WHAT ARE OUR STRENGTHS?
The future lies in technology and data. As business analytics students, we have the best of both worlds – exposure to the seemingly impenetrable world of analytics accompanied by a foundation in business. The Business Analytics (BA) programme in SUSS gives us unique strengths:
Practice Orientation
The curriculum exposes us to a multitude of different data mining/analytics topics in addition to a grounding in business functions, both with a heavy applied focus. Acquisition of such breadth of knowledge and skills is extremely useful when facilitating or implementing business analytics in organisations. The practice orientation and self-learning approach in SUSS builds adaptability as well as the ability to be dynamic in acquiring and using our knowledge and skills.
Problem Solving Focus
The business core and data mining/analytics courses focus on problem identification and problem solving. We design and implement data mining projects with business problems in mind. We go through the entire process from identifying business problems and objectives and translating them to data mining objectives to contextualising the analysis of data and grounding it in the world of business, to recommending and deploying solutions. Application is emphasised so that we have a deep appreciation of the context and can channel data collection and mining/analytics towards focused and actionable solutions to address real-world business issues, problems and challenges.
Bridge Between Analytics and Business
Business analytics is more than just collecting, cleaning and analysing data. Interpreting the results, evaluating the findings and recommending solutions are also important components of the BA curriculum. This enables us to be translators of complicated findings/models into business insights and solutions. This is the value that we can bring to the table as businesses and sectors transit from traditional business models to IT-enhanced and data-driven frameworks. Combining new concepts with traditional practices, we are better positioned to help organisations harness the power of business analytics.
HOW ARE OUR STRENGTHS RELEVANT?
Given the soft and hard skills picked up from the School of Business, how are they useful in the workplace? We spoke to two students who are currently on their Work Attachment to find out the relevance of these skills.
Chanelle, Product Consulting Intern, Tableau Asia Pacific
Chanelle works closely with Account Managers, Marketing Specialists, Product and Sales Consultants in on-boarding activities and customer enablement by helping clients understand the value of Tableau in solving their business issues. Although there is little transferability of technical skills picked up in the School of Business, Chanelle is able to make use of her expertise and knowledge of Tableau* to help customise solutions for her clients. Interning with a company that focuses on visual analytics solutions for business organisations, Chanelle is able to observe that the majority of the companies are adopting data-driven approaches to gain competitive advantage. Eventually, almost any job in an organisation would be related to BA, which demonstrates the relevance of BA whether in terms of technical or soft skills like problem solving, communication and critical thinking skills.
*Tableau is a visual analytics platform which is taught in ANL201 to all BA students.
Nadea, Data Analytics Intern, Dentsu Aegis Network
As an intern under the analytics team in iProspect (Performance Optimisation arm of Dentsu Aegis Network), Nadea’s main job scope involves reporting on the performance of the clients’ campaigns run by the agency. This entails accessing different advertising platforms to obtain data for comparison and performing analyses related to the clients’ targets and what they have actually achieved, as well as liaising with global teams to collaborate on reports.
Prior to starting her internship, Nadea struggled to find a balance between her interests and technical skills, as she did not expect analytical skillsets to complement the communications industry well, having perceived analytics to be strictly applicable to business. However, Nadea later learnt that business analytics is a very versatile skillset that can be applied to almost every type of business and industry. As an intern, she gets to use visualisation software to analyse media consumption patterns, and suggest recommendations for clients, based on how their advertisements are being received. Being able to apply technical skills picked up as a BA student in a field where she has a genuine interest for has become a big motivating factor for her to excel.
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