Automation Discovery Analyst

Automation Discovery Analyst

Hourly position — $36.09/hour — Fairfax County, VA (field-based across FCPS sites)

The work

Fairfax County Public Schools runs on thousands of behind-the-scenes processes: registrations, requests, reports, approvals, records. Many of them consume hours of staff time every week doing work a well-built automation could do in seconds. Our Business Process Automation Engineering (BPAE) team builds those automations. Your job is to find them.

As an Automation Discovery Analyst you go where the work happens: department offices and schools across the county. You interview the people who do a process, then sit with them and watch it actually being done, with a stopwatch and a structured protocol. You capture how long it really takes, how often it really runs, and where it really breaks. Your measurements become the baseline our engineers build against and the evidence behind every result the program reports. After an automation goes live, you go back and measure what changed, and you write the story: this office got 30 hours a week back, and here is what they're doing with it.

You will follow a detailed playbook, work inside a platform with AI assistants that help you draft your documents, and have every baseline and estimate reviewed by senior staff. We don't expect you to arrive knowing how to do this. We expect you to be someone who can learn a rigorous method and execute it faithfully.

What you'll do

• Meet with department and school leaders to identify processes that are candidates for automation.
• Run structured interviews with the staff who perform those processes, following our interview guide.
• Observe and time real work, in person, using our observation protocol, and pull volumes from system data.
• Produce process profiles and measured baselines, and get the department's sign-off that they're accurate.
• Hand clear, evidence-backed briefs to the engineering team.
• Return after go-live to measure actual results, and draft the case study of each win.
• Keep complete records in the program platform. The record is the product of this job.

What we're looking for

No automation or software experience is required. We provide a structured training program and pair you with senior staff on your first engagements. What we need from you:

• You can hold a structured conversation with a stranger and keep it on track.
• You write clearly and quickly: accurate notes, short summaries, plain sentences.
• You notice details and record things instead of remembering them.
• You're comfortable spending hours quietly observing work in unfamiliar offices and schools, with people at every level of the organization.
• You're at ease with basic spreadsheets.
• You have reliable transportation to sites across Fairfax County and can pass FCPS background requirements.

Helpful but not required: coursework or experience in operations, industrial engineering, business or systems analysis, research methods, UX research, journalism, or any field built on structured interviews or observational study; customer-facing or data-collection work; familiarity with how schools or public-sector offices operate.

One thing this job is not: the analyst measures and reports how staff time is spent — full stop. Analysts never evaluate employees, never discuss or recommend staffing decisions, and never participate in them. Staff you work with will be told this plainly at the start of every engagement, because it's true.

How we hire

Finalists complete a short exercise: watch a recorded demonstration of a simple clerical task, take notes, and write a one-page description of the process and where the time goes, plus three questions you'd ask the person doing it. We score accuracy, completeness, and clarity of writing — not technical knowledge. It's a preview of the actual job.

Regular travel to FCPS sites during school hours; some sessions require early arrival or peak periods (start of year, registration). Standard DIT hourly policies apply. Apply through Handshake with a resume and a short note on why this work interests you.