The Group: Morningstar’s Research group provides independent analysis on individual securities, funds, markets, and portfolios. The Research group also provides data on hundreds of thousands of investment offerings, including stocks, mutual funds, and similar vehicles, along with real-time global market data on millions of equities, indexes, futures, options, commodities, and precious metals, in addition to foreign exchange and Treasury markets. Morningstar is one of the largest independent sources of fund, equity, and credit data and research in the world, and our advocacy for investors’ interests is the foundation of our company.

The Role:  Working closely with the Director and senior analysts on the team, the Associate Director is responsible for helping manage the North American Fixed Income Strategies team, ensuring that it produces high-quality strategy-level analysis and broader fixed-income research that helps investors make better decisions. This position is based in our Chicago office and will report to the Director Fixed Income Strategies, Manager Research.

Responsibilities
•    Foster a collaborative team culture that aims for and prizes high-quality research, resulting in analyses that are insightful, ratings that are good calls for investors, and broader research that helps investors understand the fixed-income landscape
•    Manage a team of analysts, making sure that they have a clear understanding of their coverage, research and other responsibilities, and are able to execute at a high level 
•    Instill an ethos of continuous improvement regarding analysis, research, team organization and collaboration
•    Contribute to training and development of new analysts on the fixed-income team 
•    Together with the Director and the coverage committee, participate in fixed-income strategy coverage decisions
•    Coordinate with the Practice lead and Director to ensure clear employee KPIs in line with business goals
•    Provide ideas and input that enhance the research process, methodology, and products
•    Increase ties with Morningstar Investment Management (IM) and push specialization to deepen subject-matter expertise
•    Engage with the external market (media, wealth managers, regulators) to strengthen perceptions of Morningstar capabilities
•    Work with Training Director(s) to ensure that Analysts are fully prepared to best represent themselves to institutional clients

Requirements
•    Bachelor’s degree; an MBA, CFA or other advanced degree/accreditation a plus.
•    Seven to 10 years experience in manager research or a related role. 
•    Demonstrated expertise in strategy level, or fund, analysis.
•    Proven effective people management and team building skills. 
•    Excellent communications skills.
•    Strong time management skills.

Please submit a resume AND cover letter. Applications without both items will not be considered.