Data Strategist

DATA STRATEGIST

HAROLD WASHINGTON COLLEGE

CITY COLLEGES OF CHICAGO

City Colleges of Chicago’s vision is to be recognized as the city’s most accessible higher education engine of socioeconomic mobility and racial equity – empowering all Chicagoans to take part in building a stronger and more just city.  The community college system’s more than 3,500 faculty and staff serve more than 60,000 students annually at seven colleges and five satellite sites.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE

Reporting to an assigned administrator, the Data Strategist plays a significant role in institutionalizing a continuous improvement and performance-based culture at City Colleges of Chicago, and ensuring fact-based accountability at program, employee and system-levels.

The position provides strategic data analysis, monitoring metrics from various data sources, developing and facilitating the tracking of leading performance indicators, and supporting the college in the strategic use of data.  Performs related duties as required.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES

• Provide data and analytic support: Conduct strategic data analysis, identify insights and implications from institutional data and make strategic recommendations to executive and senior staff. Develop data displays that clearly communicate complex analyses to multiple audiences, including executive and senior staff.
• Facilitate performance metric monitoring: Monitor college strategic metrics through performance dialog forums. Work with staff at different levels of the organization to create metrics, set goals and conduct analyses; use operational data in real time to develop and execute action plans focused on improving institutional practices, policies, procedures and ultimately student success. Build structures, tools and routines to institutionalize a data-driven culture of student success.
• Work cross-functionally across the organization:  Maintain cross-functional visibility across all departments to help push strategic initiatives forward and surface critical issues. Provide ongoing oversight and support to management and decision making to ensure that measures are being used to effectively manage operations and effect institutional change.
• Develop and refine institutional data capacity through data use: Support development of college-wide data collection, analysis and dissemination of policies and practices; train researchers and staff to make meaningful data connections
• Develop and refine institutional data capacity through knowledge sharing: facilitate regular reviews with college team; synthesize and share key insights across projects. Develop, maintain and train teams on infrastructure (such as SharePoint) to support knowledge management.
• Develop and refine institutional data capacity through capacity building:  Help staff use data in real-time, lead data capacity building trainings on data literacy. Support the development of tools, templates, and reports that address the needs of building data capacity across the college. Provide support to the implementation, maintenance, and adoption of CCC business intelligence tools. 
• Conduct strategic data analyses, identify insights and implications from institutional data, and make recommendations for action. Analyses range from basic summary statistics to more complex modeling. 
• Develop visualizations and dashboards in PowerPoint, Excel and Tableau that clearly communicate complex analyses to multiple audiences.  
• Provide reports to stakeholders throughout the college to monitor progress toward goals established in strategic plan. 
• Respond to ad hoc data requests from college staff and external stakeholders regarding student and college performance.
• Provide data validation for external compliance reporting and external projects as needed. 
• Assist faculty and staff in using CCC’s business intelligence tools, dashboards and reports. 
• Discuss observations of college data with internal and external stakeholders. 
• Perform related duties as required. 

REPORTING RELATIONSHIPS

Reports To                       Assigned Administrator

Direct Supervision          None

QUALIFICATIONS

·     A Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university in a quantitative discipline such as statistics, business, mathematics, economics public policy; or a related field of study.

·       Master’s degree is highly preferred.

·       Three years of relevant experience in research or data analysis, with demonstrated experience in quantitative and qualitative research methods and statistics

·       A combination of education and experience may be taken into consideration based on the applicant’s credentials provided the minimum degree requirement is met

·       High level of proficiency in the use of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

·       Moderate to high level of proficiency with SQL programming or data querying

·       Experience with Power BI, Tableau, or other data visualization tools preferred

·       Experience with statistical analysis software (e.g., SAS, R, STATA) highly desirable

·       Experience in quantitative statistical analysis highly desirable

·       Experience using SQL Server a plus

We Offer: Excellent health benefits at a low cost; Investment plans 403(b) & 457(b); SURS Retirement Plan; Generous vacation, holidays, personal and sick days; Tuition Reimbursement. For a more detailed overview of benefits, please visit our benefits page.

The intent of this job description is to provide a general description of the duties and responsibilities of this position.  It is not intended to be an exhaustive set of the duties and responsibilities, nor all of the necessary qualifications to perform the work.

Chicago residency is required for all full-time employees within 6 months of hire.
We are an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.
Thank you for your interest in CCC!

(Job Description created September 23, 2013; revised July 2014, October 2020, August 2024)