HR Data Analytics is very topical right now in Human Resources. It is a new emerging trend within the building blocks of a best in class HR function. It is also a very under developed science and is stronger in the theory than the practice. Indeed there is also a growing logic that it is really an IT discipline rather than a HR discipline. In most organisations that have such established roles it most often aligns with the SME(subject matter expert) sub team within the larger HR functional team.
Most HR knowledge is found in a myriad of company databases. To clean this data up and get it ready for analysis, it ideally needs to be transferred to well catalogued data warehouses. From there the data can then be data mined and that’s where data analytics activity commences. Data can then be interrogated, analysed, trends identified and/or hypothesis challenged. As the model and skillsets grow, it can aspire to reach the level of predicative analytics. Given all this, what are the current skillsets that HR professionals working in this HR discipline will need to display?. A word of warning, they are in short supply and very hard to find.
Skilled HR Data Analysis requires a diverse and often unrelated set of skills and capabilities. The early emerging skills that seek to define the successful HR Data scientist best, include as many of the following as possible.
- Business Acumen
- HR Acumen
- IT/Technology Infrastructure
- Project Management
- Statistics
- Procurement
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Data Mining
- Storytelling
The ultimate aim of all data analytics is to drive better decision making based much more on scientific analysis rather than pure hunches or generalisations. The HR journey into this playing field is only starting, but long overdue.