Vanguard

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Employment Opportunities for PhD Candidates at Vanguard

Vanguard, one of the world’s largest asset management firms, offers employment opportunities for PhD candidates in economics and finance in a number of specialty areas. This document provides an overview of Vanguard’s program for interested candidates as well as for faculty advisers.

If you have a background in behavioral science and want to work in a fast-paced environment solving real client and business issues than this is the place for you. We are looking for Behavioral Scientists to join our applied behavioral science team. As an enterprise-wide consultant we engage in the most important problems across the company. We bring consultative skills, deep behavioral knowledge, and a rigorous experimental approach to find and prove behavioral interventions that matter.

Responsibilities:
•Delivers business value by applying behavioral science principles to address critical business and client needs.
•Partners with business and other scientists to define, design, and deliver behavioral science projects.
•Works closely with other scientists to own initiatives, identifying, and defining applicable behavioral theories and developing deliverables for business stakeholders.
•Deliverables may include (but not limited to) reviews of current business content, thought leadership and guides, coaching, and full life-cycle interventions from problem definition, experimentation, and presenting recommendations.

Qualifications
•Advanced degree in related discipline; judgement and decision making, marketing, economics, applied psychology (PhD strongly preferred)
•Expert understanding of behavioral science principles and ability to apply to real-world problems
•Ability to design and analyze complex lab and field experiments, strong statistical knowledge
•Strong communication, able to present findings and thought leadership in clear and concise manner.
•Able to clearly present and explain technical issues to a non-technical audience
•Able and willing to work directly with business partners to define their needs in terms of behavioral science projects
•Deep experience with qualitative and qualitative methods.
•Able to organize and manage work, deal with competing priorities
•5+ years of experience (included post-undergraduate work)


About Vanguard


Vanguard is the largest mutual fund company in the U.S., and one of the largest asset managers in the world. Today, Vanguard manages more than US $7 trillion in global assets for more than 30 million individual and institutional investors, offering low-cost index and actively managed mutual funds as well as a growing array of ETFs. Our business operations are located principally in the U.S., although our presence is expanding rapidly in Australia, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. There are more than 17,000 Vanguard “crewmembers” who serve clients from 18 office locations worldwide. Vanguard aspires to be both the best place to invest and the best place to work. We foster a culture with a strong ethical foundation—with a focus on “doing the right thing” for clients. We attract employees who embrace this mindset. We also strive to attract employees who seek to develop a long-term career at Vanguard.

Working as a Researcher at Vanguard

Day-to-day work life. Day to day, the work of a researcher at Vanguard is centered on current research projects, including collaboration with members of their immediate workgroup as well as with others across the organization. Depending on the role, researchers are also called upon to speak either externally with clients, the media, industry groups, or policymakers, or internally with fellow crewmembers. Researchers may also serve as subject matter experts to business leaders and to business project teams throughout the organization. We value research expertise, as well as the ability to speak cogently and clearly about one’s area of specialization and interest.

Proprietary research v. academic collaboration. Much of the research work undertaken at Vanguard is proprietary in nature. Vanguard research is either applied to the development of proprietary investment strategies or published and disseminated to a range of external parties, which may include, depending on the topic, individual investors, institutional clients, the consulting community, the media and policymakers. It is our goal to deepen the quality of insights conveyed to the marketplace through our proprietary research.

At the same time, there are also opportunities for research professionals to pursue collaborations with academic partners in their area of professional interest. Vanguard encourages its professional staff to establish a national or global reputation in their field of expertise. While not a job requirement, external research collaborations can help advance this objective.

Location. In the U.S., PhD-level roles are located at Vanguard’s corporate headquarters in Malvern, Pennsylvania. Malvern is located in Chester County, approximately 25 miles west of the city of Philadelphia. The area is known for its high quality of life and its cultural amenities. There is also easy access by rail or car to Philadelphia and to cities and resorts on the U.S. Eastern seaboard, including New York and Washington.

Travel. Depending on specific role, a researcher’s responsibilities may include occasional domestic or international travel.