Closing the skills gap: Finding skilled analytics professionals for a dynamically changing data-driven environment
Abstract
This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of the challenges companies face when attempting to fill an analytics position. It begins with an overview of the data proliferation context in which most companies find themselves when seeking analytics professionals. The study then analyses a sample of 191,276 analytics positions advertised on LinkedIn. The authors describe the demand for various types of analytics professionals and compare four of the most highly sought-after roles, namely, data scientist, marketing analytics, business analytics and data science professionals. Content analysis of position descriptions and job requirements is used to determine any similarities in competencies within each of the three categories of skill set (ie hard skills, soft skills and credentials) specified by employers seeking analytics professionals. Among the similarities is the growing acknowledgment that data analytics applied to large and complex datasets requires a new breed of employee — an employee who is fully grounded in a business domain, but who also has a breadth of analytical and personal skills. The paper then assesses the challenges that organisations face when recruiting employees with the desired skills. Finally, the paper presents emerging and creative methods for recruiting analytics talent in a very complex and dynamically changing environment.
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Author's Biography
Angela D’Auria Stanton is Professor of Marketing at Radford University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in marketing research and marketing analytics, and graduate courses in the foundations of data analytics and advanced data visualisation. Her background is in consultancy, and her previous positions include vice president of Stanton & Associates, and president of The Strategy Group. Angela holds a PhD in business with a major in marketing and an emphasis in international marketing and cross-cultural research methodology from Old Dominion University, in addition to an MBA in marketing research and a BBA in information systems.
Wilbur W. Stanton is a professor of marketing at Radford University, where he teaches undergraduate courses in marketing research, advertising and consumer behaviour and graduate courses in predictive analytics and data mining. His research and consulting focus on ad testing, consumer behaviour / insights, A / B (split) testing, competitive analysis, business intelligence, market segmentation, product / brand development and marketing research. Wil applies advanced predictive analytics and data mining techniques using SAS and SAS Enterprise Miner, SPSS and SPSS Molder and R to bring about positive and innovative solutions to business problems and the optimisation of business decisions. He holds a PhD in decision science with an emphasis in applied statistics and strategic decision making, master’s in decision science, an MBA and a BBA in marketing from Georgia State University.
Citation
D’Auria Stanton, Angela and Stanton, Wilbur W. (2019, July 1). Closing the skills gap: Finding skilled analytics professionals for a dynamically changing data-driven environment. In the Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal, Volume 5, Issue 2. https://doi.org/10.69554/TZUY4527.
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