Position Summary:

Penn Foster helps learners gain the skills to start new careers. We’re seeking a passionate, strategic Director to lead our Advanced Analytics team and drive impact across the business. In this role, you’ll partner with Digital Marketing & Sales, Learning Experience (LX), Student Success, Product, Finance/RevOps, and Partnerships to improve acquisition, engagement, completion, and revenue quality through experimentation, advanced modeling, and data-informed decisioning. Success will be measured by revenue and new customer growth, marketing efficiency (LTV/CAC, ROAS), conversion rate lift across the funnel, learner engagement and completion gains, and quality-of-revenue outcomes (e.g., LTV, retention, contribution margin, payback).

What you can expect working with us:

• Mission-oriented culture, high-performing team and company, with opportunities for growth and development
• Partnership with a dedicated, experienced cross-functional team that emphasizes innovation and data-driven decision making
• Work that is interesting and ripe for analytics
• A fun place to work with smart people who like to win
• Interaction with executives on a regular basis

Essential Job Functions:

• Develop and manage a best-in-class analytics team

• Growth & Acquisition Analytics: Funnel diagnostics, media mix/attribution, incrementality testing, CRO, audience modeling, and forecasting.
• Learner Engagement & Outcomes: Risk and propensity models (activation, re-engagement, completion), intervention/coach attribution, pacing insights, and cohort health; A/B and MVT of nudges and product features.
• Revenue & Pricing Models: LTV frameworks, contribution margin, churn/retention drivers, pricing & discounts elasticity, program ROI, and forecast accuracy.
• Program & Partner Analytics: Externship/site capacity and utilization, match quality, post-externship outcomes, employer-aligned skills signals.
• Experimentation Platform: Design the testing roadmap; ensure high-quality causal inference (holdouts, CUPED/variants where appropriate), and clear readouts.
• Decision Intelligence & Dashboards: Executive and operator-friendly BI for acquisition, engagement, completion, and revenue; standardized KPIs and definitions.
• Data Science Leadership: Build and mentor a high-performance team (DS/ML, analytics engineering, BI); partner with data engineering to productionize models.

• Design and perform A/B and multivariate testing and identify campaign optimizations for both pre and post enroll learner journeys
• Develop and utilize attribution and other advanced models to find areas of opportunity across the funnel
• Create and refine reporting, data capture and insight generation to meet the evolving needs of the business
• Develop and implement segmentation and targeting methodologies and harness insights from customer research, consumer data, and surveys to improve customer acquisition

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities —

Must-Haves

• Experience: 12-15+ years leading analytics/data science in scaled digital businesses; proven impact across acquisition, engagement, and revenue quality.
• People leadership: Hired, developed, and managed managers; built high-performing, inclusive teams; clear operating rhythms and goals.
• Stakeholder influence: Partnered with executives and cross-functional leads (Marketing, Product/LX, Student Success, Finance/RevOps, Product) to shape strategy and deliver results.
• Analytical depth: Advanced exploratory and statistical analysis; causal inference (A/B, MVT, diff-in-diff, holdouts); forecasting; segmentation and propensity modeling.
• Experimentation: Designed and governed test roadmaps; ensured clean reads and decisioning; translated insights into launches with measurable lift.
• Engagement & outcomes: Built/used risk, activation, and completion models; designed nudges/interventions that improve learner outcomes.
• Data fluency: Strong SQL (required) and Excel; Python or R (strongly preferred) for modeling and automation; familiarity with dbt/orchestration helpful.
• Visualization & decision intelligence: Proficient in Tableau/Looker/Power BI; craft exec-ready dashboards and narratives that drive action.
• Attribution & media analytics: MMM/MTA literacy; media mix, channel incrementality, creative testing; tie spend to business impact.
• Familiarity with leveraging AI for generation of LLMs

Nice-to-Haves

• Business acumen: Mastery of LTV/CAC, ROAS, contribution margin, payback, and funnel conversion; ability to model revenue scenarios and trade-offs.
• Platform/tooling: GA4, GTM, Amplitude/Mixpanel, Optimizely/LaunchDarkly, Salesforce, Segment/CDP, Snowflake/BigQuery/Databricks, Airflow.
• Pricing & offers: Elasticity modeling, discount strategy, cohort LTV uplift analysis.
• Partner/externship analytics: Capacity/utilization, placement rate, time-to-placement, post-placement outcomes.
• MLOps: Basic familiarity with MLflow/model deployment, feature stores, and drift monitoring.
• Domain: Online education, workforce pathways, or services marketplaces.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent experience.
• Track record of owning and executing initiatives that materially improve business performance (show before/after metrics).
• Exceptional communication: simplify complex analysis, set clear recommendations, and drive decisions.

About Us: At Penn Foster Group, we are transforming online learning to help learners by bringing together Penn Foster, CareerStep, Ashworth College, James Madison High School, the New York Institute of Photography, the New York Institute of Art and Design, and other education platforms. Together, we create an accelerated path to greater economic mobility through real-world skills and knowledge that enable learners to achieve long-term success in the workplaces of the future. Our history dates back to 1890 when our founder, Thomas Foster, pioneered distance education by offering training by mail for coal miners to get the necessary skills for safer jobs. Today, with the partners who use our education and training programs, we continue that mission of providing accessible training and education for in-demand skills and are building a workforce that’s prepared for the future job market.

Equal Employment Opportunity: We strive toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Penn Foster Group by intentionally building diverse teams – in identities, lived experiences, and ideas to create a culture where people feel connected to each other and have a sense of belonging. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion because it is the foundation that enables us to achieve what we set out to do as an organization – from maximizing the number of learners who can reach their goals while giving them the kinds of experiences we want them to have, to becoming the type of company we want to work in.

What We Offer: We offer a robust benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, flexible spending, generous paid time off, sponsored volunteer opportunities, a 401K with a company match, and free access to our online programs.