BI/Analytics Consultant
General Skills
- Strong interpersonal and communication skills,
- Customer-facing personality,
- Ability to work productively as an individual or in collaboration with others,
- Ability to write/communicate clearly, accurately, and effectively,
- Ability to think analytically,
- Data centricity – obsession with evidence-based problem resolution,
- An understanding of the scientific method – theory, hypotheses, testing and learning,
- Ability to use the scientific method to conceptualize business problems,
- Orientation to business and one or more business processes – either vertical or horizontal,
- Commitment to life-long learning.
Technical Skills
- Intermediate programming and computation skills,
- Facility with logical and physical relational databases (SQL),
- Understanding of the economic approach – “the allocation of scarce means to satisfy competing ends” – to problem solving,
- Facility with standard statistical/BI packages to perform analytic calculations,
- Ability to interpret the the results obtained from these packages,
- Facility with a variety of graphical/visualization techniques for exploring and presenting analytic data,
- Understanding of the principles of management, accounting, finance and marketing,
- Understanding of the meaning of business optimization,
- Ability to recognize the nature of, and to model, the random variation underlying given business data,
- Understanding the nature of statistical inference – its scope, limitations and proper role in the process of business analytical investigation,
- Ability to express a generally-posed business problem in a statistical context; ability to translate business concepts for measurement.
- Understanding how to obtain a suitable sample from a population and how to make inferences from that sample,
- Understanding of experimental and quasi-experimental designs for BI,
- Ability to provide advice on the design of business analytic investigations,
- Understanding of a variety of commonly-used analytic techniques and the models underlying them,
- Conversance with the mathematical underpinnings of often-used analytics techniques to facilitate simple modifications in appropriate situations,
- Understanding of alternatives to traditional statistical modeling from computer and mathematical sciences,
- Comfort with Internet research,
- Obsession to stay current with the latest analytic methods/techniques.