Chief Learning Partnerships Officer — Industry and Academic Relevance

The mandate

An education network has signed several industry relationships, yet faculty and learners do not consistently see how those relationships change the capability a programme develops. Employer talks and partnership announcements provide visibility but little evidence of curriculum relevance. The network is creating a chief learning partnerships office to turn those connections into usable learning. Employment is open-ended, with a twenty-four-month opening agenda covering selected professional programmes across six hubs and continuing accountability for relevance as industry work changes.

The starting question is what employers genuinely need people to demonstrate. A broad request for future-ready skills is insufficient unless it can be translated into work examples, assessed judgement and teaching activity. The chief will organise that translation with employers and faculty, distinguishing an enduring capability from a tool-specific demand that may not justify a lasting programme change. Academic leaders retain curriculum approval and disciplinary standards. Employers own their hiring requirements. The partnership institution must preserve those responsibilities while ensuring that external input reaches actual teaching and assessment rather than remaining in a memorandum.

Sixteen partnership and learning-design colleagues report through the office. You decide partnership priorities, the operating method for employer input and programme-support allocation within the approved budget. The academic council approves curriculum changes; the chief executive reserves material commercial commitments and strategic institutional relationships. Faculty own disciplinary teaching decisions, with qualified assessment owners validating the proposed learning evidence. Accreditation opinions, guaranteed placement and technical certification outside the network's authority are excluded. A partnership's value must be demonstrated through better learning relevance, not inferred from a prominent signatory or a promise of access to jobs.

During the opening agenda, selected programmes should contain employer-informed work tasks that faculty can teach and assess consistently. The network should know which partnerships supply useful evidence, which contribute only general advocacy and which need a different format. Bengaluru is the base, with academic-hub and employer visits integral to the work. Continuing leadership includes developing partnership deputies, maintaining curriculum-refresh routes and evaluating the learner implications when work expectations shift. The chief should leave faculty better equipped to sustain relevant learning, rather than establish a separate external-content stream that academic teams cannot own.

What you will own

• Establish employer work-evidence requirements for priority programmes, turning broad capability requests into examples of observable judgement and performance that academic owners can evaluate for appropriate learning use.
• Decide partnership priorities using the quality and maintainability of industry input, distinguishing relationships that strengthen teaching from those whose main contribution is visibility or access to a ceremonial forum.
• Shape curriculum-refresh proposals with faculty through explicit capability and learner implications, preserving academic approval while making the reason for each proposed change understandable beyond the partnership team.
• Build an operating route from employer input to learning tasks and assessment review, ensuring updates reach responsible faculty instead of becoming an unowned collection of presentations and suggested tools.
• Test faculty adoption through worked teaching and assessment cases, identifying where the external work example is useful but the network lacks the support needed to deliver it consistently.
• Present partnership investment and continuation choices to governance with relevance evidence, making commercial obligations and academic decision boundaries explicit without promising employment or certification outcomes outside institutional authority.
• Develop partnership leaders and faculty collaboration practices that sustain refresh after the opening agenda, reducing dependence on the chief's personal relationships when employer expectations or academic teams change.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate industry-academia or learning partnership work that materially changed what participants could demonstrate, rather than only created an agreement or speaker series. Explain the employer evidence, faculty decision and assessed capability that followed. The proof should show how you handled a mismatch between industry language and academic practice, including a proposed input you rejected or reframed because it could not be used responsibly in the programme.
• Evidence 28+ years across people leadership, capability development, services or education-related transformation with substantial VP or comparable senior standing. You must be able to connect work expectations to learning design and sustain executive stakeholder relationships without assuming specialist academic authority. Experience in IT services, BPM or professional capability is relevant when it supplies real work understanding that can be translated for educators and learners.
• Show judgement about enduring competencies and rapidly changing tools. Describe how you prevented a fashionable demand from overwhelming a programme's learning purpose, and how you kept useful industry input current. Coaching, change-management or cross-cultural practice should support faculty adoption and employer dialogue. Strong candidates respect disciplinary expertise while making vague external expectations precise enough for an accountable curriculum and assessment discussion.
• Demonstrate leadership of partnership or learning teams, including deputies who maintained relationships and refresh activity after your direct involvement reduced. Regular academic-hub engagement, careful learner information handling and clear commercial scope are important. The role needs a chief who can assess relationship value honestly, communicate limits around placement and certification, and build an institution faculty can own rather than a programme dependent on personal influence.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 13 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-158.