Your Impact:

Handshake is hiring a Research Analyst reporting to the Senior Researcher, on Handshake’s Education team. This position will play a critical role in bringing Handshake’s unique educational product data and user research to life for the 1000+ 4-year universities, 100+ community colleges, and assorted bootcamps and corporate credentialing partners on our platform—along with the wider ecosystem of higher education. 

You’ll surface insights from surveys, product data, and the market to transform how higher education thinks about the impact of career education and Handshake on early career opportunity and the future of work. We’re seeking someone with the skills to identify and uncover trends occurring in the early talent space, the communication abilities and domain knowledge to translate these trends to data and non-data users alike, and the forward-thinking mindset to create sustainable systems and processes to ensure that our work will be reproducible in the future and throughout the organization.

Your Role

• Partner with the Senior Researcher to tell Handshake’s story through product and user data in harmony with the editorial, marketing, and product roadmaps established within the Education business.
• Own the management of data and research workflows for regular Education-focused thought leadership and insights in partnership with the Education Operations and Product team.
• Create and maintain data documentation resources (dictionaries, FAQs, resource guides) for internal Handshake stakeholders.
• Work with the corporate data team to ensure timely and accurate updates of critical external datasets. 
• Support the creation of reproducible insights reports for Education thought leadership content (in and out of product), white papers, benchmark reports, data for media interviews, and customer-facing programming and reports.
• Develop strong collaborative working relationships with all internal stakeholders (Education team leadership, as well as the marketing, product, and success teams), including development of internal communications/processes around insight reports.
• Proactively seek opportunities to improve and evolve insight analysis, output, and engagement.

Your Experience:

• 3+ years of experience researching higher education systems (outcomes, public policy), labor trends, and/or early talent pipeline. 
• Experience using big data analytics languages/software to access data warehouses (e.g., SQL, Looker).
• Familiarity with all stages of a collaborative data research pipeline, including research design, data collection, cleaning, analysis, visualization, and reporting. 
• Passion for complex problems that combine qualitative and quantitative factors.
• Open-mindedness, curiosity, capacity to understand and navigate a bureaucratic and complex customer base in:
• Higher education
• Government
• Healthcare
• Other industries or groups that are deeply interconnected
• Comfortable presenting ideas, analysis, and recommendations to stakeholders internally and externally. 
• Demonstrated excellence in analytical thinking, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, delegation, planning, organization, and judgment

Bonus Areas of Expertise: 

• Experience with popular data science and statistical software R, Python, or similar tools.
• Familiarity with federal and state higher education and workforce datasets (e.g., IPEDS, BLS, College Scorecard).
• Experience with survey tool development and survey collection software (e.g., Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey)