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.

 

Position Summary -

The Data Scientist plays a critical role in WGU’s culture of data-driven continuous improvement and mentoring more junior analysts, wherever they sit in the organization. The successful candidate is curious, skeptical, technical, and possesses a strong business acumen. An ideal candidate is also a continuous learner, working to improve their analytical tool kit and increase productivity. This role is responsible for working with leaders across the organization, primarily in marketing, to gain a deep understanding of the strategies, tactics, and goals of the organization. Armed with this contextual understanding, the data scientist is responsible for rigorous data analysis to help guide decision making. The data scientist is expected to present findings clearly, concisely, and directed toward action.

Overall, data scientists in Institutional Research support the data, research, and analysis needs of WGU to improve student outcomes. They will design, conduct, and report results of ad-hoc research and analytical studies supporting academic and administrative planning, policy formulation, and evaluation. The ideal candidate is comfortable using a range of analytic methods to answer university questions. Analytic methods include summary statistics, statistical testing, time-series forecasting, and predictive modeling. Analysts will need to be able to communicate results in automated reports that can be run on demand in Tableau and Cognos 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 perform analysis in Python, R, or SAS.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

· Extracts and evangelizes insights from analysis and reporting in support of marketing, enrollment, strategic relations and WGU E-team. Makes logical conclusions and inferences. Able to drive toward and gather consensus across stakeholders. Presents to Marketing and WGU leadership.

· Makes strategic and operational recommendations based on data, analysis and insights.

· Looks for and identifies ineffective and inefficient processes. Develops ideas and recommendations for improvement.

· Builds statistical models of business processes for evaluation, triage and interventions. Manage and maintain new enrollment forecasts. Develops new forecasting tools and techniques. Creates Annual

Planning tools and processes for WGU college leadership. Provides support and training to forecast users.

· Owns the lifecycle of all official reports. Identifies design improvements, ensures reporting suite fits together, recommends new reports for creation, and deprecates reports for sun setting.

· Interacts with leadership across the organization in support of marketing and broader WGU initiatives.

· Develops other people’s talents and skills through coaching and mentoring.

· As requested, interviews and evaluates job candidates with IR, Marketing and Strategic Relations.

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

o Meet and Consult with the project stakeholders to determine scope, requirements, final product, and if needed, on-going maintenance support

o Facilitate needs-analysis and IR resource allocation of project

o 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

Required Education and Experience:

· MBA/Master’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Computer Science or other applied mathematics discipline and 3+ years’ experience in data analytics, business intelligence or information technology or

· Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Computer Science or other applied mathematics discipline and 5+ years’ experience in data analytics, business intelligence, or information technology

Required Skills:

· Proficiency in SQL, Python, R, or Scala for processing and analyzing data

· Familiarity with common ETL techniques

· Experience developing and producing reporting using Tableau, Cognos, Power BI, or similar applications

· Understanding of best-practice marketing metrics

· Understanding of marketing strategy and operations with an emphasis in lead generation

· Understanding of digital marketing, partnerships & geo-marketing

· Understanding of inferential statistics and predictive modeling

· Understanding of time-series forecasting

· Proficiency in visual display of data

· Experience with working with different file formats such as JSON, XML, and CSV

· Experience in data validation and testing to analyze, debug and fix issues

· Knowledge of qualitative research analysis, methodologies and best practices

· Experience in KPI development and application

· Expertise in understanding, manipulating and querying large data sets with complex file structures

· Experience and success with creative problem solving particularly with respect to innovative data applications

· Ability to bridge communication and action between business user stories and technical requirements

· Ability to explain complex data and research issues in a professional manner with technical and non-technical colleagues

· Excellent communication and documentation skills

· Ability to work well in a team environment

· Professional communication across all levels of the organization

· Experience working with enterprise data warehouses and big data

· Demonstrated ability to identify project risks.

· Experience in change management

· Skilled in project design and management. Can do big picture project management and detail results delivery

· Skilled in stakeholder facilitation. Ability to anticipate customer needs and understand customer requirements

· Ability to work independently

· Experience in designing, organizing, and managing multiple complex projects simultaneously and with meeting deadlines

Preferred Qualifications:

· PhD in Statistics, Economics, Computer Science or other applied mathematics discipline

· Experience in the Higher Education industry

· Experience working with Salesforce, Adobe Analytics (or similar web analytics tools), and general marketing data sets

· Experience in survey design and sampling methodology

Special Position Requirements:

No special position requirements. Position will not be remote; it will be located at Salt Lake City office; standard weekday working hours.

Competencies Required:

· Strong analytical, interpersonal, and problem-solving skills are necessary

· Ability to work collaboratively and to build cooperative relationships

· Continuous improvement mindset

· Friendly, life-long-learner

· Strong written communication skills, including reporting writing for a variety of audiences

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

· Demonstrated ability to work with technical and non-technical colleagues explaining complex data and research issues in a professional manner

· Candidate must have ability to work with others as project lead or work independently

· Ability to work with changing and multiple priorities and to work under pressure in an Agile framework

As an equal opportunity employer, WGU recognizes that our strength lies in our people. We are committed to diversity.