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.

 

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Current WGU employees should submit an internal application before 8/19/2022 to be considered.

Who is WGU Academy?

At WGU Academy, we work collaboratively to dramatically impact college and workforce readiness efforts on a large scale. Our primary mission is to develop and deliver new solutions for college and career readiness to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of individuals and propel them to success in whatever domain they choose.

This is a fully benefited, remote position that can be located anywhere in the 48 US States.

Why consider us?

• Fully remote position where you’ll make a difference in a mission driven environment.

• Equipment provided: Choice of Mac or PC laptop

• Comprehensive and affordable benefits (including mental health benefits, and generous PTO) plus 403b matches and contributions where we put money into your retirement account, even if you’re not contributing.

• 75%employee tuition discount available at WGU for yourself, and 50%discount for qualifying family members.

• Innovative, fun, and enriching team environment where are you valued, given credit where its due, and recognized for your contributions.

• Collaborative and cross functional team, where good communication is prioritized.

What will you be doing?

WGU Academy uses a data and research-driven, evidence-based approach to learning success and the organization has a healthy respect for analytics and data in general.

As the Lead Data Analyst with WGU Academy you’ll work on real-world problems that identify levels of learner success and most importantly use data to inform the building of interventions that help struggling learners reach their goals. This includes a deep analysis of learner profiles, learner learning patterns, academic and career outcomes, and course and learning resource quality. You’ll also help identify new markets & customers and help guide them to educational success. You’ll answer questions posed by others, but also be expected and encouraged to and answer your own questions. As a thought leader for analytics, you’ll interact with researchers, academic leaders, curriculum design experts, and other data analysts across the organization to continuously analyze and improve course and program performance and learner outcomes.

Who will you be helping?

Findings about learners and their experiences are used immediately and lead to direct, actionable interventions and changes to help current and future learners succeed. Your data analysis will shape learning experiences for individual learners who have traditionally been underserved in Higher Education.

Who are you?

You’re inquisitive and have the desire to innovate and test ideas in an environment where iteration is encouraged and expected. You enjoy working at a fast pace on projects that have clear-cut deadline and objectives and follow a 2-3 week sprint cycle. You love working with data and are excited about creating and improving learning experiences for our learners.

How is success measured?

We’ve built out a training plan so you can familiarize with data, gain a solid understanding of the metrics and status quo before jumping into creating descriptive analysis, building out automated calculations. From here you’ll jump into inferential statistics, and, visualization build outs.

Once you’re up to speed with our data and processes, success will be measured against the number of deliverables, the speed of generation, and quality of your findings.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

Working with other analysts and researchers in a sprint fashion, you’ll be expected to expertly handle multiple projects simultaneously, each at different stages of the analytics cycle. You’ll be cleaning data, performing manipulation and analysis, creating reports and dashboards for presentation; attending a handful of meetings, and working on projects that align to interests and key priorities for the organization. There will be opportunity to build out systems, further data refinement, automate jobs, and create automated dashboards that will replace manual processes. 

• Defines analytic projects in a way that delivers business value to WGU Academy

• Identifies needs and creates novel analytic projects (rather than simply responding to requests)

• Analyzes and interprets diverse sets of educational data using a variety of statistical methods (e.g., t-tests, regression, natural language processing, thematic analysis, structural equation modeling, Chi-square, factor analysis, hierarchical/multi-level modeling)

• Uses SQL, Python, R, or Scala to clean, manipulate, and transform data for analysis

• Reports, explains, and presents statistical analyses to the most senior leadership teams using graphs, charts, and tables

• Designs and maintains Tableau dashboards

• Applies understanding of learning science to develop methods for measuring  learning and engagement

• Uses understanding of data collection to design and implement new methods of measurement

• Stays informed of emerging trends in learning science, learning analytics, and data science

• Clearly communicates with users to assess needs and requirements for data products

• Pitches value of potential data products using functioning proofs-of-concept

• Works across academic colleges and programs to provide valuable data-informed insights on trends of performance metrics

Knowledge, Skill and Abilities

• Strong written, oral, presentation, and interpersonal skills, including the ability to explain the significance of data and trends to stakeholders

• Ability to manage multiple, competing tasks independently while working in a team environment

• Ability to provide mentoring to more junior team members

• Work with outside vendors and internal teams to improve data availability and quality

• Ability to use SQL, R, Python, or SAS to run descriptive, inferential, multivariate, and other statistical analyses

• Ability to create data dashboards and visuals using tools like Tableau and Databricks

• Ability to create datasets for analysis & reporting using SQL, Python, R, or Scala.

• Ability to explain analysis results to non-technical audience

• Ability to manage multiple ongoing data projects

Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in learning science, data analytics, behavioral or cognitive psychology, statistics, or a closely related field

• 5+ years of experience in quantitative and qualitative data analysis and visualization

• 1+ years building dynamic, interactive dashboards

• 3+ years working with relational databases

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with Databricks, Salesforce

Working Conditions

• Limited travel for team meetings in Salt Lake City

• Remote Position

Disclaimers:

WGU Academy, Inc is an affiliated non-profit entity of 501c(3) Corporation of Western Governors University

This Job Description has been designed to indicate the general nature, essential duties, and responsibilities of work performed by employees within this classification. It does not contain a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications that are required of the employee to do this job.  Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice. This Job Description does not constitute a contract of employment and the University may exercise its employment-at-will rights at any time.

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