Careers

Serving clients throughout the United States, Public Policy Associates provides high-caliber, thoughtful policy research that results in strategies of value in the real world. Clients include public agencies at the federal, state, and local level; private foundations such as Ford Foundation, C. S. Mott Foundation, JEHT Foundation, and W.K. Kellogg Foundation; and other nonprofit organizations.

Our areas of focus include workforce, education, and economic policy; health, human services and philanthropy; corrections policy; and natural resources. The work includes long-term, multisite evaluations; policy research; and policy-development projects. Often, clients value most the strategic consultation that accompanies other products.

Currently, we are conducting a six-year national evaluation for the Ford Foundation; assisting the State of Michigan with redevelopment of its workforce and economic development strategy; helping to shape the Michigan Prisoner ReEntry Initiative; assessing the use of technology in education; conducting the national evaluation of Generation II and III of the WIRED Initiative of the U.S. Department of Labor; evaluating several philanthropic initiatives; and carrying out a variety of other interesting and important projects.

PPA is an equal opportunity employer and affirmatively encourages applications from under-represented minorities. For much more information about PPA, click here.

All applicants are required to complete the PPA general application and submit it in hard copy form.

Researchers at PPA

We do not have any job opening currently. If you would like to be considered for future openings, please send your resume to:

Virginia M. Orabone
Director of Business Management
Public Policy Associates, Inc.
119 Pere Marquette Drive, Suite 1C
Lansing, MI 48912

E-mail responses may be sent to vorabone@publicpolicy.com

All researchers at PPA play a critical role in the success of projects and of the firm. They must take deep, personal responsibility for their work and play proactive roles in shaping their day-to-day work. Perhaps most important, they have a passion for public policy and enjoy working on highly collaborative project teams.

Our work requires strong quantitative research skills. This means a high level of competence working with large-scale, complex databases and conducting data analyses in SPSS. Our work also includes significant qualitative research, so understanding of methods such as focus groups, key informant interviews, observation, and case studies is very relevant. It is rare that a PPA project includes only quantitative or qualitative research, as we find the richest results to come from a thoughtful blending of the two.

Researchers at PPA must be excellent thinkers, writers, and presenters:

	<	Since much of our work requires synthesis of data from multiple sources to create new insight and meaning, we need research associates who are capable of seeing the connections between apparently unrelated facts, who can quickly come to understand the needs and interests of our clients better than they do, who constantly surprise themselves and their colleagues with their new ideas and understanding of old ones.
	<	Most of PPA’s products are written documents. We constantly produce memos, reports, and summaries for clients, and that work must be crystal clear, powerful, and well-organized. Our clients dread jargon, as well they should, since it tends to obscure rather than reveal meaning. PPA researchers must engage readers in their writing, not simply recount the facts.
	<	We interact with clients and others constantly, and those interactions include formal and informal presentations of what we are learning or of work we propose to do. As with our writing, our presentations must communicate effectively with our audiences. In these presentations, we frequently use PowerPoint software, so a working knowledge of that application is useful.

Every person at PPA contributes to development of new business, and research associates play an important role. Research associates help senior staff to research those project ideas and develop them into marketable products. They also conduct background research to enrich our proposals in response to competitive solicitations. Senior research associates play leadership roles in project conception and development.

The education and credentials of our entire staff is an important ingredient in our competitiveness, so we require research associates to have at least a master’s degree (doctorate preferred) in a discipline related to our work and three years of relevant experience. We require senior research associates to have similar educational credentials, but at least five years of relevant experience. An individual with exceptional experience and capabilities who lacks the requisite credentials may be considered for a research assistant position while continuing work toward a needed degree.