Top 5 Questions Regarding A Career In Business Analytics Answered!

Ivy Dec 10, 2015 No Comments

Ask any Young Tech Savvy IT/BFSI/Telecom/Marketing professional today –

What should be your next career move? Most of them will have the following as one of the options –

“Business Analytics!”

But the moment it’s time to take the plunge, millions of questions enter their minds. We’ve tried to answer a few of these Critical questions regarding Your Analytics Career through this blog post.

It has snippets from our recently concluded Webinar on “ Analytics for Beginners” on 6th December 2015 by our Expert Subhajit.

1.What is Analytics

Simply put, it’s the way we logically think while making decisions? Say, how do you decide which dress to buy when you are shopping in a mall? How do you come to a decision?

We take decisions based on information / data available. You gather information / facts. Say there is a scenario where all the information / data are available. Then, do you have any risk in making a decision? However, the facts/information are not available in entirety. Hence, there is a risk while making decision. Since info is not available readily, analytics helps to make decisions to minimize the risk of taking decision.

2. Why is it important today?

Analytics is getting applied everywhere, in different industry sectors – example: retail, healthcare, finance, etc.

Be it our online purchase from our favorite e-tailers  Amazon or Flipkart, or watching the complex poll results during election, the crux of it all is Data. Data is available aplenty but what companies lack is insights from this Data. This is where a Data Scientist’s role comes into the picture

3. What questions does Analytics answer?

Based on the type, it answers a variety of questions:

> Descriptive Analytics – What is happening? – How do you do this? – You gather data, and based on which you make metrics.

> Diagnostic Analytics – Why is whatever is happening?

> Discovery Analytics– What types of insights can I draw from what and why? What kind of decision can I take

> Predictive Analytics – What will happen next?

> Prescriptive Analytics – What actions to take based on predictions? Recommendation to the business to take certain actions and the results thereon.

4. What are the skills required to fit in to “Analytics”

Analytics is a mixture of broad skills spectrum. One can add value in various different components of analytics.

> Data Preparation – Data is not structured most of the time. Weprocess the unstructured data to make them structured. Skills required – SQL (very imp. – platform independent – most important language for data preparation)

> Diagnostic Analytics – What metrics can you build to draw information?Skills required – Should have analytical skills – logical thinking skills. Some questions to judge this skill:

1. Ex – How many leaves are in a tree?
2. Ex – All the cows are white in the world. How do you prove me wrong?
3. Ex – How many new tyres are sold every year in India

Suggestion to build logical thinking skill:

Start to question every business that you see around. Ex – when you go to a mall, analyze why some dresses / products are kept together. Analyze how the queue could be shortened. Think, how operations could be optimized, etc.

> Predictive Analytics – What will happen in the future? Skills Required – Typically, for the folks who have strong mathematical / statistical skills as it requires statistical analysis. A non-statistics / mathematical / engineering background person would need to learn these concepts thoroughly to be able to do predictive analytics.

> Prescriptive Analytics – Optimize; Skills Required – This again requires mathematical skills.

Typically for Descriptive analytics general statistics skills are most important ex – What is Data, Frequency Distribution, Probability, Mean, Median, and Mode. For predictive Analytics the skills that are needed are Regression, Logistic, Factor, Linear / Non-Linear Optimization

5. What are most important tools used in Analytics today?

♦SAS – 70% of businesses are still using SAS

SAS Programming knowledge is required. You cant just rely on GUI version of SAS (Enterprise Guide).

♦R – Since SAS is very costly (ex – 50 Lakhs per year for server license of SAS), hence, R is becoming popular (R is open source – free).

♦Analytics tools by IBM – SPSS

♦Data Visualization Tools – Tableau, Spotfire, Qlikview

♦Excel – is still the most important tool used. You should be very good in Excel. You can do a lot of statistical analytics work on Excel.

•All features of Excel are important. Text, Character, Date, Optimization, LookUp, Pivot, etc.

•If you don’t know Excel, it’s very difficult to work in Analytics.

•How important is to know / learn VBA

−VBA is going to become one of the most sought after skills in analytics

–VBA is becoming famous because it automates various reporting processes and saves time.

–VBA helps to save time. Hence, it is very important.

Snippets from Recently conducted webinar “ Analytics for Beginners and Introduction to Retail Analytics” on 6th December 2015.

Recording of our webinar is available on our Youtube Channel youtube.com/user/IvyProSchool

If you have any other questions regarding your career in Analytics, write to is at info@ivyproschool.com

Team Ivy