Lead Data Analyst- WGU Academy

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
 

Grade: Professional 312

Pay Range: $106,700.00 - $165,400.00

Job Description

WGU Academy is dedicated to providing innovative, competency-based education that helps students achieve their academic and career goals. We value accessibility, innovation, and student success.As a Lead Data Analyst, you'll play a pivotal role in extracting, processing, analyzing, and reporting on data to produce rigorous, actionable insights and research. This role will be a leader of the team and interact often with executive-level stakeholders, driving impactful decisions and strategies.What You'll Do

• Drive the documentation of data, analytics, and research needs in projects of high complexity with a student and equity-centered lens, collaborating with peers, cross-functional partners, faculty staff, and leaders.
• Set and manage expectations about complex analytics tasks and activities through clear, timely, and effective communication with partners and stakeholders.
• Answer complex business questions requiring extensive knowledge of the university’s data assets across several domains and departments.
• Identify adequate data sources and data sets to evaluate hypotheses and produce forecasts.
• Collaborate with Data Engineering in the development of complex ETL/ELT processes and data pipelines.
• Identify, investigate, and solve complex data issues, contributing to the accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, and validity of the university’s data.
• Combine data analysis, visualization, and narrative structures to convey information in compelling ways that instigate deliberate action.

What You'll Bring

• Advanced SQL proficiency, with experience writing queries and subqueries, modifying data (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE), creating views, and knowledge of different join types, filtering, sorting, aggregation, window functions, common table expressions (CTE), and performance tuning.
• Highly proficient and experienced in using tools like Tableau and Power BI to present data and information utilizing charts, graphs, and maps in ways that make it easy to understand trends, patterns, and outliers.
• Ability to interpret and design models that describe how data relate to one another, and to the properties of the real-world entities they represent. Highly experienced in conceptual and logical data modeling, dimensional models, star schema, snowflake schema, and advanced concepts like slowly changing dimensions.
• Experienced with descriptive statistics, causal analysis, and inference. Familiarized with forecasting methods (time series, inferential, and/or regression) and with classification algorithms.
• Comfortable with common project management methodologies and frameworks (e.g., Waterfall, Agile, SDLC).
• Proficient in the MS Office suite, including advanced Excel knowledge.
• Proficient in flowchart and diagramming tools like Miro, Visio, Lucidchart, and similar applications.

Bonus Points if You Have

• Familiarity with the university’s most relevant KPIs, the drivers that affect them, and play an active role in their definition and tracking.
• Ability to apply sound judgment, systems-thinking, and analytical skills to assess risks, perform root-cause analyses, make recommendations, and drive cross-functional decisions that contribute to the achievement of the university’s objectives.
• Ability to perform with very high levels of autonomy, reliability, self-direction, and with