The “would like to have” checklist in my mind for marketing analytics peoplecoming into Neal is as follows:
1.Pretty advanced Excel skills
a.Genuine enthusiasm for Pivot tables
b.Know how to trick Excel graphs into doing what you need.
2.Data Modeling
a.Entity relationship modeling of data bases or the ability to understand ER diagrams.
b.Basic SQL skills (can query multiple tables in SQL Server for example)
c.Higher level SQL Server Analysis/Integration/Management Services or equivalent a big plus. “Self Service BI” or ETL experience removes dependencies.
3.Data Visualization
a.Portfolio of data visualizations you’ve done?
b.Tableau, Power View, or GGPLOT2 in R
4.Some coding experience in something. Not picky about this as my experience is debugging spaghetti code accounting software in Visual Basic. I.E., you don’t need to be a developer. But you will need some kind of scripting or programming experience.
5.Stats
a.SAS, or SPSS, or R, or SYSTAT, or other omnibus stats software
b.Survey research or linear regression, time series work a plus
c.Eagerness to learn new statistical tools:
i.Most common pattern at Neal is “Go to R-Bloggers.com look up the technique (ex., market basket models), find an R package with data and routines. Install the package, replicate the numbers from the data. Get your head around the procedure.” That in 90 minutes.
6.Analytical business fluency
a.Analytical (not necessarily quantitative) business models
i.Porter five forces
ii.Organizational Change (Heath and Heath’s SWITCH a big favorite)
iii.Personal Organization (David Allen’s GETTING THINGS DONE a favorite)
iv. List others if well-known but unlisted
b.Ability to identify critical issues in business scenarios.
c.Experience problem solving in high uncertainty situations a plus.
i. Many of the things we do are undefined by nature, and being able to work without an instruction set is essential
If you have more than half the stuff on this list, the rest is likely to be easy enough to pick up once you are attached to projects here.