Director of Learning & Employee Experience

About the Role

The Director of Learning Employee Experience is a leader responsible for anchoring HR operational consistency across all Sonida communities, while building and enabling the learning, culture, and development programs that make that consistency possible. This role owns the design and standardization of HR processes and workflows, ensures those processes are applied consistently by HRBPs and Talent Partners across all locations, and builds the training and onboarding infrastructure that equips new team members and leaders to succeed.

Responsibilities

• Onboarding Effectiveness & New Leader Integration:
  • Own the end-to-end onboarding experience for all new team members and leaders, ensuring consistency and quality across all communities.
  • Develop standardized onboarding timelines, checklists, and touchpoints that set people up for success from day one.
  • Design a dedicated new leader onboarding track that introduces HR expectations, processes, and workflows early.
  • Partner with Talent Partners and HRBPs to create seamless handoffs between recruiting and onboarding.
  • Track onboarding effectiveness through 30/60/90-day metrics, retention data, and new hire feedback, using those insights to drive continuous improvement.
• Culture & Service Excellence:
  • Serve as Sonida's culture champion by embedding our mission, vision, and CARES values into orientation and ongoing leadership development.
  • Develop a scalable, consistent orientation experience that brings Sonida's culture to life.
  • Partner with Community and department leaders to integrate Sonida’s mission, vision, CARES values, service recovery techniques, and relationship-centered care into daily operations.
  • Build tools and resources that empower department trainers to reinforce culture within their own areas.
• Learning & Development:
  • Design, build, and continuously improve learning programs that support frontline, operational, and corporate team members across all career stages.
  • Establish a consistent framework for curriculum design in collaboration with department trainers and SMEs.
  • Manage and develop the L&D Associate and any additional direct reports to execute on program delivery and content creation.
  • Leverage UKG, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 to deliver, track, and report on training completion and effectiveness.
• Leadership Development & Talent Management:
  • Build and manage Sonida's leadership development programming, including programs for emerging leaders, new managers, and senior community leadership.
  • Partner with HRBPs and Talent Partners to support succession planning, high-potential identification, and individual development planning.
  • Ensure leadership development programs build leaders who embody Sonida’s culture and service excellence standards.
  • Support the creation and maintenance of talent review processes in partnership with HR leadership.
• Employee Engagement:
  • Design and lead Sonida's employee engagement strategy, including survey cadence, analysis, and action planning.
  • Partner with HRBPs and community leaders to translate engagement data into meaningful, community-level action plans.
  • Champion recognition programs and initiatives that celebrate our people and reinforce our values in action.
  • Monitor engagement trends and share regular insights with HR and senior leadership.
• HR Process Standardization & Operational Excellence:
  • Support the programmatic framework for HR process standardization across all communities.
  • Build and maintain a library of HR process guides, SOPs, and decision trees.
  • Partner with HRBPs and Talent Partners to identify process gaps and opportunities for improvement.
  • Establish accountability mechanisms and workflow checkpoints to monitor process adherence.
  • Lead change management efforts when new HR processes or policies are introduced.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Organizational Development, Education, Business Administration, or a related field required.
• 7+ years in HR, L&D, or organizational development with progressive responsibility; experience in multi-site or field-based organizations strongly preferred.
• Strong project management skills with experience building and managing multiple workstreams simultaneously.
• Proven ability to design learning curricula from scratch, including needs analysis, content development, and measurement strategies.
• Comfortable working within HRIS/LMS platforms (UKG experience a plus) and Microsoft 365.
• Demonstrated ability to design, document, and implement HR processes and workflows at scale.
• Experience managing or developing direct reports; ability to build a small, high-performing team and influence without authority across a matrixed organization.

A master’s degree in organizational development, HR, or a related discipline is a plus.