Job Opportunity for Director – Research at Udhyam Learning Foundation

About Udhyam: 

At Udhyam Learning Foundation (Udhyam), our vision is to “Co-create a caring world, where people fearlessly pursue their potential.” We believe that entrepreneurship is a powerful way to channelize an individual’s potential. Entrepreneurship enables agency and allows an individual to work on their strengths while creating value for the world.

Our programs:

• Udhyam Shiksha works on developing entrepreneurial mindsets among the youth and enabling them to achieve their potential, having impacted ~16,00,000 learners across 10 Indian states.

• Udhyam Vyapaar focuses on nano businesses in India, and solving large problems faced by them, at scale; having already enabled upto a 27% income uplift for 5000+ entrepreneurs.

The goal for Udhyam is to build a thriving and supportive ecosystem, where every individual feels empowered to define their own path.

Research is a new function within Udhyam Shiksha that aims to create practical and theoretical learning propositions for the education sector, development practitioners and policymakers, based on Udhyam’s work across states. The function has two primary mandates. First, to facilitate evaluative research with leading academic institutions and research organisations that helps in examining the outcomes and impact of the programmes at Udhyam. Second, to facilitate more inductive, thematic and conceptual research, both quantitative and qualitative, on pedagogies and learning principles that are foundational in Udhyam’s work. The function hopes to be interdisciplinary in taking on different research areas and collaborating with scholars and specialists across the globe.

We are looking for a candidate who can manage and facilitate work actively with different organisations, institutions, academic networks and publication houses to lead the process of generating both quantitative and qualitative research related to Udhyam’s work.

Role & Responsibilities: 

• Conceptualise the goals and deliverables of this function.
• Enable and manage research collaborations with leading organisations to augment the scope and depth of research
• Build a network of like-minded organisations and scholars in the sector
• Partner with and onboard relevant research networks and publication houses for publications.
• Manage the partners and review the research work undertaken by them.
• Conceptualise and write research papers, book chapter contributions, working papers and reports based on Udhyam’s data.
• Manage quantitative and qualitative data collection from the field.
• Plan dissemination of research and present our research work at various academic and social research forums.
• Write research grants to attract funding towards Udhyams research projects

Knowledge & Skills:

• Partnership enablement
• Research conceptualisation across a variety of disciplines and lines of inquiry
• Data collection and analysis using different quantitative and qualitative methods
• Understanding of large scale operations
• Ability to work collaboratively with a diverse set of people
• Understanding of innovative research dissemination
• Stakeholder management

Other Requirements: 

• PhD/Post Doctoral researcher from a UGC recognised University (awarded or submitted)
• An experience of twelve to fifteen years in working with the research teams for large scale projects
• Experience in directly working with publication houses, editorial desks of journals will be an advantage
• Highly creative and entrepreneurial

Compensation:  Aligned with the market compensation norms of the development sector.

Commitment: Full time

Location: Can be based anywhere in India, with the willingness to travel to research sites as necessary.