Research Analyst

Job purpose: 

UCAS’ insight team generates insight for the business, the wider HE sector, and commercial clients, spanning the UK Higher education sector and student trends across both charity and commercial projects. 

This exciting and varied role will use strong quantitative and qualitative insight techniques to produce high-quality outputs for internal and external stakeholders. With strong experience in survey design and delivery, as well as qualitative moderation/ analysis experience, you will gather valuable, timely insight by offering expert question writing to design question sets and discussion guides, launching surveys and carrying out insight projects, analysing response data, and presenting findings. 

Key Accountabilities: 

To play a key role in the smooth and efficient running of UCAS’ insight services 

Liaise with internal and external stakeholders to design surveys to meet research objectives, advising on the most appropriate ways of obtaining the desired insights for a variety of purposes, including quick turnaround polling, customer feedback or marketing evaluation 

Develop and deliver surveys best practice, ensuring this is followed within projects delivered, and offer advice and guidance to others where needed 

Be responsible for the full operational surveys and insight launch processes, building surveys in survey software and project managing operational insight projects 

Design discussion guides, carrying out focus group or interview moderation, and analyse findings to answer research and business objectives 

Analysing results to draw out the story, delivering clear and accurate insights, and producing client-ready outputs 

Disseminating insight to all relevant parties, including giving presentations to senior colleagues and clients where required 

To derive new and valuable insights from data and communicate these effectively to decision makers 

Skills, qualifications, and experience: 

Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in a relevant field, such as social science, numerate discipline, or marketing/ business. A market research society qualification, or similar is desirable.  

Extensive experience and working knowledge of survey design to deliver against client objectives 

Experience of working with survey software such as Qualtrics to deliver end to end projects; from setting up surveys and producing results outputs  

Experience of conducting qualitative research- such as depth interviews, comment scanning/coding or focus groups 

A working understanding of the data manipulation and interpretations challenges specific to working with surveys data 

Demonstrable business experience of data interpretation, identifying trends and themes, and drawing conclusions from data, to answer commercial questions 

Ability to deliver insights and recommendations clearly and confidently as well as explain technical concepts, to both technical and non-technical audiences 

Experience of working with, and presenting to, external clients 

Able to manage workload, and manage expectations of key stakeholders 

An ‘analytic mind set’ – including strong professional judgement in choosing analytic approaches that give efficiently-produced, high quality, actionable results