Trends in Analytics Training

While there is a strong need and demand for basic courses in data mining and analytics, including tool training, there are a couple of trends emerging in training requirements around different areas of analytics.

One big area of demand has been around Big Data Analytics. There is a lot of corporate interest and buzz around Big Data skills as well as Big Data analytics and visualization. There has also been a significant increase in Big Data Analytics oriented training offerings that have hit the market. These courses are typically aimed at people with programming backgrounds who need to work with large volumes of data in structured and unstructured formats, and who need to understand how to set up and use distributed processing systems like Hadoop.

Related to Big Data Analytics training needs is training in R.  R, like a lot of the Big Data related technologies, is open source, and is gaining a lot of popularity for visualizations and data analysis, especially since there are now a lot of packages in R that allow users to work with R and Hadoop in an integrated fashion. Commercial enterprise versions of R have also allowed users to work on Big Data sets with R.

Other trends in analytics related trainings include requirements around specialized domains like HR Analytics. There is an increased interest in generating insights from data related to people and performance. While a lot of HR related data has been used for reporting, there is a lot more strategic and predictive insights that can be generated using the data. Similar to a specialized requirement like HR analytics, there is also interest and demand for training on training analytics and education analytics, and how to accurately capture effectiveness of training and educational programs and calculate value added.

Finally, there is tremendous interest and demand for data visualization training, using a variety of new and powerful tools that have gained popularity in the past couple of years, including Tableau, Qlikview, and Spotfire.  All these tools are mostly self service tools, but there is a need for training that combines the tool usage component with the more important training of how to actually generate insights from data that are useful and implementable.

If you found this article interesting, do take a look at the article The Importance of Big Data Training and the Hottest Sectors Using Big Data by Jigsaw trainer Kiran PV.