Common myths about a career in Business Analytics: Busted!

Some time back, I wrote an article on “How to start a career in Business Analytics?“. The article was well received by people who want to enter Business Analytics. It is still one of the most popular articles on Analytics Vidhya. In response to this article, I received a lot of queries about career in Analytics. While some of them were good queries, some of them were recurring myths.

Hence, I decided to do a follow up article. Not only so, in order to debunk these myths entirely, I decided to publish the articles in all relevant forums.

Here are the myths I received through queries / comments / emails and my take on them:

• You need to be an engineer to start a career in Business Analytics: The truth is that you don’t. All you need is ability to think structurally and comfort with number crunching. As long as you can put structure to unstructured problems and perform back of the envelope calculations, you are as good as any analyst out there.

Having said that, companies prefer people from quantitative background, as they are expected to be better with numbers. By quantitative background, I mean people from any of these disciplines: Engineering, Economics, Maths, Statistics, Physics or MBAs with graduation in these fields.

• Analytics is about working with large datasets / Companies work with big data day in and day out: This rosy picture is far from reality in most of the Organizations. Experts estimate penetration of big data to be in low single digit percentage among Organizations. Most of the time analytics team work on specific problems, which may or may not involve large datasets. The requirement of the role is to be able to put structure across unstructured problems and be able to use numbers to understand business and the changes required in strategy.