Non-IT Professionals Learning Analytics To Save Their Career

Computing power and bandwidth coupled with the growth of smartphones has enabled large volumes of data to be captured, communicated and stored very easily and cheaply, resulting in the need for big data technologies including big data analytics.

The growth in Big Data is posing challenges while at the same time creating opportunities for organizations: challenges in terms of lacking the capabilities and skilled professionals to manage and analyze data, while opportunities in terms of new products and services, product/service customization and personalization, new insights to realize process efficiencies; that Big Data Analytics is enabling.

Sector Mapping

Like with most technologies, there are early adopters, mainstream adopters and late adopters. Technology and IT companies, given their relative comfort with technologies have been early adopters and derived maximum benefit from them.

BFSI also tends to be an early adopter given that technology always provided a competitive advantage in finance. Other industries like Manufacturing, Automotive, Pharma, Healthcare and Media are the mainstream adopters and are now aggressively adopting Big Data Analytics. Other industries like Tourism, Agriculture, Hospitality and Education tend to be the late adopters. However, every industry that has adopted these technologies is deriving strategic benefits which will ensure that eventually all of them will.

Importance of Analytics for career

Mohan Lakhamraju, Founder and CEO, Great Learning said, “We, at Great Learning, believe that analytics will become a fundamental skill that everyone will have to know to some extent. At Great Learning, we are seeing professionals from many sectors beyond IT, learning analytics. They are safeguarding their career and helping their organization by building analytical capabilities.”

Data-driven decision making is taking over the heuristic, experience-based decision making that was prevalent earlier, where all the professionals will have to get comfortable with working with data and with data-driven decision making.

The IT industry regularly goes through cycles of technological change. This transformation makes some jobs redundant, while creating newer jobs and the IT industry is going through one such phase. This is causing confusion and insecurity amongst IT professionals.

Also, new opportunities are opening up for technology professionals in emerging areas such as Analytics, Big Data, Machine Learning, Cloud Computing and Information Security.

Increasing Interest in Analytics

Mohan Lakhamraju  added, “At Great Learning, we are empowering professionals to take advantage of these trends by up-skilling themselves instead of getting rendered irrelevant by it. In the last 18 months, we have seen a jump of over 300 percent in terms of interest from professionals working in the IT Sector, out of which 70 percent of candidates in our programs are IT professionals.”

Technological shift will not be restricted to merely the IT sector but every other sector where efficient decision making is the key.  Therefore, the nature of jobs in all the sectors will eventually change where all knowledge professionals will have to work with data to varying extents.

Rajguru Tandon

BW Reporters The author is a correspondent with BW Businessworld with keen interest in HR and employee welfare.