platform. Regional Teams: Partner with local Program and External Affairs leads to align central resources with regional strategies, ensuring effective use of central "levers" to meet local needs.
• Establish and steward the cross-functional rhythms, the right people in the right conversations at the right cadence so that PAF priorities are visible across functions and the work that depends on others actually moves.
• Hold the cross-regional view that no single regional team can hold: synthesize what’s working and what isn’t across campuses, cohorts, and contexts, and bring those insights back into both central strategy and regional practice.
• Partner with regional leaders as a strategic resource, sharing patterns, flagging emerging gaps, and helping teams act on what the data and field signals are telling them.
• Build trusted relationships with regional colleagues, influence action with the clearest cross-network picture of what's working for Fellows, and bring that intelligence to the people who can act on it.
• Work directly with Site Directors and their teams to strengthen local PAF strategy, diagnosing gaps, sharing what's working across the network, and helping teams make good decisions even when the data picture is incomplete.
• Co-create new programming with regional teams and treat their experience of what you build as essential information for evolving the broader strategy.
• Lead, develop, and grow the PAF Execution team, including developing talent at multiple levels and scoping new roles as the organization scales to serve significantly more Fellows.
• Serve as a member of Braven’s Product Leadership Team, contributing the perspective of someone accountable for field-level outcomes to cross-functional decisions about what Braven should build, change, or stop doing in the Accelerator and post-Accelerator arc.
• Partner with colleagues across Research, Design, and Operations to ensure the Post-Accelerator strategy is grounded in evidence, informed by what’s happening with students in real time, and set up to be delivered well.
• Serve as a member of the "One Braven" leadership team, contributing to org-wide strategy and stewarding a healthy, high-performing culture for both your immediate team and the broader organization.
• Anticipate where the post-Accelerator model needs to evolve as Braven scales toward 25,000+ Fellows, including which interventions can remain staff-delivered, where technology-enabled and asynchronous approaches need to grow, and what the PAF experience looks like when it's working at a fundamentally different volume.
• Other duties as assigned.

Benefits

• Unlimited vacation time in addition to org-wide holidays and week-long shutdowns in July and the end of the calendar year (this is a minimum of 19 days per year)
• $25,000 in lifetime Carrot benefits for fertility, family-building, and hormonal health
• Match of your 401K contribution up to 5% of your base annual salary, starting your first full month
• Coverage of 85% of health insurance premium for employee and dependents
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• A one-month paid sabbatical after 4 years on staff

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager