Sven Gerjets

As the SVP, CTO Higher Education at Pearson Education, Sven leads the product and platform engineering teams to provide a single, unified focus and set of accountabilities for technology development and growth as well as serve as a strategic partner on improved quality of our technical solutions here at Pearson.

Prior to Pearson, Sven was the Senior Vice President of Information Technology at DIRECTV, the number 1 pay video provider in the world with 37 million customers across the Americas and revenues in excess of $29 billion dollars.  He led an organization focused on delivering technology-enabled business solutions. This organization consisted of 1500 resources that deliver more than $220 million in capital initiatives annually. These initiatives allowed DIRECTV to release new products, develop new methods of selling, create business process efficiencies and improve the quality of the customer experience. Sven served on the Product Development Council, which governed DIRECTV's consumer product roadmap.

Sven was instrumental in delivering DIRECTV’s strategic business initiatives such as using data for decisioning and churn reduction, rolling out new capabilities to distribute and monetize video over the internet, as well as scheduling, routing, and mobilizing capabilities in support of DIRECTV's 15,000 technician, field service organization.

Prior to joining DIRECTV, Sven was Director of Global Consumer IT at Symantec. At Symantec, Sven was responsible for delivering all IT solutions and infrastructure needs to the global consumer business unit, which generated more than $2 billion in revenue.  Before joining Symantec, Sven co-founded Genetimedic, an online health education company that developed and marketed lifeclick.com.  Earlier he spent 14 years in various leadership positions at McCaw Cellular/AT&T Wireless.

Sven holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Kennedy-Western University and completed Harvard Business School’s elite Advanced Management Program.