“Do I continue taking Excel and People Analytics courses?”
The core four technologies for HR pros to look out for.
The transition to into analytics can be intimidating, particularly for HR Generalist who are light on technical or quantitative background. Some HR Partner lack confidence in their abilities to do even light data work.
The path can be bewildering, especially as “big data analytics” makes its way into HR.
Not only does the size of the dataset get larger, the share number of tools and applications has increased exponentially.
The Good News
Building on a previous post, I listed out all technologies that could be potentially used by People Analytics professionals. The list of technologies were derived from the Occupational Information Network for HR Specialist and Statistician — two positions whose hybrid comes close to being ‘People Analytics’ (note: a case can be made to include other occupations as well including Industrial Psychologist, Management Analyst and Software Developer, but to keep things simple, I opted for two roles).
Here is the full list of technologies:
- Analytical or scientific software (SPSS, SAS)
- Business intelligence and data analysis software (Qlik Tech Qlik View; Tableau)
- Data base management system software (Teradata, Apache Hadoop)
- Data base user interface and query software (Microsoft SQL Server, SQL, Microsoft Access)
- Data mining software Development environment software (Microsoft Visual Basic)
- Enterprise application integration software (XML, SAS/CONNECT)
- Enterprise resource planning ERP software (SAP; Oracle Peoplesoft Human Capital Management)
- Object or component oriented development software (Python, R) (Rstudio)
- Office suite software (Microsoft Office)
- Operating system software
- Presentation software (PowerPoint)
- Spreadsheet software (Microsoft Excel)
- Word processing software
Then, I used this list to examine 22 job postings that showed up randomly in a search for “people analytics” over at indeed.com. The positions ranged from Data Analyst to Sr HR & Analytics Insight to People Analytics Project Manager.
I combed through each job posting to see which technologies were explicitly listed. Here are the results:
By learning/practicing the following four technologies, non-technical HR professionals can gradually shift into more analytical roles. They are:
- Tableau (mentioned in 77% of postings)
- Python / R (mentioned in 73% of postings)
- SQL (mentioned in 68% of postings)
- Excel (mentioned in 59% of postings)
Honorable mention goes to: Power Point (32%), Workday (23%), Microsoft Power BI (18%), SPSS/SAS and Google Sheets (14% each).
This corroborates finds from my previous post.
So in response to the titled question. YES. Continue making sure you develop into an Excel whiz — in many cases, that forms the foundation for any analytics endeavor. For the second part of that question, “should I continue taking ‘People Analytics’ courses”, I’d make sure the course at least covers some of the more prominent technologies required by employers including: Tableau, SQL, R and/or Python.
If you come from a generalist background, just starting out in your analytics journey, The aforementioned specific technologies should make you competitive for most jobs. Your learning plan should incorporate these technologies in doing projects.
Stay tuned for the next post where I’ll go through each job description to analyze exactly what day-to-day tasks and responsibilities are required in a People Analytics role. Now that we know what technologies are used, we want to dig deeper into what we’ll actually do with those tools.
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