About this role
Director of Education
Calgary, Alberta | Full-time, on-site | Senior academic leadership Compensation: $60,000 to $80,000 annually, plus benefits
*READ THIS PART FIRST*
This is a senior academic leadership role inside a licensed private career college. It is not an instructor position and it is not a curriculum coordinator position.
If you do not have previous operations experience in the education sector, this is likely not a good fit for you.
We mean that plainly and we are saying it up front to save you time. Running academic delivery inside a regulated institution is a different job from corporate training, from private studio teaching, and from being an excellent instructor. It involves program approvals, audit cycles, instructional hours compliance, student appeals, faculty management, and accountability to a provincial regulator. Candidates who have not lived inside that environment do not get through our process, and we would rather tell you now than after four interviews.
If you have run academic operations at a college, polytechnic, university, or licensed training institution, keep reading. This is one of the best seats in Western Canadian post-secondary right now.
ABOUT NIWE ACADEMY
NIWE Academy is a private career college in downtown Calgary, licensed by Alberta Advanced Education under the Private Vocational Training Act. We have graduated more than 3,500 students since 2012 across hairstyling, barbering, esthetics, clinical aesthetics, nails, and massage therapy.
We are the only Alberta Apprenticeship and Industry Training approved apprenticeship hairstyling provider in Southern Alberta, and the first beauty college in more than 40 years to win the provincial Apprenticeship RFP Grant. Our student retention runs well above the industry average.
Our ambition is not modest. We intend to become the Harvard of the beauty industry. That requires academic rigour the sector has never had, and this role owns building it.
THE ROLE
Our Academy Dean is moving into a broader company-wide leadership seat. The Director of Education takes over the academic function in full.
You will own academic delivery across every NIWE program. You will lead our Lead Mentors and a team of 14 plus instructors. You will direct a third-party instructional design partner through a full curriculum modernization, and you will carry accountability for our academic regulatory standing.
You will report into senior leadership. This seat carries a standing place on our leadership team.
WHAT YOU WILL OWN
We hire against a written scorecard with weighted, measurable outcomes. Every person in this seat is reviewed against it quarterly. Here is what it contains.
Document the academic function. This is the highest weighted outcome. Within your first 180 days you will complete a structured handover and publish the 15 core academic processes with a named owner and a named backup for each.
Student retention and completion. Hold and improve retention against a benchmark we already beat, report completion and graduation by cohort every month, identify at-risk students within the first four weeks of every intake, and deliver graduate employment reporting at 100 percent completion every quarter.
Regulatory and academic compliance. Maintain clean standing with Alberta Advanced Education, the PVT Act, and AIT apprenticeship approval. Zero adverse findings. Full documentation integrity across student files, attendance, instructional hours, assessment records, and graduate reporting. Audit-ready at all times, with no fire drill when notice arrives.
Instructor performance and bench strength. Put every instructor and Lead Mentor on a written scorecard with a quarterly rating. Complete classroom and floor observation twice a year on every instructor with written development actions. Address underperformance within 90 days of first documented concern.
Instructional design partnership. Agree scope, deliverables, and acceptance criteria with our externa