WHAT DOES AN ASSOCIATE DO?

Published: May 16, 2025 – The Associate performs detailed administrative and operational tasks to support departmental goals and ensure project timelines are met. This position coordinates communication between internal teams and external stakeholders, while tracking progress through reporting tools and documentation systems. The associate also contributes to strategy execution by analyzing data, identifying inefficiencies, and recommending actionable improvements for process optimization.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Associate

1. Associate Actuary Roles and Responsibilities

  • Actuarial Analysis: Directs and performs the monthly, quarterly and annual calculation of actuarial reserves and liabilities on a Statutory, GAAP, and Tax basis.
  • Financial Reporting: Directs and prepares the preparation of quarterly and annual valuation and financial management reports.
  • Statistical Reporting: Directs and prepares statistical experience reports for state insurance departments.
  • Profitability Analysis: Directs product profitability by recommending corrective action when experience studies suggest changes.
  • Trend Evaluation: Analyzes and evaluates trends for discussion with management and to support Group Underwriting pricing objectives.
  • Underwriting Collaboration: Collaborates with Group Underwriting on stop loss rate manuals and pricing decisions.
  • Regulatory Filings: Directs and prepares rate filings for regulatory approval.
  • Risk Management: Manages product and corporate risk through reinsurance.
  • Cash Flow Testing: Supports annual cash flow testing.
  • Regulatory Relations: Develops and maintains professional relationships with state insurance departments and internal and external auditors.
  • Systems Development: Supports with technology development of core company systems, including automations and upgrades to the stop loss system.

2. Associate Architect Responsibilities

  • Residential Development: Work on a range of developments predominantly within the residential sector.
  • Team Leadership: Take responsibility for running a team.
  • Client Liaison: Liaise well with clients.
  • Site Coordination: Attend site visits, work closely with clients and contractors.
  • Project Management: Run single large or multiple small projects on a day-to-day basis and organise, direct and monitor the project team/s.
  • Project Alignment: Agree on the project's goals and management with the project director.
  • Architectural Flexibility: Have the ability to move between the different areas of the architectural work undertaken in the practice.
  • Financial and QA Control: Take responsibility for the day-to-day financial and QA control of projects.
  • Workplace Motivation: Demonstrate a passion and/or desire to excel and to bring that enthusiasm into the office environment.
  • Mentorship: Guide and mentor team members.
  • Design Improvement: Engage in and promote discussion on ways of improving the design and delivery of projects.

3. Associate Attorney Duties and Roles

  • Client Legal Support: Work with default servicing and mortgage bank clients to resolve legal issues.
  • Document Review: Conduct a comprehensive review of all loan documents, financial information, and correspondence.
  • Motion Drafting: Draft responses to motions and affirmative defenses received from defendants.
  • Pleadings Management: Draft, review and ensure proper filing/mailing of pleadings, notices, motions, and correspondence.
  • Court Representation: Attend in-person and video court hearings.
  • Legal Issue Resolution: Identify and address both routine and complex legal issues and develop creative solutions.
  • Legal Strategy Development: Identify causes of action, affirmative defenses, and counterclaims, and develop a strategy and an evidentiary basis to advocate for clients in court.
  • Staff Oversight: Review documents and provide direction and oversight to non-legal staff.
  • Ethics Compliance: Lead by example concerning support of the compliance and ethics programs within the firm.

4. Audit Associate Responsibilities and Key Tasks

  • Auditing Standards Knowledge: Know auditing, accounting standards, and application of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP, GAAS, and SEC rules).
  • Technical Application: Apply technical skills and on-the-job practices and business processes for clients.
  • Audit Software Proficiency: Knowledge in the Firm’s computer applications in facilitating the auditing procedures (Engagement, Accounting Research Manager and PPC ETools, etc.).
  • Internal Control Testing: Perform internal control testing, document deficiencies and develop comments for inclusion in management letters.
  • Risk Assessment: Perform the risk assessment process and apply knowledge in completing all related forms.
  • Financial Reporting: Participate in the preparation of the financial report (statements, footnotes and any supplemental information).
  • Assignment Execution: Take direction to ensure that assignment quality standards are achieved.
  • Communication Skills: Express ideas clearly and concisely both orally and in written form and develop writing skills for documenting findings.
  • Engagement Planning: Plan, organize and work efficiently to identify opportunities to improve engagement profitability.
  • Job Execution Compliance: Ensure job execution, documentation, consultation and completion following required policies and procedures.
  • Budget Monitoring: Monitor one’s own engagement task budgets, be aware of out of scope work and proactively communicate potential issues to appropriate team member.
  • Professional Development: Actively participate in learning and development opportunities, formal learning (CPE), and training.

5. Associate Buyer Roles and Details

  • Procurement Support: Provide functional support within key procurement activities (developing request for quote packages, evaluating quotations, supplier identification/selection, placing purchase orders).
  • Cross-Functional Coordination: Work with internal engineering, manufacturing and supplier quality teams to ensure cross-functional alignment within the commodity outsourcing strategy.
  • Continuous Improvement: Champion continuous improvement initiatives for cost, quality and delivery.
  • Issue Resolution: Resolve purchase order discrepancies and invoice issues.
  • Supply Communication: Proactively update SpaceX management and engineering teams on all critical supply issues.
  • Supplier Relationship Management: Develop and maintain strong supplier relationships.
  • Supplier Assessment: Visit the supplier's facilities and accurately assess technical capability and capacity.
  • Procurement Analysis: Analyze procurement data and report metrics.

6. Associate Consultant Key Accountabilities

  • Team Management: Key team member responsible for daily management and development of junior colleagues/interns while working on Value+ engagements.
  • Deliverable Quality: Produces high-quality deliverables within planned timescales with excellent attention to detail.
  • Engagement Understanding: Starts to develop an understanding of financial engagement, economics and risk management.
  • Client Support: Supports and contributes to client presentations and meetings.
  • Performance Contribution: Helps teams meet team-specific performance targets.
  • Exam Progression: Passes exams at first sitting if elects to do ACCA/ACA.
  • Technical and Advisory Development: Continues to build technical expertise, broader business advisory and people management skills.
  • Client Relationship Building: Developing client relationship skills and building sector knowledge.
  • Inclusive Culture Support: Supports leadership in creating an inclusive environment.
  • Colleague Development: Supports the development of colleagues by providing timely feedback and identifying development opportunities, e.g., mentoring/buddying.
  • Personal Branding: Continues to develop personal brand.

7. Associate Creative Director Tasks

  • Creative Execution: Ensure creative teams create and execute best-in-class visual content from concept to completion (design, multimedia, photography, animation, etc.).
  • Ideation Leadership: Lead and actively participate in creative ideation and brainstorming sessions.
  • Concept Pitching: Pitch breakthrough ideas and inspire high-level conceptual, big thinking.
  • Storyboard Development: Oversee translation of concepts into storyboards (consider media/visual elements).
  • Visual Leadership: Provide visual leadership and share design best practices throughout work cycle.
  • Asset Design: Design a wide range of assets for different formats and channels.
  • Copy Development: Develop and edit copy for social posts, infographics, videos and other creative.
  • Brand Compliance: Ensure clients’ brand and style guidelines are being followed.
  • Creative Direction: Attend and provide creative direction at photo and video shoots.
  • Client Presentation: Present concepts and creative presentations to clients.
  • Creative Alignment: Ensure all output delivers against the client brief and creative strategy.
  • Innovative Content Creation: Execute creative that is innovative, compelling and inherently shareable.
  • Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with Designers, Client Services, Editorial and Production teams to direct projects on a conceptual level – provide direction and ideas, partner with copywriters and manage the creative process and executions.

8. Associate Dean of Graduate Studies Duties

  • Graduate Program Support: Support the Dean of Graduate Studies in graduate program leadership.
  • Program Development: Collaborate on new program development and curriculum changes.
  • Approval Navigation: Assist in navigating approval processes for program initiatives.
  • Policy Implementation: Implement policies and procedures for graduate degree programs.
  • Curricular Integration: Ensure seamless integration of new curricular initiatives into student support.
  • Opportunity Coordination: Coordinate curricular and co-curricular opportunities with various departments.
  • Administrative Alignment: Align administrative procedures with curricular goals and liaise with program directors.
  • Graduate Recruitment: Participate in graduate recruitment events and advise on enrollment and marketing.
  • Program Assessment: Conduct ongoing assessment of graduate programs, including learning outcomes and policies.

9. Associate Engineer General Responsibilities

  • Cross-Team Coordination: Act as the bridge between customer support and engineering teams by helping the customer support team diagnose and resolve customer problems.
  • Automation Development: Develop tools and automation to prevent the issues from occurring in the future.
  • Escalation Handling: Handle, coordinate, and resolve escalations from the customer support team to engineering teams.
  • Technical Diagnosis: Use administrative interfaces, database queries, and review source code to diagnose and resolve customer problems.
  • Performance Analysis: Investigate and resolve system performance issues/analysis using a variety of tools, including Python, Ruby, Shell scripts, QuickSight.
  • Reporting: Run reports at the internal customers' requests.
  • Bug Management: Write up on HW/SW issues as bugs and resolve or escalate.
  • Log Analysis: Analyze logs, diagnose hardware/software faults, apply known fixes, and find new solutions.
  • Tiered Support: Provide L-2/L-3 support to resolve field issues/queries.
  • Support Team Training: Train the Customer Support team.

10. Associate Manager Role Purpose

  • Solution Delivery Leadership: Lead the solution delivery and implementations for programs and projects.
  • Stakeholder Interface: Interface with product owner and key stakeholders in Project Management, Business, QA and Technology.
  • Estimation Analysis: Work with Scrum Master and product owner to provide development sizing and cost analysis estimates.
  • Story Decomposition: Work closely with the product owner and team members to decompose stories, design features, and prioritize tasks.
  • Release Support: Support the release manager to assemble releases and drive improvements in the release process.
  • Solution Prototyping: Prototype, validate, and create specific application solutions for the business.

11. Media Analytics Associate Essential Functions

  • Media Analytics: Analyze historical performance, audience and trend data to inform the media strategy, planning and activation.
  • Market Analysis: Analyze business data, market and category data to inform marketing strategy.
  • Measurement Planning: Work with Strategy, Intelligence, Planning, Social, eCRM, Data Solutions and Activation on developing and implementing measurement plans.
  • Reporting: Package learnings into client presentations and reports.
  • Data Interpretation: Source, harmonize and interpret data for data scientists and solutions teams.
  • Technology Sourcing: Identify new partners, technology and data sources to drive media performance.
  • Business Requirements: Organize client needs and opportunities into business requirements.
  • Analytics Recommendations: Recommend analytics products, partners and solutions.
  • Data Solutions Management: Scope, manage and package data solutions, advanced attribution and mix modeling assignments for clients.
  • Data Visualization: Use data and visualization to effectively communicate support for recommendations.

12. Associate Planner Additional Details

  • Sales and Profit Planning: Create seasonal sales, inventory, and profit plans at a division, dept. and vendor level.
  • Open-to-Buy Management: Own open-to-buy process – forecasting sales, markdowns, and inventory levels regularly for owned and dropship businesses.
  • Risk and Opportunity Management: Develop action items to maximize opportunities and mitigate risks.
  • Digital Forecasting: Work with marketing team to forecast digital metrics – traffic, conversion, AOV – that tie back to financial plan.
  • Business Analysis: Analyze weekly business results. Manage reorders of key products and action slow-sellers with markdowns.
  • Size Analysis: Analyze the size selling and implement appropriate recommendations.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Build strong relationships with a cross-functional team.
  • Sales Recap Development: Develop meaningful historical sales recaps to make more sound decisions on future seasons.
  • Trend Analysis: Create, run and analyze reports in order to react to current business trends as well as anticipate future business trends.
  • Ad Hoc Analysis: Develop ad hoc analysis and recaps to help guide in-season actions and project for future seasons as directed by the manager.

13. Associate Producer Details and Accountabilities

  • Risk and Dependency Management: Proactively identify dependencies and risks associated with meeting project milestones, ensure necessary and appropriate steps are taken to resolve difficulties that may impede progress or compromise achievement of project objectives.
  • Status Reporting: Create, update, and present status and information to provide ‘real-time’ visibility of shared development efforts to the Studio Leadership team.
  • Process Improvement: Identify task-related processes to improve efficiency.
  • Capacity Planning: Provide regular capacity plan updates.
  • Scrum Administration: Administer project-related processes, internal and external to the team, such as running scrums to identify dependencies and roadblocks.
  • Stakeholder Communication: Handle the formal and informal organizational communication with stakeholders.
  • Project Development: Project development with emphasis on team empowerment.
  • Milestone Management: Milestone planning, execution, and evaluation.
  • Team Motivation: Communicate goals to the team and motivate them to execute on time and at a high-quality level.
  • Team Management: Management of both internal and outsourced development teams.

14. Associate Product Manager Job Description

  • Product Innovation: Drive innovation in product development with a team of world-class engineers and designers.
  • User Research: Research to understand users’ needs and pain points.
  • Product Expertise: Become a product expert, understanding the competitive landscape, the evolving market needs, and how those things relate to the company’s mission and vision.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with the customer success, engineering and design teams to prioritise and ensure features and tasks are developed as expected.
  • Product Communication: Write clear and concise product materials to communicate and deliver new features to the team and users.
  • Operational Strategy: Organize and execute operational strategies to drive user growth and product improvement.
  • User Engagement: Engage with users and internal teams to quickly identify and resolve difficulties experienced during their user journeys.
  • Feedback Analysis: Collect and analyse user feedback from merchants and other stakeholders, and recommend solutions to further improve product features and user experience.

15. Associate Project Manager Functions

  • Project Planning: Assisting in the development and management of project plans, including timelines, communication plan, training plan, content documents and implementation plans.
  • Change Control Management: Coordinating and managing the study change control process from initial request to final decision/approval, including documentation and communication.
  • Meeting Coordination: Planning and participating in internal and external project kick-off meetings, including preparing presentations and associated materials.
  • Project Support: Serving as a backup point of contact for identified study projects and helping to facilitate the activities necessary for carrying out the project, including requirements gathering, managing project scope and budget, providing project updates and reporting.
  • Internal Liaison: Liaising with internal functional teams and resources to carry out project requirements/tasks.
  • External Liaison: Liaising with external teams to achieve project objectives in and around change controls, translations, content development, and integrations.
  • Timeline Management: Assisting with managing and updating timelines in study management systems.
  • Study Coordination: Coordinating and working closely with Study Support and Study Deployment to ensure sites, users, and equipment requests are addressed and entered in a timely fashion.
  • Project Configuration: Performing configuration activities for identified projects.
  • Project Management Support: Performing the Project Manager role for identified study projects under the guidance of the assigned mentor.

16. Associate Recruiter Accountabilities

  • Candidate Sourcing: Sourcing candidates via web advertising, referral, social networking, database, candidate portal on client website, etc., as directed/agreed with the Onsite Recruiters.
  • Database Management: Build, develop and maintain an in-house candidate database and workflow products, e.g., candidate/job tracking spreadsheet.
  • Candidate Interviewing: Contact and interview prospective candidates and retain an audit trail of contact.
  • Volume Recruitment: Be comfortable reacting efficiently to volume recruitment.
  • Candidate Retention: Retain contact with candidates placed via direct contract recruitment.
  • Onboarding Support: Assist with the full onboarding of direct contractors, including pre-assignment screening and permanent staff, until the handover of responsibility to HR.
  • Recruitment Tracking: Build and maintain accessible, effective, and accurate tracking during the recruitment lifecycle for audit, information, and accountability purposes.
  • Team Support: Provide support to the vendor management function and the rest of the team.
  • Target Achievement: Achieve and exceed delivery targets and service levels.
  • Progress Reporting: Responsible for feeding back progress and business development opportunities to the Consultant.
  • Project Support: Take responsibility for ad-hoc project work.

17. Associate Scientist Roles and Details

  • Research Leadership: Lead research efforts on gene editing, cell line generation, target validation and compound characterization studies.
  • Experimental Design: Independently generate study plans and design experiments.
  • Assay Execution: Proficiently execute molecular biology, biochemistry and cell-based assays with high assay development and troubleshooting skills.
  • Data Interpretation: Accurately interpret data, communicate experimental results internally and externally, and generate project reports.
  • Literature Utilization: Search and utilize literature and external resources to support internal studies.
  • Technology Implementation: Implement novel technologies and platforms to add value to the organization.
  • Regulatory Compliance: Perform job-specific tasks in compliance with applicable regulations, company policies and Standard Operating Procedures.

18. Associate Teacher Essential Functions

  • Curriculum Implementation: Assist in implementing developmentally appropriate, child-centered curriculum, which encourages learning through exploration in a natural setting.
  • Social Modeling: Model positive social interactions and language.
  • Classroom Management: Implement positive class management techniques and strategies.
  • Child Supervision: Ensure the health, safety and well-being of children in the program by providing close supervision of all activities.
  • Lesson Planning: Participate in creating and leading developmentally appropriate lessons and activities in conjunction with the director and teaching staff.
  • Team Collaboration: Work as a supportive team member.
  • Safety Maintenance: Maintain a safe classroom environment by reporting and/or removing all potential hazards and by setting up spaces and materials with a focus on supporting child learning.
  • Policy Adherence: Adhere to all Department of Health guidelines, policies, and procedures.
  • Activity Documentation: Assist in documenting daily activities and progress of students.
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