Lead Data Analyst, Institutional Research

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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 Lead Data Analyst for Institutional Research 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, 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. Leads the translation of user stories into technical requirements.
• Sets and manages expectations about complex 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 and produce forecasts. 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. Participates in the definition of data visualization standards and best practices and promotes their adoption across IAR and the university.
• 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.).
• Plays a prominent role in other team members' development through constructive feedback and sharing of technical and institutional knowledge.
• Drives tasks, activities, and medium-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, and actively supports leaders in project planning.
• 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 them at IAR and the university.
• Supports leadership in strategic planning and contributes to operational excellence across IAR.
• Understands and abides by the relevant policies and methods to access, use, transform, store, and delete data in responsible, secure, and compliant ways. Identifies data security risks when dealing with concrete data sets and takes adequate mitigation actions.
• Collaborates effectively with other technical specialists (e.g., data engineers) in the construction of data products, systems, and applications.
• Performs other related duties as assigned.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Advanced SQL proficiency, with experience writing queries and subqueries, modifying data (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE), creating views, and knowledge of the different join types, filtering, sorting, aggregation, window functions, common table expressions (CTE), and performance tuning.
• Able 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.
• 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.
• Experienced with descriptive statistics, and causal analysis and inference. Familiarized with forecasting methods (time series, inferential, and/or regression) and with classification algorithms.

Job Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree
• 7 years of experience in Data Analysis, Business Intelligence, Data Science, Statistics, Decision Intelligence, Research, or a related domain, including 5 years focused on executive reporting, target setting, and forecasting.

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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:

How to apply: apply online

Full-time Regular Positions(FT classification, standard working hours = 40)

This is a full-time, regular position that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.

The University is an equal opportunity employer.All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status.