Zonal Training Manager

What you will be expected to do:

• Own the annual training plan for Ethiopia’s zones, aligned to sales targets, product launches, seasonality and regional training priorities.
• Translate regional and HQ training strategy into disciplined execution across every region and market in scope.
• Set and enforce standards for onboarding, certification, refresher training, demo quality, pitch, load calculation and objection handling.
• Own the blended-learning model: classroom, field coaching, microlearning and LMS content, localised and translated for the Ethiopian market.

• Personally plan, facilitate and certify onboarding and refresher cycles for agents, technicians and the commercial field team, to a consistent national standard.
• Spend the majority of your time in the field: joint field days, live demo observation, ride-alongs and on-the-spot coaching with Area Business Managers and agents.
• Run high-value certification and Sales Clinics on priority commercial topics, including product guides, screening quality and conversion.
• Keep a dated coaching log and close the loop on every gap you observe, so field coaching converts into changed behaviour and improved numbers.

• Run train-the-trainer and calibration cycles with Area Business Managers, Regional Mentors and commercial managers so facilitation, product and coaching quality stay consistent as the market grows.
• Build a documented development plan for each bottom performer every quarter, working with the relevant commercial line manager.
• Recruit, onboard, coach and manage the performance of training staff as the country scales, holding monthly one-to-ones with every direct report.

• Carry accountability for reactivation rate, certified-agent conversion, face-to-face coverage and quality, and job-knowledge standards across your zones.
• Run business reviews, spot-checks and gap-closing so underperforming regions and teams are diagnosed and corrected early.
• Own execution discipline and data QA: high field-app record compliance, a healthy field-time ratio, and regular quality spot-checks on reported work.

• Own the training dashboards (Looker, Kazi Plan, Litmos) and use the data to find performance gaps and set priorities for training effort.
• Submit a monthly training dashboard to the Regional Training Manager, and run a quarterly Training Needs Review using sales, repayment and customer-complaint data.
• Correlate training cohorts to business outcomes: sales uplift, Collection Score improvement, lower returns and stronger customer retention.

• Own one to two quarterly strategic priorities cascaded from the Regional Training Manager, tied to the country’s core commercial metric (for example, collections), and cascade the key results into field scorecards.
• Partner with Ethiopia commercial management, Zonal and Regional Business Managers and Area Business Managers to identify the skill gaps constraining revenue and design targeted interventions for underperforming teams.
• Represent training in country and zonal reviews and work closely with Sales, Risk, Operations, Programs and Marketing to align training to the commercial agenda.
• Feed structured field insights back to regional and HQ Product and Marketing teams: customer confusion points, market activity and product feedback.
• Uphold Sun King’s standards of integrity, professionalism and customer experience across the field team.

You might be a strong candidate if you have:

• 5+ years in sales training, L&D or sales management, including at least 2 years managing, coaching or developing teams or trainers, in solar, electronics, telecoms, FMCG or any agent-based distribution business.
• A proven record of building and running training programmes that moved regional or national sales metrics, not just attendance.
• Experience working across multiple regions or zones and delivering results through field teams, including teams you do not directly manage.
• Comfortable in a new or fast-scaling market: able to build from a blank page, write and localise the content, and run the sessions personally while putting the structure in place.
• A credible master facilitator with a strong technical knowledge of Solar Home Systems (and inverters where relevant), able to demo and troubleshoot the basics.
• Highly data-focused, and fluent with LMS platforms, business-intelligence dashboards (Looker) and field or CRM applications.
• Commercial acumen: able to translate a commercial target into a training plan and cascade it into team scorecards.
• Willing to travel 60-70%+ across Ethiopia.
• Fluent in English and Amharic; Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya or Somali is a strong plus.
• Bachelor’s degree required; certifications in training, facilitation or instructional design are a strong plus.

What Sun King offers:

• Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry
• An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
• A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
• Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun Center for Leadership.

About
Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, combining cutting-edge product design, fintech, and field operations to deliver energy access for the 1.8 billion people who live without an affordable and reliable electric-grid connection.Sun King has built a new kind of energy utility: distributed, green, customer-centric, and affordable. We bring clean, reliable, decentralized energy directly into people’s lives — from solar kits that provide first-time energy access to multi-kilowatt systems that serve both off-grid users and grid-connected customers powering larger homes, schools, hospitals, farms, offices, and light manufacturing.Already, 25 million homes and businesses rely on Sun King for electricity supply and the appliances and services it enables: lighting, televisions, fans, refrigeration, and smartphones. Sun King combines energy generation, energy-efficient appliances, installation, and financing into one seamless offering. Think of it as a distributed utility, designed for wherever energy is needed and designed to scale with its users as incomes and energy needs grow.Sun King makes solar products affordable to low-income households and businesses via ‘pay-as-you-go’ (PAYG) purchase financing. Sun King installs solar after customers pay a small deposit. Customers then make small, manageable payments of as little as US $0.14 a day via mobile money or cash.Instead of paying for expensive, polluting, and health-damaging kerosene for lighting or diesel for power, customers unlock savings through accessing solar power and after one to two years of payments, customers own their solar equipment outright.Sun King collects payments digitally through mobile money systems and its 35,000 field agents — over 1 million payments each day. To date, Sun King has extended more than $1.4 billion in PAYG loans to customers.Sun King began by powering homes and businesses with solar systems delivered through PAYG financing. Now, we’re using the same model to make smartphones and clean cooking equipment affordable: helping households connect to the digital economy and transition from wood-based fuels to modern, sustainable alternatives.Sun King employs 3,500 full-time staff in 14 countries, with specialties spanning product design, data science, logistics, customer service, sales, software, operations, and more — all with a passion to serve off-grid families. Sun King is committed to gender diversity in the workplace. Women represent 42% of Sun King’s workforce.