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Making McGraw Hill an exciting workplace for innovators

To share more about our culture of innovation, we interviewed two leaders at McGraw Hill that are helping us create our next generation digital products.

Tags: Company News, Blog Article
We're willing to take risks if we think we can make a big impact. Justin Singh, McGraw Hill Chief Transformation & Strategy Officer

As a global education company that reaches more than 45 million learners and educators worldwide, we believe we have an incredible opportunity to improve lives and help students learn. To do that, we know we must continue to innovate and find ways to leverage technology to enhance learning outcomes.

As McGraw Hill has transformed, we’ve worked hard to improve our ability to innovate and respond to the changing needs of our customers.

So we were thrilled last month to learn that Fast Company had named McGraw Hill a Best Workplace for Innovators in education.

To share more about our culture of innovation, we interviewed two leaders at McGraw Hill that are helping us create our next generation digital products.

Justin Singh
Chief Transformation & Strategy Officer
Justin and his team lead transformation efforts for the company and spearheaded the development and launch last year McGraw Hill’s study app for college students, Sharpen.

What makes McGraw Hill an attractive company for innovators?
Our work is purposeful – to help teachers teach and help students learn and succeed. It’s exciting and motivating to know that our innovations can have an immediate impact.

What is one emerging technology that you think has the potential to improve learning?
The way I think about it is this: What massive pain points can we solve, likely with technology, to create value for our customers and users? I believe deeply that aggregate data, coupled with our trusted content, will become more and more important.

What makes McGraw Hill’s culture unique?
We’re willing to take risks if we think we can make a big impact on our customers.

What is your approach to fostering innovation from your team?
We talk to our customers almost constantly to listen, learn and test. If we haven’t tested it with the customer, we don’t do it.

Shawn Smith

Shawn Smith
Chief Innovation Officer, K–12
Shawn leads McGraw Hill’s K–12 Center for Innovation, which has been responsible for the development of several recent innovations, including McGraw Hill Plus for PreK–12 and the McGraw Hill AR app.

What makes McGraw Hill an attractive company for innovators?
Our ability to innovate ‘how learning happens’ is a noble calling. And our global scale means we have both a tremendous responsibility and an incredible opportunity to help people.

What is one emerging technology that you think has the potential to improve learning?
Continuously improving the daily workflow of the teacher should be our relentless focus. Our technology should lift some of the heavy burden away from the teacher so that they can spend more time with students where it matters—building relationships that accelerate each student’s potential.

What makes McGraw Hill’s culture unique?
Our leadership supports us to think with maximum impact and to keep our customers’ needs at the center of everything we do. That’s empowering.

What is your approach to fostering innovation from your team?
We have an idea meritocracy. Position authority does not dictate where ideas come from. Rather, we create opportunities for everyone to participate in the creation process. Last month, for example, we hosted an “Ideas Jam” where employees were invited to participate in a facilitated experience brainstorming how to bring to life our civil rights curriculum in new ways.

Interested in working with us? See our latest openings here.