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:
 

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

Job Description

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 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:

• Requirement Analysis: 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.
• Expectation Management: Sets and manages expectations about complex analytics tasks and activities through clear, timely, and effective communication with partners and stakeholders.
• Data Querying & Transformation: 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.
• Data Quality & Troubleshooting: 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.
• Data Visualization & Storytelling: 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.
• Workflow & Automation: Utilizes software, scripts, and algorithms to perform data-related tasks (e.g., importing, cleaning, transforming, analyzing, displaying) without human intervention.
• Communication: 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.
• Knowledge Management & Documentation: 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.).
• Mentoring: Plays a prominent role in other team members’ development through constructive feedback and sharing of technical and institutional knowledge.
• Project & Initiative Leadership: Drives tasks, activities, and medium-scale projects with high levels of autonomy, confidence, and collaboration with peers and partners.

Other Relevant Responsibilities

• Project Execution: 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.
• Continuous Learning: 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.
• Functional Acumen: Supports leadership in strategic planning and contributes to operational excellence across IAR.
• Data Security & Privacy: 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.
• Technical Solution Design: 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:

• Data Querying & Transformation: 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.
• Data Modeling: 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.
• Data Visualization & Storytelling: 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.
• Statistical modeling: Experienced with descriptive statistics, and causal analysis and inference. Familiarized with forecasting methods (time series, inferential, and/or regression) and with classification algorithms.

Other Relevant Competencies

• Project Execution: 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.
• Functional Acumen: Familiarized with the university’s most relevant KPIs, the drivers that affect them, and plays an active role in their definition and tracking. Applies sound judgment, systems-thinking, and analytical skills to assess risks, perform root-cause analyses, make recommendations, and drive decisions that contribute to the achievement of the university’s objectives.
• Self-organization: Performs with very high levels of autonomy, reliability, self-direction, and with a bias for action. Manages conflicting and concurrent activities with minimal need for supervision.

Job Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in related field.
• 7 or more years of related experience (Data Analysis, Business Intelligence, Data Science, Statistics, Decision Intelligence, Research, or a related domain).

Work Location

• This position is in-office in Salt Lake City, UT.
• Schedule: 4 days onsite, 1 day work from home

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Position & Application Details

Full-Time Regular Positions (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours): This is a full-time, regular position (classified for 40 standard weekly hours) 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.

How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.

Additional Information

Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all-inclusive.

Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at [email protected].

Equal Opportunity Employer: We are 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. #DEI