job @ National Foreign Language Center

https://ejobs.umd.edu/postings/76345

Program Director
Functional Title:Program Director of Business Development
Category Status:33-Exempt Regular
Applicant Search Category:Staff
University Authorized FTE:100
Unit:ARHU-National Foreign Language Center
Campus/College Information:Founded in 1856, University of Maryland, College Park is the state’s flagship institution. Our 1,250-acre College Park campus is just minutes away from Washington, D.C., and the nexus of the nation’s legislative, executive, and judicial centers of power. This unique proximity to business and technology leaders, federal departments and agencies, and a myriad of research entities, embassies, think tanks, cultural centers, and non-profit organizations is simply unparalleled. Synergistic opportunities for our faculty and students abound and are virtually limitless in the nation’s capital and surrounding areas. The University is committed to attracting and retaining outstanding and diverse faculty and staff that will enhance our stature of preeminence in our three missions of teaching, scholarship, and full engagement in our community, the state of Maryland, and in the world.
Position Summary/Purpose of Position:This position will direct and oversee business development and strategic communication for NFLC and serve as a member of the Center’s Executive Committee. The purpose of this position is to identify and pursue opportunities to promote the mission of the NFLC, including federal, state, and local grants, contracts, and partnerships, and handle all aspects of proposal development. The position will also develop and execute a comprehensive communications strategy, encompassing web and social media presence and outreach activities. As a member of the Center’s Executive Committee, this position will participate in the governance and leadership of the Center.
Minimum Qualifications:Minimum Qualifications:
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field with a minimum of ten years of relevant experience OR Advanced degree in a relevant field and a minimum of seven years of relevant experience
o Relevant fields include any of the following: Communications, Marketing, Business Administration, Education, World Language, Linguistics.
o Relevant experience includes any of the following: business development, proposal writing, website development and management, public relations, project management, organizational leadership, government contracting, world language education.
• Outstanding verbal and written communication, presentation, and relationship development skills
• Ability to work successfully in teams in a highly collaborative, goal-focused environment
• Demonstrated experience in communications, marketing, and/or outreach
• Demonstrated experience in at least three of the following areas:
o Identification and pursuit of new opportunities
o Partner and customer relationship building
o Proposal development
o Revenue generation
o Government contracting
o World language education
o World language product development
o Team supervision
o Project management
Preferences:Experience or certification in sponsored research administration; experience developing work breakdown structures and project budgets; strong non-specialist understanding of one or more key disciplines, including world language education and assessment; face-to-face, distance, and blended learning delivery methods; web and social media communication.
Additional Certifications:Project Management Professional (PMP) certification a plus
Additional Information:
Job RisksNot Applicable to This Position
Physical DemandsTravel is required for this position.
Posting Date:01/16/2020
Closing Date:
Open Until FilledNo
Best Consideration Date02/07/2020
Diversity Statement:The University of Maryland, College Park, an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws and regulations regarding nondiscrimination and affirmative action; all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment. The University is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, physical or mental disability, protected veteran status, age, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, creed, marital status, political affiliation, personal appearance, or on the basis of rights secured by the First Amendment, in all aspects of employment, educational programs and activities, and admissions.

jobs in the UK with Appen

Appen has openings for Linguist Lead positions in London, Seattle, or the San Francisco Bay area.

Linguist Lead

This is an opportunity for linguists with native language skills in Italian (also German, European Spanish and French, and in UK, AU, NZ, and Indian varieties of English). In particular, they are looking for candidates who have strong linguistic awareness along with leadership qualifications.

In addition to the Linguist Lead role, annotators and project managers for the same projects:

Project Manager position

Linguist Annotator position

job: Head of International Communications – Nextdoor

http://edge.uncubed.com/jobs/nextdoor/job/313901-head-of-global-communications?utm_campaign=google_jobs_apply&utm_source=google_jobs_apply&utm_medium=organic

Nextdoor is built on the idea that the neighborhood is one of the most important communities in an individual’s life. We strive to be a place that neighbors everywhere come to build deeper connections, stay in the know, and help each other in their daily lives. There has never been a more important time to build strong, local community. Join our innovative, diverse, and welcoming team, and help us empower neighbors around the world.

Nextdoor seeks a Head of International Communications to lead its international communication team and support the company’s rapid global growth and adoption. This position will report to Nextdoor’s Head of Communications and Policy and will oversee Nextdoor’s growing team of communications leaders around the world, working closely with Nextdoor’s leadership team, including CEO Sarah Friar and country managers and communications leads in UK, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and Canada, with many more to come. This leader will be a motivating force to others, develop positive relationships with cross-functional teams, partner with external resources and be able to roll up their sleeves and manage the details to secure coverage that influences all forms of media. What’s more, Nextdoor is a consumer brand and this person must exhibit strong consumer communications skills to continue to elevate Nextdoor as the essential local app, connecting neighbors to the services and people who matter most in their daily lives. 

The position is based in San Francisco, California. Given the scope of the role, frequent international travel is required. 

Specific responsibilities include:

  • Lead strategic communications, working with country managers and in-market communications leads to drive a proactive strategy to elevate Nextdoor as the essential local app and convey Nextdoor’s vision and value proposition across geographies.  
  • Work closely with the product team to support product launches globally.
  • Recommend, execute and measure the effectiveness of grassroots and digital marketing campaigns to support product teams.
  • Ensure brand consistency at a local level by developing and executing messaging that is tailored to each market.
  • Manage crisis communications – exhibit good judgment, have smart positioning, proactively prepare “battle plans” and be able to weather the storm and lead others under pressure.
  • Cultivate and maintain deep relationships with business press, consumer media, key industry opinion leaders and external stakeholders.
  • Build and support a team culture that encourages sound judgment and discipline when supporting the corporate narrative; guide the product teams to use this judgment when determining the communications endeavors that are additive and ones that are not.
  • Ensure that Nextdoor key messaging, narratives and FAQs scale to international teams and that key in-market spokespeople have received appropriate media training. 
  • Work with Finance and HR teams to ensure our teams and agencies are set with the budgets and resources they need to scale. 
  • Serve as a senior leader in the company, interacting with the executive team and country managers across the world.

The successful candidate will be a seasoned storyteller and business-oriented communicator with a strong belief in Nextdoor’s mission.  S/he will have a proven track record in media relations, product communications and crisis/reputation management on a global and local level. 

Additional experience and qualifications include:

  • Outstanding written and verbal communication skills.
  • Ability to leverage media campaigns and content creation to generate increased awareness for Nextdoor to wide range of audiences. 
  • A global mindset and prior experience in a fast-paced, high-growth startup environment.
  • Ability to see the bigger picture and use creativity to innovate in the new media landscape.
  • Experience supporting product launches domestically and abroad.  

Minimum Qualifications: 

  • Bachelor’s degree in Communications, English or related field 
  • 10-12+ years of experience in communications 
  • International / non-U.S. experience is required (international assignment or otherwise) and experience managing and leading international teams. 
  • Experience executing media campaigns, crisis communications, building relationships with media and working with executives 
  • Experience managing corporate issues project management 
  • Experience managing agencies, and putting in place scalable processes to drive and measure results

Benefits:

  • An opportunity to grow communities, solve hard problems, and have a real impact in the world
  • Supportive, friendly, and adventurous environment with a team of talented, engaged colleagues
  • A comprehensive, industry-leading  benefits package
  • 100% company-paid health insurance premiums (medical, dental, and vision) for you and your dependents
  • Generous paid vacation 
  • Weekly catered lunches and fully stocked kitchen (all sorts of drinks and snacks), plus catered dinners M-Th
  • Monthly wellness stipend
  • Personal learning and development stipend 
  • Inspiring, creatively fulfilling offsites 
  • Paid volunteer days off
  • Pre-tax commuter benefits
  • Health FSA
  • 401K plan

About Nextdoor

About Nextdoor Nextdoor is the private social network for you, your neighbors and your community. It’s the easiest way for you and your neighbors to talk online and make all of your lives better in the real world. And it’s free. Thousands of neighborhoods are already using Nextdoor to build happier, safer places to call home. People are using Nextdoor to: Quickly get the word out about a break-in Organize a Neighborhood Watch Group Track down a trustworthy babysitter Find out who does the best paint job in town Ask for help keeping an eye out for a lost dog Find a new home for an outgrown bike Finally call that nice man down the street by his first name Nextdoor’s mission is to provide a trusted platform where neighbors work together to build stronger, safer, happier communities, all over the world.

Want to learn more about Nextdoor? Visit Nextdoor’s website.

Being now/here for career

One of the major highlights of my year in 2019 was the opportunity to go to Finland. And there were so very many things to appreciate, but something that particularly delighted me was the Finnair NOW/HERE campaign that set the tone for my trip:

Nordic happiness is an experience of being one – with nature, with others, with time. It’s about getting lost and finding yourself. Because sometimes you have to travel to nowhere to be now here.  https://www.travelnowhere.com/

The concept of being now/here struck me as a perfect way to embrace that feeling of being lost, which strikes me as absolutely essential to career exploration. If you are truly allowing yourself to be radically curious and explore, of course you are going to lose your bearings, you haven’t been here before: no one has!

You are doing the important work of being now/here!

Career can be an intensely anxious proposition. We all want to do something that brings meaning and purpose to our lives and for many of us, work will be a primary means through which we seek to make a difference in the world. So we add pressure, feeling like there is a great deal riding on the decisions that we make about career, especially at times of transition (just starting out, changing jobs, changing careers, or simply contemplating any of the above). And while I want to acknowledge the anxiety – it is all too real – at the same time, we can’t let it get in the way of the task at hand. And it certainly will if we let it.

We need to let it be.
And be
where we are,
now/here.

We can’t possibly know what is coming down the pike, and we can’t change what is past, so the task is to stay present, figure out which of the opportunities currently in front of us we would like to pursue. AND if there are no opportunities in front of us, how to stir some up. Even if we do have opportunities, it’s probably always a good idea to be stirring them up…

So, being mindful that this is something that we are going to be figuring out for our entire working lives, I offer some practices now (on the occasion of a new decade) for being here (with what is currently at hand), starting with Gratitude.

Gratitude

Now, certainly I’m not the only one out there talking about bringing an attitude of gratitude at the dawn of a new decade, but there is a very real place for such a practice when it comes to career. No matter where you are, someone helped you get here. Someone in your community (who you know or don’t know yet) inspired you with their work or their words, in any one of a million ways. So why not start 2020 by sharing some gratitude with them? In Bringing Linguistics to Work I talk about the gracious note, basically just sending some appreciative thoughts to someone – maybe someone whose article you used recently which helped you build an argument. That’s actually how I began my professional collaboration with Camilla Vasquez! Oh, and she has a new book out this year, folks, check it out: Language, Creativity and Humour Online  And thanks Camilla for your excellent scholarship!! Happy 2020!!

And just like that, you have already begun the next practice: honoring community.  

Honoring Community

For most of us, our networks will be how we find most of our professional opportunities moving forward. And I do talk a lot about networking, including just last month on episode lucky #13 the Coffee and Cocktails podcast,  and networking intergenerationally, but there is good reason to share some love for networking, including that it is in need of reclaiming because so many people seem to be doing it wrong. Networking in a way that honors community is not just about now, it is about building trust and trusting. It is about sharing, and it is about being generous. When we invest in building and supporting our community now, we help ourselves. Start with the people who currently surround you. If you are a student, think about what you can do to support and connect with your classmates.

Your community are invaluable to you because they are in a better position than you are to notice the patterns in the ways that your gifts and ways of thinking and working express themselves.

Noticing Patterns

Pattern-recognition in community is behind the design of the Mighty Network (take the work sessions as an example – your community can help you bring forward your strengths, identify the little stumbling blocks that present challenges to you so that you can anticipate and not get so tripped up by them), it is why we share stories around the campfire in Career Camp. We cultivate the story listening abilities of your fellow campers so that they can help you hear (and amplify) your superpowers!   

Another thing to know about these patterns is that they are expressions of curiosity.

Chasing Curiosity

When you choose a research topic and analytical approach, you are chasing your curiosity. So too with career – the work contexts that you find yourself drawn to comprise expressions of where and with whom you feel called to share your gifts. But these expressions can be harder to see – especially given the pressures which surround career decisions – which is why I advocate for a mindfulness practice that I call an hour a week on LinkedIn. Ideally, you will spend this hour in daily 10 minute increments, and mainly what you are doing will be looking for ways to pay it forward. Who in your community is on LinkedIn asking for something? (“help me spread the word about ___”, etc.) with whom might you share a resource that you just came across in your newsfeed? Who might benefit from a connection or an opportunity right now? And as you are doing this, pay attention to what is piquing your curiosity. What would be your next step in following it?

Get on out there and Iterate!

These practices interrelate and inform each other: Chasing curiosity is fueled by honoring community and is informed by noticing patterns, especially when approached in contexts of gratitude and generosity. So if you are one to make resolutions, consider where you might build these practices into your year and decade as you look forward.

For me, it means seeking out two career conversations a week and two meetings (networking events or conferences) a month. In Designing Your Life, they describe opportunities as being the result of approximately 25 connections. Following this formula, my activities would stand to generate about 5 opportunities a year, which seems to be about right: One for me, four for my community….what’s your plan?

And here’s to what’s next!       

Career Profile: Linguistics in AI Enablement

The Career Profiles in Linguistics section regularly highlights career paths taken by linguists. If you would like to recommend someone (including yourself) for a future profile, please contact Career Linguist.

Time and travel involved to write this piece were generously supported by Appen. ideas and reflections on experience are my own.  

Earlier this month, I had the delight and great privilege to fly up to Seattle to hear Cala Zubair talk to linguistics students at the University of Washington’s Linguistics Department as part of their Treehouse series of talks in Computational Linguistics.  For her talk: Working as a Linguist in AI Enablement, Cala shared her perspective working as a sociolinguist in the tech sector. She shared insights from her professional journey broadly, and particulars of her current work at Appen.

Cala began by observing that perhaps it was starting off her career post PhD as a Linguistics Faculty member in an English Department that best prepared her for the work she does now as a Program Manager for Client Services. As  she put it “success in this position is 50% about understanding the workplace and how to work with people.” Specifically, Cala needs to engage clients and partners – many of whom do not understand language or linguistics – with appreciation for the richness and complexity of language in a way that is accessible and inviting. In the business world, this is called “stakeholder buy-in.”

But the rare and delightful thing about working at Appen is that she is not – by far – the only linguist on her team.  Appen employs hundreds of linguists to work on English alone, and English is just one of 180 languages that they have deep expertise in. There is a real community of linguists who collaborate and know how to ask and give support to one another.

One of Cala’s colleagues was there at her talk in fact, Alyssa Johnson, an Appen Lead Linguist. Cala asked her to share with the group what it was that she had been working on just that morning (the talk was at noon). This was my introduction to NLG technology: National Language Generation.  If I understood correctly, NLG is about generating language for a digital assistant so that it can respond to user requests in a way that sounds everyday.

It is no accident that Appen has such a great reputation among linguists. They were founded by a linguist out of Sydney Australia in 1996. Dr. Julie Vonwiller had been a linguist at the University of Sydney, when she left to start her own automated speech recognition start-up with her husband Chris Vonwiller – who worked at the time as an engineer at Telstra. According to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, they began in true start-up fashion, using a spare room in their home to get the business off the ground.

Much of Appen’s success today is owing to the growth in Artificial Intelligence, or as the Herald put it “the voice-ification of the internet” which depends on high-quality language data to train systems on. The level of quality of the data, in turn, depends on employing highly skilled linguists to do things like take massive amounts of  unstructured data and normalize it, annotate it, package it, and run quality assurance measures of it.  

For me, one of the most useful aspects of Cala’s talk were some of the contextualizing slides designed to show how all the aspects of the work of the organization interrelate, for example that there are three kinds of data: 

  • Relevance Data
  • Speech and Natural Language Data
  • Image and Video Data

Which comprise three overarching domains of work:

  • Text-to-speech
  • Data Collection
  • Natural Language Processing

Which break down into tasks for the linguists employed there such as:

  • Video transcription tasks
  • Data Collection tasks
  • Annotation & Phonetic Dictionary Development
  • Content Analytics & NLP
  • Localization and Machine Translation

To give students a real sense for the day-to-day of working at Appen, we spent most of our time working with an example. In this case, what we would need to be thinking about if we were designing a chatbot that could answer queries about the weather. How would we need to train it? Cala guided us through reflections starting at the pragmatic level: What is the user intending to do? What historical facts do we need to know about the weather? Then ontologies to generate guidelines, what do you count as a location (if the user asks about the weather “here” or in the “Midwest”?), or a time phrase? (“now” “tomorrow” etc.) We would need to think about how to categorize parts of semantic meaning. We were left with a better appreciation of and understanding of what it means to say that we linguists can see the patterns in the messiness because we know what different parts of language do.

Finally, Cala shared the results of some informal interviewing she did with her colleagues: Basically, she asked a bunch of people who work for the organization about their experience of working there. They shared feeling a sense of validation – that they had hoped and wondered whether their training would be relevant and applicable, and were gratified to find that it indeed it was!

When it turned over to student questions, one of them asked “what’s the delight for you?” (Cala had shared that many of her colleagues used the word “delight” to describe their work in her informal survey). Cala’s response: “my delight? Data is exciting and I get to work with it all day!”

If you are or someone you know is currently looking for work, Appen is hiring!  You can check out their careers page, or the recent post on Career Linguist featuring some selected jobs.

Thank you Cala – and for those of you heading to the LSA Careers Expo later this week, you can stop by and speak to her there!

Career Events at the LSA annual meeting

Linguistic Society of America

Calling attention to just a couple of the wonderful events taking place at the Linguistics Society of America meeting in New Orleans Jan 2020!!  For more information, check out the LSA Facebook page and Twitter feed, or the Annual Meeting page.

Thursday January  2nd – pre conference workshop Careers for Linguists / Linguistics for Career 
a multi-part session designed to increase academic advisors’ and students’ awareness of career opportunities in industry, government and non-profit organizations (all beyond the Academy). In the past few years, our SIG members have spoken to students, advisors, and instructors at universities across the country about careers for linguists outside the university, and although students are hungry for information and receptive to guidance, one thing is clear: among advisors and instructors in linguistics, the level of discomfort with the idea of a career outside of academia was very apparent, and as much as they want to help, they have no idea how to help students find extra-academic jobs. To that end, sub-sessions 1 and 3 are aimed primarily at advisors and instructors, in order to provide them with the knowledge and tools to help inform and guide students who choose to take the path out of academia.

Linguistics Beyond Academia Career Mixer
When: Saturday, January 4, 3:30 – 5:00 PM

The Linguistics Career Mixer is an annual event that brings linguists who have found professional expression of their skills and training in a variety of fields — from research and consulting to writing and education — together with people who are currently trying to learn about their next steps professionally. The idea is to create a context for having exploratory conversations about career paths. Linguists who have found employment in a range of contexts will be on hand to talk about their work as researchers,consultants, writers, editors, trainers, managers, and language and communication specialists in government, education, business and non-profit sectors (among others). Representatives from 20+ organizations will be in attendance.  Sponsored by the LSA’s Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group (SIG).

jobs: opportunities @ Appen

With deep expertise in more than 180 languages and access to a global crowd of over 1 million skilled contractors, Appen partners with technology, automotive and eCommerce companies — as well as governments worldwide — to help them develop, enhance and use products that rely on natural languages and machine learning. 

Some Current Opportunities for Linguists:

Project Manager – Linguistics

Lead Linguist

Annotator

Check out Appen’s Careers Page for more information on opportunities and for details about how to apply!