Senior Research Analyst

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 Senior Research Analyst plays a critical role in WGU’s culture of data driven continuous improvement. The successful candidate is curious, skeptical, technical, and possesses strong business acumen. An ideal candidate is also a continuous learner, working to improve their analytical tool kit and increase productivity. This Senior role is responsible for providing leadership across our Outreach Analytics team and the WGU organization to gain a deep understanding of the strategies, tactics, and goals of the data used to lead the organization.

The Senior Analyst is responsible for rigorous data analysis to help guide decision-making within the departments we service and across the university through various collaborations. They are expected to present findings clearly, concisely, and directed toward action. Overall, Research Analysts in Outreach Analytics support the data, research, and analysis needs of WGU to improve student outcomes. They will consult with business leaders about data needs and design, conduct, and report results of ad hoc research and analytical studies supporting a variety of non-academic departments at WGU, including Marketing, Enrollment, Regional Operations, and Student Support Services. The ideal candidate is comfortable using a range of analytic methods to answer university questions. Analysts will often need to be able to communicate results using automated reports that can be run on demand in Tableau, Adobe Analytics, and ServiceNow as well as in written and presentation form.

In addition, this position will need to be able to work with internal customers to understand requirements and be able to design user stories. The analyst will use business user stories to define data acquisition requirements and develop, deploy, manage and revise reports and analysis supporting the user stories.

This is a technical role that requires extracting and manipulating data using SQL and performing analysis on a variety of platforms.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Extract and manipulate data using SQL. Develop database objects

• Code and perform unit testing of developed code

• Proficient analytical skill set and experience with creating, cleaning, and analyzing large data sets

• Develop and deploy complex reports and dashboards

• Create data-informed processes to resolve business problems and use analytical methods to produce actionable insights

• Manage change requests and troubleshoot data issues

• Complete root cause analysis on KPIs

• Collaborate in the forecasting of key business drivers and KPIs

• Present findings to technical and non-technical audiences, including executive staff

• Design process and business audits for data quality

• Identifies, investigates, and/or solves complex data issues, contributing to the accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, and validity of WGU's data.

• Collaborates with Data Engineering and other data & analytics partners to define standards and best practices that increase data quality across WGU.

• Ability to attend to detail, manage multiple tasks and meet deadlines

• Work closely and communicate effectively with business users and stakeholders. Requirements gathering and documentation from stakeholders

• Responsibility to Lead or Manage an IR-supported initiative or project at the enterprise-wide level

• Meet and Consult with the project stakeholders to determine the scope, requirements, final product, and if needed, ongoing maintenance support

• Facilitate needs analysis and IR resource allocation of project

• Communicate project statuses and activities to IR and WGU leadership

• Represent Institutional Research at meetings and other coordinating events to provide IR insights, perspective, and results

• Assist, train, and guide less experienced members of the team in technical processes

• Sets and manages expectations in projects of medium/h