Senior Research Analyst

Armed with strong analytic skills, intellectual curiosity, and a passion for research and writing, Research Analysts first strive to identify and develop the best solutions to operational business challenges, and then work to teach these solutions to our members. Most of an analyst’s time will be spent working on several aspects of a particular research deliverable.

Responsibilities Include

• Arrange and conduct interviews with senior executives, academics, and industry experts in search of best practices.
• Conduct significant amounts of secondary research and document those findings.
• Analyze business problems using root-cause analysis, hypothesis generation, survey design, benchmarking, and other qualitative and quantitative methods.
• Present interview and research findings to senior managers.
• Participate in the creation of research deliverables, including essays, executive summaries, case studies, essay graphics, presentations, and speeches.
• Assist with program and research agenda development.
• Support the team through other tasks such as scheduling interviews, coordinating meetings and teleconferences, and preparing research materials and summaries for the team.

The Ideal Candidate Will Possess:

• Experience conducting primary and secondary research
• Excellent oral communication skills and strong writing skills
• Ability to locate and procure sensitive data from original sources and senior executives
• High proficiency in distilling massive amounts of data into important relevance for senior managers
• Ability to analyze quantitative and/or qualitative data
• Strong project management and time management skills
• Ability to work either independently or in a team environment
• Exceptional performance in undergraduate academics or graduate studies
• 2-6 years postundergraduate experience, or related research experience

A Week in the Life of a Research Analyst 

There are a few constants that help define the analyst role: intellectual challenges, a variety of tasks, and unpredictability. 

Monday

I’m coordinating a teleconference for 25 of our most important members on how to align an organization around customer priorities, and I have a call this morning with a company whose strategy for solving this problem is different from any others I’ve seen so far and may be profiled in our teleconference.  I plan on spending my first few hours back in the office doing background research on the topic and preparing questions for the member.  If it is, then I may have just discovered a best practice that could completely change the way sales executives deal with this issue. Around 11:00, I get some bad news.  The member who was slated to co-host the teleconference next week has to take an emergency business trip to Mexico and can’t host the call.  We’ve been advertising this teleconference to the membership for months, so now I’ve got a problem.  After quick conversations with my Managing Director and the member’s assistant, I find out that all is not lost-if we can push the teleconference back a day or two the member will be back in the office and able to co-host the call. After working with the member’s assistant to arrange a new time for the teleconference, I get started on a very long "to do" list: first in the queue, I need to update the attending members on the date change.

Tuesday

I finally have the chance to dig through the stockpile of e-mails that accumulated during my vacation.  There are a few interesting requests from my colleagues: 1) a request from one of our short answer researchers for information on a topic I researched a few months ago for a roundtable discussion, 2) a question from one of our Account Managers on the best information to send to a member with questions about increasing sales-force productivity, and 3) a request from a member who's looking for some advice on the best way to implement a tactic I wrote that was profiled in our last study. With some free time in the afternoon, I start planning for the monthly content session that I lead for my program’s Sales Associates.  These information sessions are designed to help the SAs stay abreast of our newest research findings and to answer any questions they may have about the program’s past research. 

Wednesday

One of the Project Managers on the team and I have been tasked with writing the text and creating the graphics for some of the best practices we’re profiling in our upcoming research study.  The rough draft is already with our Managing Director, but some editing: my day is going to be entirely focused on editing and revamping some of the tactics in the presentation.

Thursday

I made it further than I thought I would yesterday, but I still need to put the finishing touches on one of the tactics.  Those edits and the e-mails in my inbox are going to be my morning.  This afternoon I have to catch a plane.  I’m joining one of our Content Deliverers for an on-site meeting at a manufacturing member’s home office.  On the plane, my time will be spent preparing for the meeting, reading through old interview notes, polishing my articulation of our newly announced 2005 agenda topics, and working through the script for the portion of this year’s study that we’ll be covering tomorrow.

Friday

Our meeting is a huge success.  We were not only able to help guide the direction of a major initiative at the company but also discussed a few issues that may make it into the agenda of our next big study.  It was a six-hour meeting, so with travel, it is my day.  The flight home gives me the opportunity to fill in the blanks in my notes from the day.