VP Strategic Sourcing and Contracts

Job Title : VP, Multilingual, Translations & Strategic Sourcing

Location: Flexible, anywhere in the continental U.S.

Reports to: SVP, Enterprise Development Strategy & Services

Who We Are

HMH is a learning technology company committed to delivering connected solutions that engage learners, empower educators and improve student outcomes. As a leading provider of K–12 core curriculum, supplemental and intervention solutions and professional learning services, HMH partners with educators and school districts to uncover solutions that unlock students’ potential and extend teachers’ capabilities. HMH serves more than 50 million students and 3 million educators in 150 countries.

What You Will Do

The Vice President, Multilingual, Translations & Strategic Sourcing, (VP- MTSS) is responsible for implementing and overseeing the execution of HMH’s content development strategy for multilingual learners, supplier partnerships, and translations strategy and support. The successful candidate has extensive experience in overseeing high profile, complex multi discipline and multilingual programs, including sourcing partnerships, and negotiations, with multiple dependencies, delivering them on time and within budget.

The VP-MTSS is the authority and responsible for the oversight of HMH’s Multilingual content development strategy, partnering with product management, learning experience, sales, and supplemental teams, as well as overseeing relationships with partners and suppliers, including establishing and vetting new partners, and is ultimately accountable for the program’s success, particularly in ensuring compliance and mitigating risk. Works collaboratively with the SVP, Enterprise Development Strategy & Services, and across the full organization including Development Teams, Legal and Finance, prioritizing needs and management of the necessary resources, including budgets, staff, relations with suppliers and partners, etc. Ensures that standards for multilingual supports, translations/ transadaptations, and supplier relationships are in line with industry best practices and HMH’s business requirements.

Ensures that team members are trained, coached, and provided with development opportunities and project assignments that meet professional and personal development needs as well as organizational and business needs. The successful candidate has an excellent understanding of digital development process, including the intricacies of educational tech publishing. Candidate also possesses professional and executive gravitas with a successful track record of outside in strategic viewpoints while driving newer digital first best in class approaches over otherwise static business models.

Core Responsibilities

• Establish Strategic Direction for Multilingual Services, Sourcing, and Translations
  
  

Direct the development of business strategies and implementation of standards for best Multilingual support strategies, program translations and sourcing operations. Define and drive continual process improvement and go forward industry leading best practices creating a best in class organization, high performing center of excellence for HMH. Ensure all business collateral (statements of work, development terms, deal sheets, partnership terms, etc.) are executed accurately and in a timely manner, and that terms and other data are maintained in appropriate databases/tools.

• Manage People, Performance and Stakeholder Relationships
  
  

Experienced in leading, building, and managing a high-performance team through coaching and mentorship. Oversees and manages professional career development for a team of sourcing, multilingual specialists, sourcing and translations professionals by conducting performance reviews and regular check-ins with functional team.

Exhibits strong people-leading skills, with the ability to develop, coach, and provide timely and effective feedback in a strong-matrix environment. Creates and cultivates strong supportive, collegial, and customer focused environment with key stakeholders across HMH, including Senior Leadership and Executive Leadership teams.

• Ensure High Quality, Automation, and Mitigate Risk
  
  

Ensure enterprise-wide needs for creating multilingual supports in content development are met, and partnership/supplier due diligence, risk assessment, and continuous monitoring of partnerships are being accomplished. Ensure that partnership terms and conditions are favorable and fair, align with policy, and maximize business potential and beneficial to HMH and overall compliance. Define and drive automation throughout the business and work of the team.

• Customer Success Focus
  
  

Uses functional expertise, best practice communication, and leadership skills to manage complex relationships and influence positive change. Resolves escalated translations-, supplier- or contract-related issues and/or escalates them to SVP as needed. Drives the importance of quality and accuracy with the internal and external stakeholders at every stage of the development process. Clearly conveys information and ideas through a variety of media to individuals or groups in a manner that engages the audience and helps them understand and retain the message. Meets regularly with functional team to keep them apprised of our strategic direction and how it may be supported by current and future industry evolution.

Relevant Experience And Skills

• A minimum of 10 years of relevant job experience with progressive management experience and strong people-leading skills.
• A highly skilled communicator. Verbal and written communication must be professional, comprehensive, clear, direct, and accurate. Demonstrates expertise in educating and communicating practices and processes to internal and external stakeholders, with a proven background in creating and modeling change.
• A functional expert in some/all of the following disciplines: EdTech, multilingual and linguistic supports, translations, localization, strategic sourcing, partnership development, terms and conditions processes.
• Has a comprehensive understanding of publishing industry business practices, and guides company management in setting policies and strategies to anticipate the company's future business needs with a clear understanding of associated business and financial risk mitigation.
• Able to build and maintain lasting cooperative partnerships with internal and external stakeholders and leverages relationships to meet organizational objectives within functional framework.
• Exceptional organizational skills and knowledge of content/product development lines of business, strategic functions such as finance, legal, technology, content development, corporate partnerships, and proven experience collaborating with these cross-discipline teams.
• Demonstrated success in leading direct reports and non-direct reports through influence. Strong people-leading skills, with demonstrated ability to influence, develop, coach, and provide support effectively in a matrix environment, working with large cross-functional, multifaceted teams.
• Demonstrates initiative and innovation to successfully lead automation/process improvement efforts, to develop and motivate staff and stakeholders to implement change, to problem solve effectively, and to successfully address changing business conditions.
• Highly organized and able to manage multiple projects simultaneously, delegate, and to prioritize. Must have demonstrated track record of delivering successful, complex assignments.
• Able to use strong analytic skills to interpret data and the associated impact on education, technology, learning and development.
• Possesses the vision to anticipate changes in industry and translate potential changes to strategies to position HMH for success. Must be able to establish and execute strategies that support company objectives. Must achieve revenue, delivery, and expense targets.