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Employment Demand
The growth in the area of big data and the need for deriving insight from this data has a direct correlation on employment demand for academically trained business analysts/data scientists. Our program will teach students the technical skills they need in order to work with big data in business settings.
Our program is classified under CIP code: 52.1301, “Management Science”. Graduates with their master degrees in Management Science are considered data scientists or business analysts depending on the scope and extent of their technical skills and business acumen. Dice.com reports that business analysts are becoming “more like data-centric business intelligence analysts, similar to data scientists.”
The April 2015 edition of Analytics (INFORMS) says that the data science profession has emerged to solve the peculiar computing and analysis problems of data that are not only big but also unstructured and messy. Employees need to know how to use tools invented specifically to store and retrieve massive amounts of data efficiently. "They need to be proficient at distinguishing the useful from the useless in messy data through the use of sophisticated statistical models and machine learning techniques."
National Employment Demand
Sara Royster, economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), writes in Working with Big Datathat employers are looking for people with master’s degrees to fulfill their needs. "In addition to technical knowledge, data scientists also need to be creative thinkers and problem solvers. To develop these valuable skills, a graduate program should teach communication skills, teamwork, and curiosity." Our curriculum integrates such skill development throughout the program at an advanced level.
The job possibilities are as Big as Big Data
Graduates of our program will gain the technical skills required of data scientists and the business context skills required of business analysts. They will be trained to work in a variety of industries such as accounting, consulting, defense, energy, financial services, manufacturing, retail, technology, telecommunications and transportation. The following job titles would be appropriate for graduates with this degree: Business Analyst, Business Intelligence Analyst, Statistician, Operations Research Analyst, Big Data Engineer, Optimization Analyst, Data Analyst, and Business Analytics Consultant.
Workplace Skills
Our program will teach you the advanced workplace skills and knowledge to work in the field of business analytics and Big Data. The following are specific competencies that graduates of our program will be able to apply to selected workplace/job opportunities for advanced business analysts:
- Construct and validate predictive models
- Analyze statistical concepts including regression, time-series analysis, Bayesian methods, clustering, etc.
- Use statistical software such as R, SAS, SPSS to analyze data
- Write computer programs in Python, C++, Java, Visual Basic or other languages.
- Distill strategic insight from analyses of models and statistical analyses
- Design, execute and test quantitative analyses
- Extract relevant data from multiple database management systems using SQL and other tools
- Perform data scrubbing and usability analysis to identify anomalies
- Assist in building complex models and reports
- Participate in the development of dashboard design
- Analyze data using Big Data technologies, such as Hadoop and NoSQL
- Apply descriptive analytics to analyze data and validate assumptions
- Monitor and analyze data to recognize patterns and trends
- Create optimization and simulation models as well as other predictive analytics tools
- Communicate with clients to understand their business needs and provide analytic solutions
- Create data visualizations, advanced analytics and predictive modeling to solve clients’ needs
The MSBA Program is accredited by AACSB and SACSCOC.
