Demand for business school graduates who can gather, analyze, and translate reams of online data will steadily rise over the next decade – a statistic that could make business analytics curriculum a focal point for campuses large and small.
A partnership between Yale University’s School of Management Center for Customer Insights and IBM, announced April 29, gives business analytics a high profile in higher education, as Yale business students will get free access to IBM’s analytics technology and curriculum that, until recently, was only essential in the IT world.
The ability to make sense of millions – sometimes billions – of bits of information can make a recent graduate valuable to companies with a strong online presence, Yale officials said.
About 70 percent of consumers’ first interaction with a service or product is now on the internet, according to a Yale video detailing the school’s IBM partnership.
With more than 2 billion people using the web worldwide, small companies and gigantic corporations have piles of customer data to sift through – data that can show who is attracted to a certain product online.
Sharon Oster, dean of the Yale School of Management, said that over the past five years, business leaders have sought ways to make sense of “masses and masses of numbers” that could help improve the bottom line through personalized advertising campaigns aimed at specific demographics.
“It’s more than statistics, and that’s a challenge to teach,” Oster said in Yale’s video announcement. “When you have a plethora of data it means you have to think a little more strategically up front about what you do with that data.”
Demand for professionals with management analysis skills will increase by 24 percent by 2019, according to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There will also be a 22 percent increase in demand for operation research analysts and a 13 percent jump in demand for statisticians.
Ravi Dhar, a marketing professor and director of Yale’s Center for Customer Insights, said the public’s ever-increasing use of the internet – particularly commercial websites – has created enormous amounts of data.
The rise of social media has given companies unprecedented access to the preferences of potential customers. Social analytics – age, likes and dislikes, educational background – can allow companies to tailor marketing campaigns that target specific groups of customers.
Business students, Dhar said, should be able to “understand how to take all the noise that’s generated and what kind of insights you can get from that.”
Ivan Dremov, a student in Yale’s School of Management, said business recruiters have made it clear during campus visits that students need to be able to do more than analyze web-based customer data; they should be able to tell decision makers what that data means in plain English.
“Many recruiters on campus have said they need analytical skills, and working with large data sets, and to be able to communicate that with clients,” he said.
Studying analytics data, for example, can help a business adjust customer service demand during their busiest times of the year. Seeing a readout of just how many customers the company will have to help will show when more employees are needed to meet that demand.
“Analytics skills are no longer just a requirement for the IT professional,” said Rob Ashe, general manage of business analytics for IBM. “The business world continues to become more complex and information is at the center of all its challenges. Analytics has quickly become one of the most important skills required to prepare our business leaders of tomorrow.”
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