Are you looking for more than just a job and do you want to make a difference? If so, then join the National Student Clearinghouse talent community and discover your impact today!

We are a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization and the leading provider of educational reporting, data exchange, verification, and research services. Serving the education, workforce and learner communities has been at the heart of our mission for over 30 years. Our work — performed in a trusted, secure, and private environment — provides numerous time- and cost-saving benefits to students, schools, administrators, and requestors. Education leaders rely on the Clearinghouse’s unique national student data resources to better understand student pathways and outcomes in order to help students succeed, and our research better informs practitioners and policymakers about student educational pathways and enables informed decision making.

About the Role:

The Specialist III, Business Analysis (a.k.a. Business Analyst III) is a crucial role in fostering the strategic partnership between business and technology. The incumbent is responsible for developing requirements and related business rules for existing and new software solutions in the market. This position is a subject matter expert for one or more services and works closely with business partners and other subject matter experts in the definition, development, testing, training, implementation, and support of functional requirements. Our solution delivery follows the Agile SCRUM process.

The Specialist III provides cross organizational support, as needed. Additionally, the analyst runs multiple projects at once, and uses creative and innovative methods for analysis, design, documentation, and tool selection. The ideal incumbent understands and documents integration points and dependencies with other systems and will utilize simple queries to check the status of a service line.

Currently, this is a remote-first position, and this position may be required to periodically work on-site at our office and the frequency would depend on the department/division's requirements. Therefore, candidates must either reside within a reasonable distance to commute to our office or be willing to travel to our office in Herndon, when required.

How You Contribute:

• Demonstrate NSC’s competencies, which align with our corporate values. Manager will provide more detail to candidates as needed.
  • Core Competencies include: Customer Focus, Optimizes Work Processes, Collaborates, Communicates Effectively, and Be Open and Authentic.

Customer Focus:

• Work closely with the Business Owner/Product Manager to understand the needs of the market/industry and define the scope for projects.
• Lead efforts to solicit, review, document, and refine requirements via interviews, workshops, group meetings, and/or existing systems documentation or procedures.
• Read and write SQL code and perform complex data analysis tasks.
• Within Customer Focus, this competency includes data literacy skills to build customer-centric solutions. This role must understand the business purpose of data, including how it is being used for a particular service and across the enterprise, how data is modeled, defined, validated, captured, cleansed, stored, reported, visualized and accessed. This role will leverage that data knowledge to write business requirements, process flows, and user stories that accurately reflect enterprise data and provide additional data insights for education and business stakeholders.

Optimizes Work Processes:

• Contribute to the successful on-time, within-budget and in-scope delivery of business initiatives.
• Provide LOEs and plans for Business Analyst activities.
• Define user personas and develop user stories, use cases with actors and interactions, and UML models, wireframes, sequence diagrams, and data flow diagrams.
• Produce “As Is” and “To Be” process flow diagrams.
• Derive business requirements from use cases in an agile environment.
• Create, revise, validate, and maintain business flow maps, business requirements, business rules, user stories, user flows, test plans and acceptance tests.
• Define conceptual technical and/or non-functional requirement documents to translate business requirements into technical information that developers can use.
• Document and maintain traceability of requirements.
• Be able to analyze the impact of new business requirements/user stories on the current application from both a business and technical perspective.
• Adapt to changing priorities and procedures.

Collaborates:

• Work with business owners to drive consensus across multiple stakeholders.
• Work with users and QA, assist with the development of test cases based on documented requirements and perform user testing during sprints and as part of formal testing activities.
• Collaborate with other business analysts to identify all cross-system interfaces, dependencies and requirements.

Communicates Effectively:

• Accurately represent the needs of the business owner(s) to software IT development teams and vice versa.
• Participate in various agile ceremonies with both technology and business partners to facilitate the understanding, clarification, and implementation of requirements in an Agile development environment.
• Accountable for presenting timely, accurate project and product information to all levels of stakeholders at NSC including but not limited to Executives, Senior Managers, the IT Division, and applicable operational staff.
• Understand and effectively communicate to project teams and business owners all the data elements utilized by the service.

Be Open and Authentic:

• Create and foster positive and open communication channels between external and internal stakeholders, including customers, Clearinghouse leadership, business and product owners, scrum teams, IT, CDO, and with other business analysts.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, teamwork, innovation, and service excellence at the Clearinghouse and help resolve any product or project issues.

Position may be required to perform other duties as required. These essential functions are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the job. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform these essential functions.

What You Bring to the Table:

• Bachelor’s degree in IT, business, or related field, or a combination of education and experience, including through military service will also be considered.
• 8 years of total years of professional experience with 3-5 years of directly related experience in soliciting and defining requirements for mission critical business applications across technology, business and finance, or knowledge of Clearinghouse services and applications typically gained by at least 2 years of Clearinghouse work experience.
• Experience in analyzing data for composing targeted and concise reports.
• Experience with embedding quality controls in work processes to assure uninterrupted operation.
• Ability to solicit, define and write business requirements from research, customers, market and internal feedback into user stories that have to become part of a solution.
• Demonstrated proficiency:
  • Working with Agile principles and processes and Merit-based feature/product evaluation driving decision making.
  • Communicating effectively and confidently with internal stakeholders from all levels of the organization, and external stakeholders to represent the product, department, and company.
  • Working with Microsoft Office Suite and other collaboration tools.
• Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication and presentation skills.
• Demonstrates the Clearinghouse’s core competencies: customer focus, optimizes work processes, communicates effectively, collaborates, and is open and authentic.
• Must live within a commutable distance to Herndon, VA or in one of the Clearinghouse's approved States for hiring purposes. Refer to our HR Policies Page, located on our Careers site at https://www.studentclearinghouse.org/careers/human-resource-policies/, for more details.
• Must be at least 18 years old.

Additional Desired Requirements:

• Knowledge of Clearinghouse services and applications.
• Experience with software development management tools (Rally, Jira, Confluence).
• Certification: Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), or an equivalent certification, strongly preferred.

Physical Demands:

• Use of a computer for 8 or more hours a day.
• Use of a copy machine and telephone.
• Frequently required to sit for 7 or more hours per day in close proximity to others in an open office environment.
• Occasionally required to use hands and fingers to operate, handle, and reach.
• Vision abilities include close vision and the ability to adjust focus.
• Travel via car, train, and airplane when needed.

Benefits and Related Information

The National Student Clearinghouse provides a robust benefit program designed to help meet the needs of each employee and their family, both now and in the future. We offer comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance, as well as life and disability insurance benefits, for employees and their qualified dependents. Health care, dependent care, and limited purpose flexible spending accounts, as well as a health savings account, are options available for employees to set aside pre-taxed dollars for certain qualifying expenses. We offer a very generous 401k matching contribution program with the opportunity to defer pre-tax and Roth contributions, as well as catch-up contributions for those who are eligible! We are proud to offer a competitive paid leave program consisting of vacation, sick, and personal time, as well as paid holidays, up to 3 weeks of paid parental leave during a 12-month period, and up to 5 days of paid military leave per calendar year. Vacation time will accrue based on length of service, and new full-time hires can accrue up to 13 days of vacation and up to 10 days of sick time per year. On an annual basis, new employees may use up to 32 hours of accrued sick time as personal time. Additionally, the Clearinghouse observes at least 11 paid holidays per year.

Another perk is that employees have the option to get reimbursed for basic wholesale company and roadside assistance memberships (e.g., Costco and AAA) and to request a buy back on portions of unused accrued vacation based on tenure and certain other qualifications. Employees can further their education and professional development by using our Employee Education Assistance Program, which establishes reimbursement for qualified education expenses upon successful completion of the program, and leveraging the enterprise-wide LinkedIn Learning subscription. There are additional employee benefits too, including but not limited to, mental health and well-being benefits. To find out more, please request a copy of our Benefits at a Glance!

Additionally, we reasonably believe that the salary range for this position is between $100,000 and $115,000.

This job announcement was posted to the National Student Clearinghouse’s Careers site at www.studentclearinghouse.org/careers on 3/28/2025 and the online application period will be open for at least 3 days. A completed online application is required to be considered for this opportunity.

Internal Candidates: If you feel that you qualify and meet the requirements of the job, we highly encourage you to apply and focus on preparing for the application process. Once the final candidates are selected, they can anticipate a review of the compensation prior to any offer made.

Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities: The National Student Clearinghouse is proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, alienage or national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, disability or handicap, sex, marital status, veteran status (or known to have a spousal, family, business, social or other relationship or association with a protected veteran), sexual orientation, genetic information, arrest record, natural hairstyle, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws. Our management team is dedicated to this policy with respect to recruitment, hiring, placement, promotion, transfer, training, compensation, benefits, employee activities and general treatment during employment.

Pay Transparency Notice: The National Student Clearinghouse is a federal contractor that abides by all applicable equal opportunity laws and regulations. Under these laws, companies doing business with the federal government must provide applicants and employees with certain policies, including the following information. The contractor will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor’s legal duty to furnish information. 41 CFR 60-1.35(c)