At Northwestern Mutual, we are strong, innovative and growing. We invest in our people. We care and make a positive difference.
As a Business Strategy Consultant, you will work with leadership and teams across technology and business departments to provide your expertise in strategy development and delivery, and analytical research. You will help develop and execute robust strategic plans, recommendations, and impact assessments.
You will provide new and evolve existing practice management tools, processes and solutions using use data and analytics to enhance business decision-making. Partner with business and engineering teams to identify, develop, and implement operational and technical solutions. Utilize analytical tools and methodologies that help the organization identify and achieve key strategic areas of focus.
Primary Duties & Responsibilities:

• Serve as a deep domain specialist and provide consultation on analytical research and strategy development.
• Establish and maintain standards for consulting and training materials that technology owners and their teams will adopt for consistency and cohesiveness.
• Identifying, understanding and detailing the current state, opportunities for improvement and future state business processes. Includes problem definition, cost benefit analysis, options analysis and planning, prioritizing and coordinating future efforts. Scope of efforts will cross departments and/or business functions.
• Eliciting, analyzing, representing and validating complex business needs at the appropriate level of detail to create requirements. Identifies options and negotiates to achieve consensus.
• Provide consultation for the most complex issues. Negotiates and communicates with business clients, stakeholders and leadership to develop positive relationships to ensure objectives are addressed and expectations are managed.
• Maintain an overall view of roadmap/portfolio and outcomes.
• Develop lightweight, operational business and/or reporting solutions.
• Facilitate team stand-ups, planning, prioritizing, and coordination of future efforts.
• Provides quantitative and qualitative data analysis and reporting of patterns, insights, and trends in order to drive business decisions.
• Access, gather, and analyze data from multiple internal and external sources to drive insights into business problems, decisions, and performance. Builds and produces forecasts, reports, dashboards, etc. to tell a story.
• Identify areas of improvement into current operations, and display root cause analysis of problems.
• Builds recommendations and strategic/tactical plans based on business data and market knowledge. Provide data-driven forecasts that impact the business (costs, risks, etc.).
• Translates detailed data into business-appropriate communication and recommendations.
• Delivers results, insights and recommendations (written, verbal, presentations, etc.) to business audience to support business decisions.
• Participates in cross-functional teams to address business issues.
• Applies new perspectives, creative problem solving, and inter-departmental connections to drive departmental strategy.
• Creates and is accountable for high quality, value driven work that drives business outcomes; places the user in the center of decision making; and collaborates with team for speed, agility and innovation in work.
• Shown confidence and willingness to challenge intuition and status quo based on fact-based insights

Bring your best! What the role requires:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, MIS, Business, Statistics, or related field, or significant experience beyond the minimum required.
• Minimum of 7 years combined experience in business consulting, application development, research and data analysis, and application of research techniques that support business outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver results and recommendations in written, verbal and presentation form at an appropriate level for a variety of technical and business audiences.
• Proven excellence in problem solving, research, quantitative analysis and analytical working techniques.
• Demonstrated ability to gather information systematically; consider a broad range of issues or factors; grasp complexities and perceive relationships among problems or issues; use accurate logic in analysis.
• Preferred: Expertise in analytical tools such as SQL, MS Excel, R or other tools. Experience in visualization tooling like PowerBI or Tableau.
• Ability to generate new insights and go beyond the status quo; recognize the need for new or modified approaches.
• Knowledgeable in current policies, practices, and ability to anticipate future trends affecting the business from a systems and process perspective.
• Proven track record to negotiate skillfully in difficult situations to include settling differences.
• Excellent communication skills focused on facilitation of and presentation in meetings; ability to deliver informative, well-organized documentation and presentations and ability to effectively communicate in difficult and sensitive situations.

Our Benefits:

• We offer highly competitive compensation, including annual bonus opportunities
• Medical/Dental/Vision plans, 401K plan, pension program
• We provide tuition reimbursement, commuter plans, and paid time off
• We provide extensive Professional Training Opportunities
• We offer an excellent Work/Life Balance
• Hackathons/Dedication to Innovation

#Li-post
This job is not covered by the existing Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Required Certifications:
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We are an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age or status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.