Senior Data Analyst, Faculty Experience Analytics

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.

This position is in-office in Salt Lake City, UT

Job Profile Summary:

The Institutional Analytics and Research (IAR) team supports and enables most university teams, departments, and colleges to make data-informed decisions that lead to better student outcomes. Our analysts, scientists, researchers, and managers are distributed across several teams: Faculty Experience Analytics, Institutional Research, Learning Analytics, Outreach Analytics, and Student Success Analytics.

The Senior Data Analyst for Faculty Experience is responsible for extracting, processing, analyzing, and reporting on data to produce rigorous, actionable insights and research. They establish and maintain strong relationships with peers and leaders across IAR, Data Engineering, Product Management, Finance, EdTech, and Faculty staff. They play an instrumental role in the measurement of the university's performance by performing ad hoc analyses, building standard reports and data visualizations, and delivering information and insights through a variety of methods and media that privilege data storytelling and compress time-to-action.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Drives the documentation of data and analytics needs in projects of high complexity with a student and equity-centered lens, collaborating with peers, cross-functional partners, faculty staff, and leaders. Translates user stories into technical requirements.
• Sets and manages expectations about analytics tasks and activities through clear, timely, and effective communication with partners and stakeholders.
• Answers complex business questions requiring extensive knowledge of the university's data assets across several domains and departments. Identifies adequate data sources and data sets to evaluate hypotheses, build forecasts, and support findings of research projects and experiments. Collaborates with Data Engineering in the development of complex ETL/ELT processes and data pipelines.
• Identifies, investigates, and solves complex data issues, contributing to the accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, and validity of the university's data. Collaborates with Data Engineering and other data & analytics partners to define standards and best practices that increase data quality across the university.
• Combines data analysis, visualization, and narrative structures to convey information in compelling ways that instigate deliberate action.
• Utilizes software, scripts, and algorithms to perform data-related tasks (e.g., importing, cleaning, transforming, analyzing, displaying) without human intervention.
• Conveys information effectively to peers, partners, and senior leaders, using a variety of resources and formats (synchronous and asynchronous, verbal and written) such as e-mails, presentations, meetings, and workshops.
• Creates and organizes information about processes, projects, operations, data assets, and insights from analyses and research, making it accessible in ways that increase the university’s knowledge and efficiency. Writes and interprets technical documentation (e.g. Entity-Relationship, Conceptual, Logical, and Physical data models). Contributes actively to the development of the university’s data management platforms (e.g., data dictionaries, catalogs, etc.).
• Supports and accelerates other team members' development through constructive feedback and sharing of technical and institutional knowledge.
• Drives tasks, activities, and small-scale projects with high levels of autonomy, confidence, and collaboration with peers and partners.

Other Relevant Responsibilities

• Tracks and reports own progress, dependencies, and challenges diligently. Breaks down complex goals into concrete tasks and activities.
• Works actively to improve own skills and knowledge through internal and external, formal and informal, structured and unstructured learning. Is a lifelong learner and embodies a growth mindset. Stays abreast of innovative developments in their area of work and plays an active role in deploying