I am a program analyst for Social Security's Office of Electronic Services. The Office of Electronic Services encourages the Social Security Administration's customers to use online services. To that end, I do a lot of measurement of how well people like our services and how easy they find it to navigate our website. I take customer satisfaction survey information, customer behavior information, which shows how they actually use the website, and combine it traditional management information, mix it all together and identify what needs to be changed in order to help people be more successful.

EDUCATION | Bachelor's and Master's in History from the University of Missouri.

HOW TO GET STARTED | I believe in a liberal arts education that outfits you to do practically anything. A liberal arts education gives you flexibility and an ability to adapt to various circumstances. Also, I recommend the online course from British Columbia in web analysis. There are professional organizations in web analysis that sponsor training and certification.

MUST HAVE TRAITS | Analytical skills. Patience. A background in statistics. Also, you need to know about your business and the services it provides.

how I got started | I started working for Social Security right after grad school. Six years ago, I was handed the assignment to measure the success of the Social Security Website.

why this job?| It's interesting. I enjoy learning about what our customers think. I particularly enjoy trying to figure out what they mean by what they tell us. I've learned you don't improve by simply patting yourself on the back for doing a good job, but by responding to problems and working through them.

why I love this job!| It's like a treasure hunt, finding out what customers are telling us we need to do to improve their experience and combining that data with what we observe about how customers use our site, and adding all that to the hard data facts of how they are using the website, then selling proposed improvements to other people based on the data. If we can help our customers access the information they need by spending 15 minutes online instead of having to wait two weeks for an appointment and spending an hour or so at the office, that's a good thing for everybody.

my typical day| I review the customer satisfaction surveys that we received overnight. I compare yesterday's score with last month's and the previous year's to see how we're improving. I take deeper dives into the data to develop conclusions from the responses we've received. I go to two or three meetings, usually.

what they are | Making sense of these three different strands of data and trying to make conclusions about what they mean.

all about growth | There's a lot of room for growth. The federal government is behind the private sector in doing this kind of work. Government agencies don't sell things, they don't make money, so we haven't focused on making our web sites more effective in helping visitors accomplish their tasks. So there is definitely room for more people to do this type of work: all government agencies would benefit from it.

my website| http://www.socialsecurity.gov/