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.

 

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Reporting to the Vice President for Advanced Analytics, the Manager is the functional owner of WGU’s Root Cause Analysis system, including the data products and processes that comprise the system. As a system, the RCA is a set of data reports, analyses, and dashboards that allow a user to execute a rigorous process to identify a variance in a key metric, locate it with specificity in terms of affected area and population, identify its root cause, and develop solutions to be piloted and tested for impact prior to scaling. The Manager will maintain and continue to develop the RCA system, ensuring precision and ease of use, with the goal of RCA becoming a sentinel system, ultimately automated to deliver a data story that can verified rather than requiring insights to be actively mined by users.  
• A positive and growth-mindset oriented leader, this position directly manages the team that builds and maintains the RCA system. Through team problem-solving and individual partnership with team members, the Manager participates in resolving difficult data and analytics concepts, producing innovative ideas or solutions. With full understanding of the abilities of the team, competing commitments, team goals, and institutional agenda, the Manager prioritizes stakeholder requests and pushes difficult workstreams forward to meet commitments.
• Responsible for the application of the RCA system by College Analyst Teams (CATs) and academic program leaders within WGU’s four colleges. By providing leadership, training, guidance, feedback, and quality assurance to these power users in a community of practice, the Manager facilitates continuous, rigorous, data-informed problem-solving for student success at WGU.
• Demonstrating particular strength in practical and analytic problem-solving, this position efficiently and accurately translates and responds to stakeholder requests.  The Manager, Advanced Analytics uses their knowledge of data engineering, data visualization, and automation to provide technical leadership and vision to the team in the execution of business requirements for the RCA and other deliverables.
• This position brings to all conversations a deep contextual understanding of higher education key performance metrics, an appreciation for competency-based education, and a shared commitment to the elimination of equity gaps in student access and attainment.
• The Manager, Advanced Analytics is a compelling and effective communicator who translates complex analytic insights for a wide array of audiences including lay people, power users, and executives. This position reports on changes to student success metrics in WGU’s cross-functional Monthly Student Success meeting as well as providing on-demand summaries of metric changes and other RCA insights for the board and executive team.
• Performs other related duties as assigned. 

Knowledge, Skill and Abilities:

• Practical Problem-Solving: Investigates appropriate resources and involves partners when appropriate. Is future oriented. Assesses what will help or hinder achieving goals. Focuses on what is important.
• Analytic Problem-Solving: Quickly and accurately understands the objective of a request for research or analysis. Able to determine what data, analysis, and method of presentation will most effectively answer the question or meet the need. Able to translate between requestors and data teams
• Data Analytics: Understanding of the technical processes for creating business intelligence solutions, including connecting data sources, performing data transformations, and modeling and visualizing data.
• Interpersonal Relationships: Deals with others in a considerate, respectful, and unbiased manner. Approaches conflict proactively. Solicits and share feedback openly. Listens with empathy and maintains composure.
• Attitude: Is fundamentally positive with a growth-mindset Displays commitment to the organization and to personal growth. Is self-motivated and able to motivate and inspire others. Asserts self appropriately to champion ideas. Tells the truth in a direct and constructive manner.
• Influence: Has a positive impact on others. Understands others’ points of view to persuade and gain their support and buy-in through shared wins.
• Precision: Prioritizes and ensures accuracy. Able to create systems and approaches to internal validation and quality assurance not only for the analytic products of their team, but also for the results that end-users achieve with those products. 
• Communication: Conveys information and perspective clearly in verbal, written, and visual formats and is proficient with tools for the communication of data (Tableau, SharePoint, PowerPoint, etc.). Shapes communication appropriately for the needs of different audiences. Employs active listening.
• Adaptability: Corrects behaviors and communication style to meet the needs of a wider range of situations. Tackles obstacles appropriately. Is comfortable with ambiguity.
• Reliability: Accountable to others; does what it takes to get the job done. Actions are consistent with words. Follows through on commitments. Exhibits exceptional integrity.
• Initiative: Self-directs with a strong tendency for action. Leads the way to improve performance or processes. Displays keen interest in students and organization.
• Drive for Results: Has a strong outcomes-based orientation. Persists in accomplishing objectives despite obstacles and setbacks. Has a track record of successfully achieving goals. Pushes self and helps others achieve results. Has a continuous improvement mindset.
• Effective Team Building: Forms teams with appropriate combinations of styles, perspectives, and experience. Establishes common objectives and a shared mindset. Creates a feeling of belonging and strong team morale. Shares team accomplishments and rewards team efforts. Fosters open dialogue and collaboration among the team. Creates a team that works well cross-functionally. Actively understands individual team member’s professional goals and supports ongoing professional development.
• Organizational Learning: Learns quickly when facing new situations. Experiments to find new solutions. Takes on challenges of unfamiliar tasks. Extracts lessons learned from failures and mistakes. Expends knowledge base through ongoing curiosity.
• Budgetary Responsibility: Manages day-to-day elements of the budget, compiles data to prepare annual budgets, demonstrates budgetary accountability. 

Competencies: 

Organizational Impact: 

• Plans and establishes goals and objectives for employees in job area, with direct impact on the immediate, or short-term results of the department, function, or office. 
• Typically, does not have budget accountability but may manage day-to-day elements of the budget and assist in compiling data to prepare annual budgets.  

Problem Solving and Decision Making: 

• Identifies, recommends, and implements ways to improve services and/or job area efficiency. 
• Responsible for input to and application of job area policies. 
• Problems and issues faced are general, task-oriented, and may be solved by referencing precedents and policies, and may require understanding of a broader set of jobs/issues. 

Communication and Influence: 

• Communicates within the job area to direct reports, and collaborates with other supervisors, and managers, mainly on job area-specific issues. 
• Requires the ability to communicate effectively with staff and leadership. 
• Explains policies, practices and procedures of the job area to others within the University. May work cross-functionally to justify and gain cooperation of other parties on practices, policies, and procedures. 

Leadership and Talent Management: 

• Supervises a team consisting of support employees. Coordinates, supervises, and reviews the work of team members. Guides and provides on-the-job training to direct reports. Monitors performance, coaches employees, and helps draft performance reviews with input from manager. May recommend hiring, firing, promotion, performance, and rewards decisions. 
• May also retain technical knowledge of day-to-day work of supervisee

Job Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

• Typically requires a University Degree or equivalent experience and a minimum of 3 years specific experience. 
• Requires basic management knowledge to lead such as work scheduling, prioritizing, coaching, and process execution. Generally, requires broad knowledge of the job area obtained through education and/or experience. 

Department Specific Minimum Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in an applied math (computational science, data science), social science, higher education administration/leadership, or business administration required.
• 5 years’ experience in the delivery of data to inform organizational decision making.
• Knowledgeable about data concepts such as relational databases, data mining, data engineering, data transformation, and automation.
• Demonstrated abilities in data visualization and data story telling.
• Requires basic management knowledge to lead, such as work scheduling, prioritization, coaching, and process execution. Generally, requires broad knowledge of the job area obtained through education and/or experience.
• Travel 10% or less of the year

Preferred Qualifications:

•  Demonstrated experience working with data in the higher education industry and familiarity with the standard KPIs used to measure student success.
• Work experience in business services.
• Experience with coding languages used to cleanse, transform, and engineer data (SQL, Python, R, Scala, etc.)
• Proficiency with descriptive, inferential, and predictive statistics.
• Familiarity with the automation of data products to focus analysis from a broad array of inputs and deliver insights

Physical Requirements:

• Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Must be able to lift up to 15 pounds at times.

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