Senior Lead, Skills Assessment & Validation

Microsoft

United States3h ago

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Key details

Salary: $117K–$204K/yr
Location: United States
Work style: Onsite
Level: Lead / Staff+
Experience: 3–6 yrs
Function: other
Focus area: other
Posted: 3h ago

Skills

accessibilitycalibrationcustomer successgo-to-market

About the role

Overview

MCAPS-Core accelerates customer outcomes and business growth by bringing together product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around a common customer mission. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution, we help customers realize value faster, accelerate adoption, and turn innovation into measurable business impact.

The Customer & Commercial Success (CCS) organization within MCAPS-Core turns Microsoft’s commercial strategy into execution at scale, bringing together planning, landing, execution excellence, services portfolio and delivery, and field activation across customer-facing teams and organizations.

A highly capable workforce is critical to driving customer adoption of Cloud and AI, and skilling is a key lever for building that capability. As the Senior Lead, Skills Assessment & Validation, you will help build and implement a new capability assessment framework for Customer Success and Solution Sales roles, with the potential to expand to other customer-facing roles. Evidence-based insights will help the organization prioritize skilling investments, enable managers to better understand their teams’ skills and proficiency, and help individuals identify areas for continued development.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

Translate agreed capability and proficiency expectations into assessment specifications, rubrics, and evidence requirements in partnership with role owners and subject-matter experts, ensuring domain accuracy and commercial relevance.
Design practical assessments of skills mastery, applied experience, and judgment using customer scenarios, demonstrations, labs, roleplay, observed work, artifacts, reflection, and ambiguous cases requiring tradeoffs and rationale.
Establish reusable assessment patterns, methods, and quality standards that can be applied by role, audience, and program owners across different capability contexts.
Establish standards that distinguish demonstrated capability from unsupported claims, ensuring neither attendance nor AI-generated output alone is treated as proof of capability.
Evaluate assessment validity, reliability, fairness, accessibility, usability, and learner burden to support consistent, unbiased, and defensible conclusions that are relevant to roles and workflows.
Lead pilots with selected role cohorts and program owners, incorporate learner and manager feedback, and refine designs before recommending broader adoption.
Integrate validation into existing learning programs and manager workflows, providing practical guidance for evidence collection, review, and development conversations.
Define evidence-quality and freshness standards, including provenance, relevance, expiration or refresh triggers, traceability, and known limitations, and partner with AI and data owners while preserving human oversight.
Build assessment capability across audience leads, program owners, subject-matter experts, and managers so that the discipline can scale without this role directly operating every assessment.
Embody our Culture and Values

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

Master's Degree or equivalent AND 3+ years of experience in performance-based assessment design, skills and competency modeling, measurement and validation, rubric design and scoring calibration, and/or psychometric principles
- OR Bachelor's Degree or equivalent AND 5+ years of experience in performance-based assessment design, skills and competency modeling, measurement and validation, rubric design and scoring calibration, and/or psychometric principles
- OR equivalent experience

Preferred Qualifications

Demonstrated ability to navigate business-value conversations, account strategy, services positioning, and cross-role execution within Microsoft’s commercial field or a complex enterprise technology environment.
Proven success translating real customer work and field-role workflows into credible assessment tasks and evidence requirements.
Knowledge of assessment design, rubric development, reviewer calibration, and validation.
Analytical skills to evaluate evidence quality, identify limitations, and make defensible recommendations.
Facilitation, stakeholder influence, communication, and virtual team leadership skills, including scaling through managers and existing programs without formal authority.
Experience piloting role-based assessments across technical, sales, or customer success audiences and integrating assessment into learning programs and manager routines within large enterprise organizations.
Familiarity with AI-assisted evidence processes while maintaining privacy, accessibility, fairness, and human review.

Integrated Learning IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $116,900 - $203,600 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $148,400 - $222,600 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.