When interviewing for a role leading a SaaS Academy/Customer Education program or working on the team, it's important to understand the current state of the program, and evaluate how the job responsibilities of the role, your current skill set, and your professional growth goals align.
Realistically you won’t be able to ask all the questions you would like during one interview. Most likely you’ll have to ask questions over multiple interviews & follow-up communications.
While the standard tactical question-asking approach of putting together a list of questions to ask and checking them off throughout the interview process is a great start, taking a more strategic question-asking approach will give you a more well-rounded and holistic perspective of the program and your potential to succeed in the role.
More often than not, when preparing questions for interviewers the focus is on asking questions which you already have an answer that you’d like to hear. For example, "Do you currently use an instructional design model for developing courses?" You're expecting ADDIE, SAM, AGILE, etc. but that does not really tell you much.
Going into a series of interviews with a checklist of questions to ask is good, but it’s like collecting random pieces to a puzzle. You uncover pieces of information, but you’ll have to use your imagination and assumptions to fill in the missing pieces. The result is a final image that does not reflect how the team actually operates.
Not a month goes by that I don't hear from a fellow Academy/Customer Education practitioner who shares, "the role I accepted and the team I joined in reality was nothing like what I was told during the interview process."
Some responsibility lies with folks overselling a role, and it's appropriate to question the leadership of the team/company that oversold the role.
That being said, it's also on you as the individual interviewing, to develop the most comprehensive understanding of the company, role, and team prior to accepting the role.
Interviewing can be stressful, emotional, time demanding, and most of us find ourselves in the situation where "getting our next job" is priority number one.
With that in mind we have laid out an approach for question-asking to aid you in the development of a holistic view of an Academy/Customer education program that you can use.
Your mindset going into the interviews should be to complete a puzzle that gives you the full picture of the company, team, and role.
Taking a strategic approach to discovery allows you to weave questions throughout the interview process with an end goal of a holistic understanding of the program and how you’re interests, working style, current skill set, and the skills you’d like to develop align with the needs of the program.
You do this by weaving questions throughout the interview process by asking follow-ups to questions you are asked, or asking clarifying questions prior to answering a question you are asked.
Another way to think about it is that you are looking to understand more about the program, how it operates, and if the organization/program would benefit you and your career growth as much as it would benefit the organization. Of course a "dream job" is labeled such for a reason. Success with this approach is about starting a new role with accurate expectations, not interviewing forever to find your "dream job."
This framework should be used, in addition to a comprehensive interviewing strategy, that includes finding as many answers to the themes/questions below by researching the company prior to the beginning of the interviews:
Using the same seven core functions used to build an academy/customer education operating system and applying them to a strategic discovery approach will give you a strong foundation.
One final thought before we jump in.
While there are some example questions below, we don't recommend copy > paste > ask. Ideally these questions come up naturally in conversation. In situations when you are asking a question outside of the natural conversation, using your own tone and voice is critical. Additionally, the questions you ask each interviewer should be specific to their role/responsibilities.
To complete the program leadership portion of the puzzle you'll want to understand the teams values, beliefs, norms, career growth, the approach the leaders take, the current state of the program, and the role the program has within the organization as a whole.
More specifically the sections you’ll want to uncover areas around:
The section of the puzzle you're completing here is focused on understanding how the organization and program leadership is put into practice on a day to day operational basis
Success in this section is understanding how the rest of the organization views the program you’ll be leading/joining.
The product, the educational content itself. This section is arguably the most important area to get a full picture of as it provides the most insight into what day to day operations of your role will look like and how well the content is set up to impact learner behavior and results.
The tech stack in use within an Academy/Customer Education program provides a lot of insight into the program, it's investment, and leaderships approach to scale.
The amount of educational content developed for specific audiences (industry, customer, partner, employee) that goes undiscovered is disappointing but not surprising. Questions here will not only shed light on how educational content is discovered, but the priority the company places on audiences discovered the content.
Questions here will give you insight into how the team and leader think about
Made it this far?!
Our mission is to help grow the Academy/Customer Education industry. We hope you found this helpful and are always available to hop on a call and discuss your discovery strategy prior to your interviews.
Disclaimer, we don’t offer interview coaching, recruiting or job placement services. We created this doc in an effort to help fellow practitioners find roles which they can excel in, and yes hopefully some day join us in moving the Academy/Customer education industry forward.