(Hybrid) Institutional Research & Analytics Specialist - Office of Data Analytics

West Virginia University•West Virginia, WV

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Office of Data Analytics within Institutional Research at West Virginia University seeks an Institutional Research & Analytics Specialist to complete required reporting and provide analytical support to institutional officers on admissions, enrollment, registration, graduates, personnel, financial aid, and other productivity measures. The position reports to the Assistant Director of Institutional Research. The successful candidate is detail-oriented, resourceful, and able to work collaboratively and independently, with strong communication and organizational skills. The specialist extracts, combines, transforms, validates, and analyzes data from institutional systems and external sources. The role uses SAS, SQL, Tableau, and other data visualization tools to support recurring and ad hoc workflows, reporting, dashboards, institutional research, and decision-making. It also contributes to data quality, documentation, data governance, and consistent institutional definitions and processes. The position supports internal and external reporting, benchmarking, accreditation, grants, assessment, regulatory submissions, and analytical requests from university units. It translates institutional questions into appropriate analytical approaches and communicates findings to technical and nontechnical audiences.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in social science, business, information science, computer science, or another related field.
At least two years of experience in institutional research, data analytics, assessment, program evaluation, or a related field.
At least two years of experience validating and analyzing complex datasets to support organizational decision-making.
At least two years of experience using data visualization tools such as Tableau or Power BI.
At least two years of experience programming or conducting analysis using SQL, SAS, R, SPSS, STATA, or other statistical software.
Exceptional time-management skills, including the ability to adapt to shifting priorities while managing multiple projects and deadlines.
Ability to use descriptive and inferential statistics, trend analysis, forecasting, benchmarking, cohort analysis, and other tools to interpret data.
Ability to analyze enrollment, retention, graduation, and student-success data to inform decision-making.
Ability to write queries, join and clean datasets, understand relational databases, and extract information from student information systems and data warehouses using SAS and SQL.
Ability to build dashboards and reports with Tableau.
Ability to translate complete datasets into concise findings for administrators, faculty, committees, and other nontechnical audiences.
Equivalent combinations of related education and experience will be considered.
All qualifications must be met by the time of employment.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree.

Responsibilities

Extract, combine, transform, and validate data from institutional systems and external sources.
Use SAS, SQL, and data visualization tools to collect and analyze data and prepare or present results.
Evaluate institutional datasets, including their structure, grain, definitions, timing, and appropriate use.
Identify and address duplicate records, one-to-many relationships, missing data, cohort definitions, changing populations, inconsistent definitions, and longitudinal data issues.
Develop validation and reconciliation procedures and investigate unexpected results.
Document analytical definitions, assumptions, methodologies, and business rules.
Contribute to institutional data governance, data definitions, and data consistency and accessibility improvements.
Write and maintain SAS DATA step, PROC SQL, and other SAS programs for recurring and ad hoc analytical workflows.
Use SQL to retrieve, integrate, and analyze information from relational and cloud-based institutional data environments.
Develop efficient, repeatable, documented analytical workflows and assist in maintaining reusable datasets and analytical data structures.
Develop and maintain Tableau dashboards and other visual analytical products.
Design visualizations around institutional questions and decisions, and evaluate dashboards and reports for accuracy, usability, performance, and interpretability.
Help establish consistent visualization, documentation, and reporting standards.
Support recurring institutional research, internal and external reporting, benchmarking, and data requests.
Provide official institutional data to colleges and academic and administrative units for accreditation reports, grant writing, and assessment activities.
Assist with IPEDS, Common Data Set, West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission reporting, accreditation, surveys, rankings, and other institutional submissions.
Collaborate with university offices to complete official reporting.
Develop standardized datasets and processes that reduce duplication between compliance reporting and analytical work.
Analyze institutional data to support academic, enrollment, student-success, operational, and strategic decision-making.
Translate broad or ambiguous questions into measurable analytical questions and appropriate approaches.
Conduct descriptive, comparative, longitudinal, cohort, trend, and exploratory analyses across institutional populations and programs.
Perform other duties as assigned.