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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Updater Assistant

💰 $40,000 - $65,000

OperationsDataContentAdministrative

🎯 Role Definition

The Updater Assistant is a detail-oriented operations professional responsible for maintaining, updating, and validating content and data across systems to ensure accuracy, consistency, and timeliness. This role partners with content owners, product managers, data engineers, and QA teams to implement updates, enforce data quality standards, and support process improvements. The ideal candidate balances speed with precision, uses tools such as content management systems (CMS), spreadsheets, ticketing systems, and basic scripting, and contributes to continuous improvement initiatives to reduce manual effort and increase compliance with SLAs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Data Entry Specialist or Content Operations Coordinator
  • Administrative Assistant with database or CMS experience
  • Customer Support Representative with experience handling product/content requests

Advancement To:

  • Content Operations Specialist / Senior Updater
  • Data Quality Analyst / Data Steward
  • Content Manager or Operations Lead

Lateral Moves:

  • QA Analyst (Content / Data)
  • Project Coordinator (technical projects)
  • Automation Specialist (RPA / scripting focus)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Maintain, update, and publish accurate product or content records across the company CMS and associated platforms, ensuring metadata, tags, and descriptions meet quality and SEO standards and that all changes are documented per process.
  • Review and validate incoming update requests from internal stakeholders and customer feedback channels, triaging work by priority, scope, and SLA and creating tickets in the issue-tracking system (JIRA, ServiceNow, Zendesk).
  • Execute bulk updates and mass edits using spreadsheets, CSV imports, automated scripts, or CMS batch tools while performing pre- and post-update validation to avoid regressions and data loss.
  • Reconcile data discrepancies between source systems (ERP, PIM, CRM) and presentation layers by running audits, creating discrepancy reports, and coordinating corrections with data owners and engineering teams.
  • Perform routine data quality assurance (QA) checks, including sampling, automated validation rules, and manual verification, to ensure that all published content conforms to style guides, regulatory requirements, and brand standards.
  • Maintain version control and change logs for critical content and data sets, coordinating rollbacks when necessary and supporting audit trails for compliance and governance.
  • Implement and maintain structured metadata schemas and taxonomy updates to improve discoverability, SEO performance, and downstream analytics accuracy.
  • Coordinate cross-functional change windows with product, release engineering, and operations to schedule high-impact updates with minimal service disruption.
  • Monitor dashboards and alerts for failed updates, reconciliation errors, and SLA breaches, responding promptly to incidents and escalating unresolved issues to the appropriate technical owner.
  • Automate repetitive update tasks using lightweight scripting (Python, Bash, Google Apps Script) or automation platforms (Zapier, Make, UiPath) and maintain documentation for automation workflows.
  • Train and provide onboarding support to junior updaters, contractors, and temporary staff on update procedures, quality standards, and tools to scale operations reliably.
  • Create and maintain clear process documentation, playbooks, and step-by-step runbooks for common update types, rollback procedures, and escalation paths to reduce single-point-of-knowledge risk.
  • Collaborate with SEO, content, and marketing teams to implement content refreshes, canonicalization updates, and metadata optimizations aimed at improving search rankings and user engagement.
  • Support product launches and seasonal campaigns by preparing content and product data, coordinating release checklists, validating post-launch data integrity, and reporting on launch metrics.
  • Serve as a primary point of contact for vendor- or partner-submitted content updates, validating delivery formats, mapping fields to internal schemas, and coordinating ingestion or remediation.
  • Conduct periodic reconciliations and archival procedures to remove deprecated content, correct stale records, and ensure the repository reflects current business offerings.
  • Participate in root-cause analysis for recurring data or update failures, propose system or workflow changes, and collaborate with engineering to reduce manual rework and increase throughput.
  • Work with legal and compliance teams to enact content changes required for regulatory updates, recalls, or terms-of-service modifications, ensuring timely and auditable execution.
  • Support ad-hoc reporting requests and provide weekly or monthly status reports on update throughput, error rates, backlog trends, and SLA compliance to stakeholders and leadership.
  • Maintain strong data hygiene by enforcing naming conventions, field validation rules, and standardized formats for dates, SKUs, and identifiers, reducing downstream processing errors.
  • Assist with user acceptance testing (UAT) for CMS enhancements, content pipelines, and data export/import functionality, preparing test data, documenting results, and providing feedback for product improvements.
  • Liaise with customer support and account teams to prioritize customer-impacting content issues, provide status updates, and ensure corrective actions are completed within agreed timelines.
  • Participate in agile ceremonies as part of content or data engineering squads, contributing backlog items, acceptance criteria, and estimations related to update automation and quality initiatives.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficient with content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, or proprietary platforms, including publishing workflows and permission management.
  • Advanced skills in Excel/Google Sheets: VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, pivot tables, conditional formatting, array formulas, and data cleansing techniques.
  • Experience with product information management (PIM) systems, ERPs, or CRMs and understanding of data synchronization patterns.
  • Familiarity with SQL for querying, validating, and reconciling datasets across databases.
  • Basic scripting skills (Python, JavaScript, Google Apps Script, or Bash) to automate repetitive update tasks and transform data.
  • Experience with data import/export formats (CSV, JSON, XML) and the ability to map and transform fields between schemas.
  • Comfortable using ticketing and issue-tracking systems (JIRA, ServiceNow, Zendesk) to manage and document work items.
  • Knowledge of SEO fundamentals: metadata, canonical tags, structured data (schema.org), and content optimization best practices.
  • Exposure to ETL tools and data pipelines or familiarity with data ingestion processes.
  • Basic familiarity with version control concepts (Git) for managing changes to scripts, templates, or configuration files.
  • Experience with monitoring and reporting tools (Looker, Tableau, Google Data Studio) to track update performance and error rates.
  • Understanding of quality assurance practices, test case creation, and user acceptance testing (UAT).

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional attention to detail and commitment to data accuracy and completeness.
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills for clear stakeholder coordination and documentation.
  • Prioritization and time-management skills; ability to manage a high-volume workload with multiple concurrent deadlines.
  • Analytical mindset with the ability to investigate discrepancies and drive to root cause.
  • Customer-service orientation; able to balance stakeholder requests with operational constraints and SLAs.
  • Collaborative team player who can work across product, engineering, legal, and marketing teams.
  • Adaptability to changing processes and comfort working in fast-paced environments.
  • Problem-solving and initiative-taking; proactive about proposing process improvements and automation opportunities.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • High school diploma or equivalent; vocational certificates in data, office administration, or related fields accepted.

Preferred Education:

  • Associate's or Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Information Systems, Computer Science, Data Analytics, Communications, or a related discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Information Systems
  • Data Analytics
  • Business Administration
  • Computer Science
  • Communications / Journalism (for content-heavy roles)
  • Library & Information Science (for taxonomy/metadata roles)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 1–4 years of professional experience in content operations, data entry, CMS administration, or similar roles.

Preferred:

  • 2+ years working with enterprise CMS or PIM systems, demonstrated experience executing bulk updates and reconciliation.
  • Proven track record of improving update workflows, reducing error rates, or implementing automation to increase throughput.
  • Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams (engineering, product, SEO, legal) and working within agile/scrum environments.
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