Auraria Director of Strategy

Overview

Who We Are:

Department Information. Welcome to the Auraria Campus located in the Platte River Valley in downtown Denver. The Auraria Campus is the service provider for 38,000 students and approximately 5,000 faculty and staff working at and attending the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and the University of Colorado Denver. Auraria employees enjoy a benefits package including paid vacation, holidays, and sick leave, multiple medical, dental and vision options, discounted RTD Pass, Benefit Hub and retirement plan.

So, if you re interested in a great job working alongside great people, this may be the opportunity for which you ve been waiting for.

Description Of Job

Job Summary: The Director of Strategy leads AHEC’s efforts to modernize organizational performance tracking, data reporting, and strategic decision-making. This position is responsible for developing and maintaining the systems, tools, and infrastructure that support agency-wide analytics, service level agreements (SLA), key performance indicators (KPI) tracking, and strategic dashboards aligned with the Board-approved strategic plan. Working closely with the Chief of Staff, department directors, and institutional partners, this role transforms raw data into actionable insights that support strategic decision-making, operational execution, and continuous improvement.

The Director serves as AHEC’s in-house expert on data integration and visualization technologies and plays a key role in operationalizing strategy—helping define goals, track progress, manage timelines, and surface risks. The role builds automated data pipelines, dashboards, and reports that make performance metrics accessible, relevant, and useful across all divisions, and ensuring that analytics, dashboards, and reports are tailored to audience needs and decision-making contexts.

This position requires advanced technical and analytical skills—including proficiency in modern data analysis languages and tools (e.g., Power BI)—paired with strong strategic judgment and project management capability. The Director will design sustainable data governance practices, support departmental metric development, and cultivate a culture of evidence-based decision-making throughout the organization.

Please note:

This position is 100% in-office.

Essential Job Functions:

• Maintain and improve upon existing dashboards and tools to track strategic priorities set at the departmental level and associated with the Board approved Strategic Plan.
• Design, build, and maintain dashboards and visualizations tied to KPIs outlined in AHEC-wide Service Level Agreements.
• Translate qualitative progress and quantitative KPIs into concise, actionable insights for executives, the CEO, and the Auraria Board of Directors.
• Develop efficient, automated data workflows (Power BI, Tableau, SWL, Python, R, or equivalent) to streamline reporting.
• Establish data collection and validation processes that support strategic storytelling, transparency, and accountability.
• Establish a sustainable system for ongoing data collection, storage, and validation in collaboration with IT, Finance, and departmental data owners.

• Lead agency-wide processes for developing, aligning, and assessing SMART goals at the departmental and strategic-initiatives levels.
• Facilitate strategic planning cycles, including stakeholder workshops, needs assessments, and mid-cycle refinements.
• Synthesize departmental submissions into cohesive organizational priorities and themes for executive decision-making.
• Develop frameworks to measure progress toward Board-approved strategic objectives, including baselines, milestones, and desired outcomes.
• Identify strategic risks, dependencies, and opportunities across divisions and provide recommendations to leadership.
• Prepare narrative briefings, recommendations, and synthesize reports that summarize trends, resource implications, and performance gaps.
• Partner with the Chief of Staff to prepare data-driven briefings and board materials that communicate progress toward…