by Angela Guess
Smart Data Collective has created a new infographic demonstrating how few new grads have the data skills needed to fill business intelligence positions. According to the article, “We issued the results of a survey recently that showed today’s college graduates are not adequately prepared to work in business intelligence. It seems that students lack critical skills in part because universities take a siloed approach to teaching. Sound familiar? Students either learn the basics of business, or they learn the technology, but not how to use that technology to support the business needs of the companies they go to work for after graduation. That sounds uncomfortably familiar too.”
It continues, “This disconnect between the programs that exist and the needs of the marketplace is leading to a worker shortage that will affect our customers, our partners, our competitors and even ourselves. The worker shortage is only going to increase as more companies use data to their competitive advantage. A McKinsey Global Institute report in May projected that by 2018, the US alone will need an additional 190,000 ‘deep analytical talent’ workers plus 1.5 million more ‘data-savvy managers and analysts’ in excess of available workers.”
The article goes on, “The BI Congress sponsored the study and its members are already working to help universities change the way they create their BI programs, to make sure the right content is taught and that it is taught within the right context. As an industry, we need to help the BI Congress with the context part of that equation by making curriculum realistic. We can do that by providing large data sets, real-world problems to solve, and case studies.”
Read more and see the full-size infographic here.
photo credit: Smart Data Collective
[...] through context and presentation.” He’s right, and the solution isn’t to graduate and hire a nation of data scientists. (Apparently we have a [...]