CASE: Nord Anglia Education
Technology Director

The Situation

Nord Anglia Education is the world’s leading premium international school’s organisation. Their network of 80 international schools are located in China, Europe, Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas. Together, they educate more than 70,000 students from kindergarten through to the end of secondary education. They are driven by one unifying philosophy: “we are ambitious for our students, our people and our family of schools.” Each Nord Anglia Education school is unique in character and tailored to meet the needs of their specific location. However, their schools are also united by the quality education they offer, the excellence of the student experience and the dedicated staff and management in their schools.

We have been working with their Leadership team for a number of years now, in both hiring senior leaders as well as assessing existing teams. They have been on a digital journey for some time now and recently approached us to assist them in a search for a Technology Director to lead the technical design authority for their new Digital strategy.

The Opportunity

Help Nord Anglia Education design, create and operate the best data-driven digital products in the education space which leverage technology in ways that are simultaneously ground-breaking, ethical, meaningful educationally, and generate commercial returns. They would work across NAE’s central, regional, and local school teams to improve data-enhanced teaching and learning - Nord Anglia Education’s core digital ambition.

It was important for the successful candidate to have experience of vendor management as the product itself, as well as the solution architecture that glues all components of Digital together, are being built externally – the new Technology Director’s experience of vendor management should enable them to facilitate this successfully.

What made this interesting?

Nord Anglia are reimagining education by creating a teacher-led, technology enabled school environment that will allow them to personalise the learning journey like never before. Contributing to an EdTech project of this scale in the wake of the pandemic made this search particularly unique for us.

Without giving away any trade secrets, Nord Anglia’s Digital product set is the world’s first pieces of technology that creates a highly unique learning experience for students. The immeasurable potential of this also added an element of interest because in addition to Nord Anglia’s over 80 schools across the globe, the Technology Director’s success could result in the expansion of Digital learning capability to thousands of schools worldwide.

What made this challenging?

As the process was edging towards the offer stage, the CEO then challenged the leadership team to conduct an audit on the total impact and value of its overall digital strategy.  In turn, having to put this role in temporary hold as the organisation navigated next steps.  We worked closely with the leadership team at Nord Anglia (and the candidate) to make sure both parties remained connected and were transparent.

Our recommendation in the end was to suggest to the client that they take a brave step and actually hire the external candidate initially on a consulting basis and play a lead role in the audit.  The candidate was coming to the end of a career sabbatical and was available immediately.  And, while a consulting project wasn’t their original preference it did offer a bridge into the organisation, not to mention an opportunity to really help them towards a successful review.

This proved to be successful, as the candidate was then offered (and accepted) the role on a permanent basis following the conclusion of the organisations review. It also gave them a perfect runway for ongoing success.

The Digital Board Process

We began this project by holding a number of briefing calls to develop a better understanding of DNA itself and what the Technology Director would need to bring to the organization to make it a success.

Once we had completed these calls, our research team worked on identifying candidates with:

  1. Vendor management experience: the candidate needed to be able to organise external teams whilst simultaneously instilling harmony across the final product.

  2. Software engineering background: this was important as the candidate would have firsthand experience in seeing a project like DNA grow, develop and evolve.

  3. Experience working in an integrated agile team: DNA is a product-led initiative, the candidate will need to work effectively in this type of environment.

Using this criteria, our research team developed an exhaustive list of targets, reaching out to them to establish: (1) interest in the role (2) how closely they fit the brief (3) their past achievements and (4) their cultural alignment with Nord Anglia Education.

7 of these candidates progressed to a formal interview with Bryan, our CEO, with the best of these being shortlisted to meet the client.

Throughout the project, our research team continued to identify potential new candidates in case there were any issues with the shortlist.

 

Success Story

The successful candidate bought with them almost 20 years of experience in technology, specialising in consumer data and software development. They were particularly skilled in leading both on-shore and off-shore teams, which will prove a great asset in organising DNA’s separate components. Despite the challenges of this search brought on by audit, the candidate has been able to impress in their consultancy role and are now a permanent member of the Nord Anglia team.

The candidate enjoyed being part of an agile and nimble environment making them a perfect fit to brief; in addition to this, they had a personal interest in EdTech due to having young children of their own who eventually benefit from advancements in digital capabilities in education.