Big Data, Plainly Spoken (aka Numbers Rule Your World)

An email from LinkedIn

Last week, I got served a dose of predictive analytics. I got an email solicitation from LinkedIn, presenting a list of jobs that they think I might be interested in. This email is algorithmically generated, and LinkedIn tells me that I received it because I clicked on a job posting for a senior data analyst position at Ogilvy & Mather, a top advertising agency based in Manhattan.

Yes, I did click on that job posting while preparing for the information session for Principal Analytics Prep a few days before the email arrived. A podcast of the event is available here.

Here is what the email looks like.

There are several things one can learn from this email:

1. The field of analytics is absolutely exploding. There are six pages of jobs related to the one job I clicked on. Most of these jobs are junior positions (“senior analyst”), because the ad I clicked on is at that level.

2. Many top companies are hiring. The competitors of Ogilvy – AKGA, MRM/McCann, OMD USA, RAPP/Omnicom, J Walker Thompson – are also competing for talent. Not just advertising but other related industries are also hiring senior analysts. I recognize Shazam (famous mobile song-recognition app), frog (top design agency), A+E network, Etsy (noteworthy startup retailer), Luxottica (high-end makers of glasses), AIG, Mercer (top management consultancy), Mastercard, S&P, and Burtch Works (a top executive recruiter in the data space – also our guest at the info session!) So, the jobs are at  top companies, startups and small businesses.

3. The jobs are spread out over all industries. Just in that small, nonrandom sample, we have representation of advertising, retail, technology, media and entertainment, e-commerce, credit cards, finance and insurance, human resources, management consultancy, and graphic design.

4. Analytics are needed in all job functions. The job seeker should also consider unconventional career paths e.g. the analyst at Burtch Works is a recruiter but with a specialty in data science and analytics. Another unusual path is to become an account manager at a digital advertising agency – you may not be running analyses all day long but if you have superior analytical skills, you’d be much better at explaining results and data-driven recommendations to your clients. Similarly, a salesperson for an analytics product company should definitely use foundational analytics knowledge.

One of the key reasons I started Principal Analytics Prep is to open doors in the job market for people of diverse backgrounds and diverse career paths. Analytics and data jobs are not limited to technical people who are coders and engineers. There are plenty of exciting job opportunities across all industries and job functions for data wizards with unconventional backgrounds. Please contact us if you want to learn more about how we can help guide you to your next career in data.

Why are there so many open positions in analytics?

Last week, I gave an information session on the next-gen data analytics bootcamp called Principal Analytics Prep that we just launched. A recap of the session is available here as a podcast.

To prepare for the session, I did a job search on Linkedin, and found over 80,000 open positions in the U.S. matching the word "analytics". Of these, about 3,500 positions are junior or entry-level positions in the greater NYC area. Over half of those positions have been posted in the last 30 days. There are lots of analytics jobs in the business world, and hiring managers are having trouble filling them.

One reason for the difficulty is that everyone wants to hire from a small pool of experienced people. This is rational behavior on the part of hiring managers.

First, there is a huge gap between book knowledge and practice in this field. This is most apparent, for example, in design of experiments (the theory behind A/B testing). Academic courses focus on design and analysis but in real life, the most crucial matters are getting buy-in from various parties affected by testing, and making sure that the design is operationalized properly.

Second, a good data analyst needs to have a wide-lens perspective, which must be developed over time.

Third, corporate America has cut training budgets to nothing. Managers are not rewarded for training workers; in fact, they may be chastised for hiring untrained talent. It typically takes 12 months to get a new employee up to speed, for the employee to turn from being a cost driver to a productive worker.

Finally, training frequently backfires on the supervisor. It is common to be offered a big wage hike (say 20%) when switching employers but it is almost unheard-of to be offered more than 5% even when an internal promotion is rewarded. Thus, after 12 months of training, the hiring manager might learn that the employee has been poached.

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Principal Analytics Prep helps bridge this gap by offering the kind of broad-based training in the fundamentals of analytics - instead of begging the hiring manager to train you, you bring the training to the employer.

Our instructors are all practitioners who typically hold senior level positions in industry. They help bridge the theory-practice gap, and also provide a deep network of professional contacts within the industry.

If you or your friend is looking to enter the exciting analytics field, check out our website: http://principalanalyticsprep.com