8 Laying the Foundation for People Analytics Success

When it comes to laying a foundation for a successful career in People Analytics, I recommend you focus first on your ability to apply people analytics rather than your ability to do people analytics.

Applying something doesn’t require having made or created the thing you will apply. For example, let’s say you decide to paint a room in your home. Your goal is to make it more pleasing and well-suited to the lifestyles of the people who live in it. To meet your objective (a nicely painted room), you do not need to learn the chemistry of creating paint, or the color science to pigment it. You don’t even need to learn how to paint (you can always hire a painter). But, you will need to understand what the room is used for (a child’s bedroom? a kitchen? the entryway?) and you will need to make decisions about how to use the paint to create your desired outcome (calming? vibrant? unique?). It is true that you may need to learn some paint-specific knowledge to complete your task (what does matte, semi-gloss, or satin even mean? And, who knew there were so many shades of yellow to choose from?!). Afterward, you invite others to your home and they say, “Wow, I love how you painted the walls.” It doesn’t matter if you didn’t physically make the paint or brush it on yourself. You met your objective of making the room pleasing and suited to purpose by knowing what was needed, learning enough to make the right decisions, and ensuring the desired results were met.

This painting example is meant as an analogy for thinking about how a career in People Analytics can fall somewhere along a more or less technical spectrum. You can focus only on applying people analytics – much like an interior designer who is an expert in knowing what needs to be painted and how to achieve the best results but doesn’t do the technical pieces themselves. Or, you can decide that you want to get really technical and take on roles like a people data analyst or scientist – that would be like being a paint maker or a painter in our analogy. You can also find a place in the middle. Maybe you want to be more of a do-it-yourself home improvement specialist who makes the decisions about what to paint and do the manual work themselves too.

I find it helpful to consider three styles from which you might approach your own career in People Analytics. That of a data consumer, a data-doer, and/or a data translator.

A data doer is my own made-up term for anyone whose job is specifically to gather, analyze, manage, and/or interpret data to respond to a specific question, problem, or deliverable. For the moment, we will skip past the role of “data doer” – more on this in Step 3 – to focus on the two roles that arguably require deeper excellence in non-technical skills for success: the data consumer and data translator. A data consumer is anyone who uses data results that they did not create themselves. You are already a data consumer today as you read articles, take in information, and use available insights to make decisions in your day-to-day life. Finally, a data translator is a person who serves as the link between those doing the analytics and those using them to make decisions; this is a person who knows enough about the ‘doing’ to understand and translate the work of doers to the consumers who may not well versed in the data or analysis being used.

Regardless of which type of role you might gravitate toward in people analytics, you will require non-technical skills. Even the data doer cannot do their job well without understanding the uses, purposes, and conditions in which their results will be used. In People Analytics non-technical skills allow you to identify business priorities and opportunities. They help you translate business needs into analytics questions and enable you to leverage data to create results. So, let’s get into some of the best non-technical skills for accelerating your People Analytics career.