There is no doubt that data is changing the world, it is impacting our everyday life and how companies do business. Therefore, increasing analytical maturity and leveraging the large amount of data that is being generated and stored have been identified as growing strategic priorities.
So, whether you are a student, recent graduate, or at the beginning of your career, this article will guide you through the five reasons you should start learning analytics today.
If you are an established professional eager to apply analytics on your current job, or if you cooperate with an analytics team and want to take this cooperation to another level, or even if you are looking for a career shift, these five reasons will hopefully enlighten you why learning analytics is a great investment.
The buzz around analytics and the proliferation of free e-learning came together in a perfect setting whether if you want to start or deepen your knowledge in analytics. Therefore, online platforms present themselves as cost-effective and flexible solutions and display a huge diversity of courses related to data analytics, from data mining to statistics, from database technologies to data visualization.
At the same time, education institutions, besides using analytics for improving their services and effectiveness, are also extending their curriculum to offer courses and degrees related to data analytics, and this is a trend that is observed even in the Portuguese landscape.
According to Linkedin, skills as analytical reasoning and business analysis, which are the core competencies in analytics, are among the top skills in demand in the workforce. The high demand for these skills, mostly motivated by increasing awareness and impact in business competitiveness, leads to an imbalance between the talent demand and supply, resulting in more promising and attractive job opportunities for knowledgeable data analytics professionals.
What is a common ground between today’s workplace and what we will be doing in the future? That both are, or will be, about solving problems. In analytics, you will be confronted with complex, and sometimes unclear, problems, in scenarios of uncertainty and volatility, and with a huge amount of structured and unstructured data, coming from all different sources. And then, you, or your team, will have to deep dive and come up with hypotheses to be tested, insights, and underlying connections, to describe, predict, and recommend business decisions.
So, besides curiosity and analytical mindset, a job in analytics will be an opportunity to test and develop your problem-solving skills.
The applications of analytics are endless, so you can easily combine it with your passion. Are you attracted to the idea of building a better world through a social, environmental, or similar type of organization? You can use analytics in fundraising by adapting your actions according to the target audience, or in identifying and monitoring endangered species, by using image recognition.
Are you more into sports? Analytics have been all over the place for quite some time, from monitoring players’ health and fitness to defining the best moves and strategies.
Instead, do you see yourself as the next best chef? You can use analytics to identify unusual food pairings, similarly to what IBM Watson’s challenge.
Beyond professional scope, analytics can also play a role in your personal life, not only from a practical point of view (which are the main predictors of your monthly savings and what is your estimation for the upcoming month?), but also for fun purposes, by participating, for example, in analytical challenges, such as Eurekathon.
In a world where data keeps flowing, customers are increasingly demanding and the pace of change is continuously increasing, companies are feeling more pressured than ever to reinvent and cultivate a data-driven culture. This means that, probably sooner rather than later, analytics capabilities will stop being confined to a specific department or job position.
On the contrary, the proliferation of data-driven decision-making processes across companies will be key for success, and therefore, data literacy will be a shared competency.
So, are you going to dive into analytics today?
