What This Role Is

Every year, hundreds of thousands of students across India decide they want to study abroad. They find a counselor, start a conversation, and enter a process that will shape the next four years of their life and, behind it, the financial trajectory of an entire family. The quality of that counseling conversation is the single biggest variable in whether the outcome is good. Not the university ranking. Not the destination. The conversation.

Student Placements is Manifest Global's enrollment engine. University Enrolment Advisors guide students from first contact through university shortlisting, application, offer, and deposit confirmed, across destinations including the UK, Australia, the US, and Canada. The India cohort is the largest and most consequential. It sits at the intersection of Cialfo's K12 school network, Explore's university partnerships, and Kaaiser's deep institutional relationships in the India corridor. The pipeline is real. The conversion potential is significant. What the function needs now is someone to own it with the seriousness that warrants.

This is a regional leadership role. You own the India UEA team, the India enrollment funnel, and the India regional target. That is the primary mandate. The second mandate sits on top of it: as the most experienced counseling operator in the UEA structure, you will own the global counseling standard across every region where UEAs sit, building the playbook, the training curriculum, and the quality framework that every advisor, regardless of geography, is measured against. You are not just running a region. You are setting the bar for what good counseling looks like across the entire function.

What Makes This Role Different

There are regional leads for other UEA geographies. What separates this seat is the additive scope. You own yours and then build the intellectual infrastructure that every other regional lead uses. The counseling playbook you write, the training curriculum you design, the quality index you instrument on platform with the product team: those are global artifacts. They will shape how a UEA in China handles a shortlisting conversation, how a UEA in Southeast Asia pitches a school counselor, how a new advisor anywhere in the world gets onboarded. That is a different kind of leverage.

The broader overseas education industry is contracting. Manifest Global is growing. The reason is structural: no standalone counseling agency operates with the school network, university partnerships, and direct counseling capability that Manifest has assembled. A UEA backed by Cialfo's 2,000+ school relationships, Explore's 1,000+ university partners, and Kaaiser's corridor depth is a fundamentally different proposition to a student than an advisor operating in isolation. The role you are stepping into exists to make sure every UEA, in every region, can articulate and deliver on that advantage in the room with a student.

The timing matters. The India UEA team is not scaling tenfold overnight. The size is manageable enough that you can lead it with real proximity while simultaneously building the global standard. That window will not stay open indefinitely. In twelve months, with additional resources coming in across regions, the global L&D mandate becomes significantly heavier. The person who gets in now shapes what gets built, not just who gets trained on it.

What You Own

The India UEA team

• Own the full India cohort counseling lifecycle, from nominations funnel through to enrollment confirmed, with accountability for the regional target
• Lead a team of UEAs directly, with additional resources expected over the next twelve months
• Build the team discipline, process rigor, and performance cadence that makes conversion predictable rather than dependent on individual UEA variation
• Collaborate with school counselors, client partners, and the K12 team where the India B2B pipeline requires coordinated engagement

The India enrollment funnel

• Own the conversion metrics for the India cohort: enrollment rate, commissionable placement rate, and SLA adherence across the team
• Identify and close the gaps between where individual UEAs are performing and where the standard requires them to be
• Work closely with operations and product to ensure the India funnel data is visible, accurate, and actionable in real time

The global counseling standard

• Build a destination-by-destination knowledge base that gives every UEA, regardless of region, genuine fluency across the UK, Australia, the US, Canada, and other key corridors
• Define the counseling script, talking points, and engagement pitch for each student touchpoint across the full journey: first contact, ABCCD discovery session, shortlisting, application, offer, and enrollment confirmation
• Define the school counselor engagement framework that UEAs use when entering a school event or counselor meeting, whether virtual or in person
• Own the playbook as a living document, updating it as destination requirements evolve and as regional feedback surfaces gaps

Global UEA training and quality

• Deliver the initial training program as an individual contributor: you are in the room, running sessions, calibrating advisors yourself, not delegating the execution to others
• Build a curriculum structured for delivery across regions, accounting for destination mix and regional nuance without losing the consistency of the underlying standard
• Build, in collaboration with your manager and the product team, a counseling quality index: a measurable matrix that tracks adherence to the standard and conversation quality for every UEA on the platform
• Use the quality data to identify gaps, prioritize coaching interventions, and report to leadership on the state of counseling performance globally

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where Student Placements is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

In the first few months, you have done the diagnostic work. You have sat in on enough India UEA conversations to know exactly where the standard breaks down: which touchpoints are handled well and which are improvised, which destinations the team genuinely knows and which they are covering with confidence they have not fully earned. You have a clear point of view on the India team's current state and you have started translating that into the first version of the counseling playbook. The India funnel data is in front of you and you understand what is driving the numbers.

By the midpoint of the first year, the India regional target is tracking. The counseling playbook exists as a real artifact, not a slide deck. Every India UEA has been trained on it. The quality index is live on platform and producing data you are using in coaching conversations. You have delivered the first round of global training to other regional UEA teams and the framework is being used, not just filed.

In 12 months, the standard you built is institutional. A new UEA joining anywhere in the world gets onboarded on a framework you designed. The quality index is a management tool that regional leads across geographies use to run their teams. The India cohort is performing with consistency, and the improvement is traceable to a change in counseling practice, not just a change in lead volume or market conditions.

The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.

What You Bring

You have spent the better part of two decades in international education counseling, with well over a decade working directly in this space. You know the UCAS cycle, the Common App process, and the nuances of every major destination a student from India is likely to consider. You know how a budget conversation changes depending on whether the family is first-generation. You know when a student says they want to go to the UK that they sometimes mean they want to leave India, and that those are different conversations requiring different counseling moves. That depth is not something that comes from a training program. It comes from having done the work, repeatedly, across enough destinations that the right answer arrives instinctively before the question is finished.

What separates you from a strong senior UEA is that you can codify what you know. You have the instinct to recognize the right counseling move in the moment, and you have the discipline to break that instinct down into a teachable framework someone else can replicate. You have done some version of this before: formal training delivery, school event facilitation, curriculum design, or building a counseling approach from scratch at a previous organization. You are not starting from zero. You have a model in your head for what a great counseling conversation looks like at every touchpoint, and your job now is to write it down, test it, and hold a team to it.

You have managed people and you have led commercial teams. You understand the difference between coaching someone toward a better conversation and managing someone toward a number, and you know that in this function the two are inseparable. The India regional target is yours to own, not to report on. You feel the gap between where the team is and where it needs to be, and you close it through the quality of your coaching, not through escalation.

You are comfortable being an individual contributor on the L&D mandate while simultaneously carrying a regional leadership responsibility. The fact that you will be designing curriculum and running training sessions yourself, not through a team, does not give you pause. You are precise enough to build the standard and confident enough to deliver it. You do not need a large support structure around you to produce work that holds up.

Somewhere underneath the commercial instinct and the counseling depth, you remember why this work matters. These are students, most of them from India, making one of the most consequential decisions of their lives, often with family finances and generational expectations sitting behind the choice. A better counseling conversation does not just improve a conversion metric. It changes the university a student ends up at, the country they build their career in, and the trajectory of a family that bet on them.

Most importantly, you read the description of what Student Placements is building and your first reaction was not that this is a good senior role. It was something closer to: I know exactly what the counseling standard should look like, and I know how to build it. That is the person this role is for.

Why Manifest

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system which changes that. $80M raised. Still early.

For this role specifically, the counseling standard you build is load-bearing infrastructure. Student Placements converts because of what happens inside the advisor-student conversation. No platform feature and no marketing campaign substitutes for a well-prepared UEA with a defined framework, operating inside a network with Explore's university relationships, Kaaiser's institutional depth, and Cialfo's school pipeline behind them. You are building the standard that makes that combination matter in the room with a student. That is not an L&D function. That is the conversion engine.

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.