At Northern Trust, data drives all of our decision-making and HR is no exception. The HR Workforce Analytics team pioneers Northern Trust's approach to talent strategy and organizational growth. As a member of the team, this position will play an important role in helping leverage vast troves of data to generate insights and inform decisioning-making for internal clients across the globe.
Working as an Associate Consultant for Data Management, you will be responsible for ensuring day-to-day reliability and consistency of the HR's data environment. This role enforces data governance routines and controls, ensures the quality and consistency of formulas/definitions across reports, supports BAU operations for data products (dashboards, reports, data marts, semantic models), and serves as a second line of support for user inquiries and incident resolution for data products and HR programs owned by Workforce Analytics. The ideal candidate blends strong data management fundamentals with pragmatic operations discipline and great stakeholder communication.
Key Responsibilities:
BAU Support for Data Products
- Serve as the second point of contact for user inquiries about data products, fields, measures, and report usage.
- Manage the support queue (tickets/requests), ensure SLA adherence, and provide clear, non-technical explanations.
- Create and maintain user-facing documentation: how-to guides, data dictionaries, FAQs, and release notes.
- Deliver office hours, training sessions, or quick-start videos to promote self-service analytics and data literacy.
- Monitor ETL/ELT pipelines, data refreshes, and scheduled report jobs; triage and resolve incidents or escalate per runbook.
- Investigate data anomalies, reconcile discrepancies, and document root cause and prevention action items.
- Perform minor fixes/enhancements (e.g., measure updates, parameter/config changes, small model optimizations) following SDLC and change procedures.
- Collaborate with Data Engineering/BI teams on performance tuning, reliability improvements, and capacity planning.
Data Governance & Controls
- Execute and continuously improve data governance routines (e.g., data quality checks, data lineage updates, access reviews, metadata stewardship, retention/archiving).
- Maintain and enforce business definitions and calculation standards across dashboards, KPIs, and reports; steward the business glossary and data catalog entries.
- Run periodic data quality monitoring (completeness, accuracy, timeliness, conformity, uniqueness) and coordinate issue remediation with owners.
- Support policy compliance (data privacy, security classification, separation of duties) and contribute to audit readiness with evidence/artifacts.
- Participate in change control for data products (including versioning, release notes, and regression validation).
Consistency of Formulas & Definitions
- Own standard KPI/metric definitions, measures, and business rules; drive alignment with business stakeholders.
- Implement automated and/or procedural checks that prevent drift or duplication of metrics across reporting artifacts.
- Review new report requests for alignment with canonical models and glossary terms before approval.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering, Business Analytics, or related fieldor equivalent experience.
- 2+ years of experience in data operations, BI/analytics, or data governance.
- Hands-on with at least one BI platform (e.g., Power BI, Tableau, Looker) and SQL (intermediate)
- Understanding of data quality dimensions and controls; experience designing/operating DQ checks.
- Strong documentation, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-Haves)
- Familiarity with data governance practices (data cataloging, glossary management, metadata, lineage) and at least one tool (e.g., Microsoft Purview, Collibra, Alation).
- Experience with Microsoft stack (Power BI, Azure Synapse, Fabric, ADF, Purview) or your org's core stack.
- Exposure to ITSM tools (ServiceNow, JIRA) and support workflows (SLA, priority, escalation).
- Familiarity with privacy/security frameworks (e.g., role-based access control, data classification, GDPR-like controls).
- Scripting for automation (PowerShell, Python) and experience with CI/CD for BI artifacts.
