Senior Campus Planner - DLR Group

DLR Group is an integrated design firm with a promise to elevate the human experience through design. This fuels the work we do around the world and inspires our mission to improve the lives of our clients, our communities, and our planet. If this sparks your interest, you’re in the right place.

DLR Group's Design team has an opening for a Senior Campus Planner in our new Nashville office. We operate within a hybrid work model, supporting flexibility between office time and work from home.

Position Summary

As a Senior Campus Planner at DLR Group, you will play an important role in our integrated design process as a leader with exposure to all elements of the campus planning design process. This is a fantastic opportunity to grow and contribute your design voice to our brand promise of Elevating the Human Experience.

The focus of this position will be to grow DLR Group’s national planning processes, tools, and products for colleges and universities across the country. This is a national opportunity to work with all DLR Group’s offices within the United States. You will be part of our national Campus Planning team, within our Higher Education practice. Along with playing an integral role in our comprehensive campus and facility planning projects, you will have the opportunity to lead and participate in facility programming, digital tool development, research, and developing expanded services for planning, analytics, policy, and management.

If you are collaborative and client-oriented, with a strategic mindset that enjoys translating scales between the campus user, the institution, and the region, this might be the position for you.

Position Responsibilities:

• Be highly collaborative with a strategic mindset and enjoy an interdisciplinary approach to projects.
• Lead 360-degree campus engagement workshops and client communication.
• Focus on the future of Higher Education, student success, evolving programs and partnerships, town/gown dynamics, along with sustainability, equity, and wellness.
• Ensure DLR Group’s higher education research, analytics, and planning support our clients’ institutional mission, vision, values, accreditation, and strategic planning goals and strategies.
• Assess higher education facilities, open space, and infrastructure. Identify campus condition, capacity, utilization, and usage patterns. Tie patterns to institutional success metrics.
• Integrate campus data, physical condition analysis, and recommendations with institutional strategic planning and key performance indicators.
• Identify and integrate evolving best practices, policies, and procedures.
• Synthesize quantitative and qualitative information to generate flexible implementation and capital planning strategies.
• Lead, collaborate, review, and confirm planning analytics, scenarios, and reports with senior leadership, institutional research, deans, department chairs, facilities planning, and reviewing boards.
• Manage the project process and communications to deliver, on time and on budget, graphics, and narrative to support project goals, objectives, and required deliverables for interim and final presentations and reports.
• Provide thought leadership to elevate the Campus Planning Team, our Higher Education practice, and DLR Group as a whole. Participate in research to document trends, identify DLR Group strengths/weaknesses, and tie to client needs.
• Contribute to the growth of the national campus planning team to deliver current services as well as identify and develop expanded services identified in DLR Group’s Vision 2025.
• Actively participate in marketing and business development activities.

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience leading comprehensive planning projects for colleges and universities.
• Dual bachelor's and master’s degrees in complementary disciplines such as architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, planning, and interiors.
• Ability to lead work across multiple time zones with a national team and clients located from Eastern to Alaskan time zones.
• Ability to lead project processes to achieve project budgets, schedules, and research.
• Ability to work collaboratively with all Carnegie Classifications and levels of higher education management.
• Knowledge of Higher Education academic organizational structures, workflow, and operating procedures.
• Experience with user survey methodology.
• Experience with Higher Education facility programming, design, and project development.
• Knowledge of applicable Higher Education federal, state, and peer standards.
• Experience applying best practices for campus-scale assessment, analytics, diagramming, conceptualization, prioritization, phasing, and fundraising.
• Experience with leading report preparation and presentations:
• Translating data, engagement, assessment, and concepts into graphic storytelling.
• Connecting short and long term goal setting with analysis.
• Promoting space reallocation strategies.
• Articulating campus development, renewal, preservation, and other capital planning strategies.
• Must be eligible to work in the United States without need for work visa or residency sponsorship.

*TO BE CONSIDERED, PLEASE SUBMIT CURRENT PORTFOLIO/WORK SAMPLES IN PDF FORMAT*

DLR Group is an integrated design firm delivering architecture, engineering, interiors, planning, and building optimization for new builds, renovations, and adaptive reuse projects.

We are 100% employee-owned: every employee is literally invested in our clients’ success. At the core of our firm are interdisciplinary teams engaged in every step of project lifecycles. Our teams champion true collaboration, open information sharing, shared risk and reward, value-based decision making, and proficient use of technology to deliver exceptional design. We are pursuing the goals of the 2030 Challenge, the ME2040, and the SE2050, and are an initial signatory of the China Accord and the AIA 2030 Commitment.

Our ambition is to use our collective design voice to bring about a better society and create stronger communities by recognizing and addressing longstanding inequities in our nation. Leading this change – to deliver a more equitable culture – aligns with DLR Group’s Core Values and our brand promise to elevate the human experience through design. By exploring, discovering, sharing, and ultimately resolving inequities identified within our firm and the broader A/E/C industry, we can develop a more diverse and inclusive design culture to better fulfill our brand promise.

Our comprehensive Benefits at DLR Group include medical, dental, vision, disability, wellness programs, flex spending, paid holidays, and paid time off. We also offer a 401(k) plan, employee stock ownership, and bonus opportunities. Compensation considerations are based on location, experience, and skills.
Through our values – commitment, creativity, environmental stewardship, fun, integrity, ownership, sharing, teamwork – we elevate the human experience through design, together.We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action/M/F/Veteran/Disabled employer.

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