Senior Facilitator and Content Designer, Learning Acceleration

Shopify’s mission is to make commerce better for everyone. From building a new product feature for our commerce platform, to helping a merchant troubleshoot an issue over the phone, we want to empower our ecosystem through our work.

Having a unified vision, a north star, is vitally important to ensure that we are all headed in the same direction. No matter the size or experience, we want to power every merchant’s experience. This is why we’re all here.

Shopify is now permanently remote, and we’re working towards a future that is digital by design. That location you see above? Consider it merely an example of hundreds of potential locations across America where Shopify is hiring. Learn more here: https://www.shopify.com/careers/work-anywhere

Shopify has redefined commerce, raising the standard for how companies of all sizes sell their products and services, online and off. With 1.7M+ merchants in more than 175 different countries, and the most innovative platform on the market, we continue to grow rapidly while constantly looking for new ways to impact and disrupt markets.

Shopify is now a Digital by Design company. Great care and effort is being devoted to reimagining how we come together as an organization in our new reality, be it through virtual Summit, ongoing virtual team building experiences, and in real life (IRL) intentional “bursts” once in-person gatherings will return as an option. Our experience working with teams and facilitating various types of team gatherings has brought into focus several needs:

• Team Facilitation: Organizing and running a digital and IRL gathering for a team (i.e. bursts, homesites, team forming sessions, retrospectives etc.) has specific challenges that can be eased by expert facilitation, which is particularly impactful for high stakes meetings with senior audiences.

• Train-the-trainer: The art of facilitating a gathering is quite different from the craft required to present or train. In order to ensure facilitation support for critical gatherings, we need to put a system in place to help develop facilitators that are skilled to do so.

• Consultation Expertise: Teams need guidance to shape their gathering experiences and a professional Facilitator can provide advice, tools, and resources to assist teams in being more successful. 

Additionally, the Sr. Facilitator will be responsible for:

• Mentoring Facilitators: Provide mentoring to less experienced Facilitators to support the continual growth in the craft. Guidance will include addressing the nuanced and practical differences between virtual and IRL facilitation and demonstrating what great looks like in each environment. 

• Program Facilitation: Provide additional coverage to deliver exceptional experiences within the Onboarding and Leadership Development space at Shopify

• Thought Partner: Acting as a thought partner for the Senior Lead to inform strategies and activities to address gaps in processes or methodology

As with everything at Shopify, we want this set of responsibilities to stay flexible and open to evolve as we capture learnings, needs, and we refine our overall strategy on how we come together at Shopify. For example, it is to be expected that this role will contribute to the ideation and execution of IRL “bursts” as part of our future gathering strategy. 

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Accumulated years of experience (delivering training as well as facilitating meetings) leveraging their ability to create inclusive spaces across different business groups and with audiences that span from individual crafters to Executive participants

• Experience using techniques such as root cause analysis, project retrospectives, and other process efficiency methodologies to drive results

• A track record of training others and distributing knowledge for added impact and scalability

• The ability to analyze, extrapolate, and document key best practices and processes that lead to impactful team gathering

• A history of success leveraging their business acumen to engage stakeholders and collaborating across teams

• Skillfully managed conflict and adapted within a learning experience to meet the evolving needs of the group

• Provided mentorship to others to elevate their facilitation craft

• Mastery in their ability to use technology to enhance a variety of learning experiences in a digital setting

• The ability to travel monthly to facilitate IRL team experiences (subject to fluctuating demand)

Additional bonus experience: 

• Exceptional storytelling capabilities to elevate and engage a global audience

• Project management and operations/logistics

Here’s how to apply:

We know that applying to a new role takes a lot of work and we truly value your time. Katrina is a real live person and is looking forward to reading your application. 

This posting will close on Tuesday, October 19th at 11:59 pm EST. We are looking forward to learning more about you and your interest in joining our team. Successful candidates can expect to hear back from us by Friday, October 29th. 

Please complete the following challenge question in order to be considered for the role:

Context: We are currently experiencing a gap between business requests and skills/experience on the team. Our new Learning Consulting Studio service offering has taken off, and we have requests coming in to build custom workshops, digital “offsites”, and in person facilitation for teams all across the business. Many members on the team have never facilitated in person before.

Examples of the types of challenges teams look to us for support through activities and discussion include:

• Acknowledging and addressing different team dynamics to build relationships and trust as they move throughout forming, storming, and norming phases 

• Providing skill building opportunities, 

• Engaging in strategic planning and goal alignment.

The current Facilitation team is willing and eager to take these new offerings on, while still maintaining our high service standards for our existing learning programs. 

Your challenge: As a Senior Facilitator coming into this situation, we will be requiring your support to help the team by:

• Raising the teams’ collective awareness and ability to leverage tools, processes, and content to support the diverse needs of the business;

• Closing the gap between business needs and current skills on the team by upskilling the team in both digital facilitation and in person facilitation.

Please provide a one page summary of how you would approach supporting the team as part of your application. Thank you!

Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity & inclusion enables us to truly make commerce better for everyone. We encourage applications from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities, people from gender and sexually diverse communities, and/or people with intersectional identities. Please take a look at our Sustainability Reports to learn more about Shopify’s commitments to our communities, and our planet.

At Shopify, we understand that experience comes in many forms. We’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team - so if your experience is this close to what we’re looking for, please consider applying.