Key skills for analytics pros

Patrick Noonan earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management, but it wasn’t until he went to work for management consulting firm McKinsey & Company that he really began to learn and appreciate the “essential skills” for analytics professionals. Thirty years later, Noonan, now a professor of Practice of Decision & Information Analysis at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, has packed all of the “best practices” of consulting he has garnered over the last three decades into one of the first courses offered by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences’ (INFORMS) continuing education program. The course, “Essential Skills for Analytics Professionals,” will be offered Sept. 26-27 in Redwood City, Calif., and Nov. 7-8 in Washington, D.C.

The skills Noonan is talking about aren’t taught at Yale or most other business or engineering schools, yet they are critical in real-world problem-solving. According to Noonan, the “essential” analytics consulting skills include: 1) defining the client’s problem properly, 2) problem structuring and work planning, 3) managing a project or team and, 4) making the case for change and implementation of the analysis and recommendations through persuasive communication.

After a five-year stint at McKinsey, Noonan returned to academia, earned a Ph.D. in Decision Science from Harvard University and joined the business school faculty at Emory. He continued to consult and teach executive education business courses … and never forgot his McKinsey experience and the “essential/professional” skills he first learned there.

Recognizing a blind spot in his MBA students’ education, he created a “professional skills” workshop for his MBA students that started as an extracurricular activity but has since become a required course for Emory MBAs in which he brings in consultants to share their ideas and “best practices” with MBA students of all stripes.

Noonan, who has taught more than 5,000 MBAs, describes the INFORMS continuing education course on essential skills as an expanded version of the course he teaches at Emory, tailored for analytics professionals. For more information on the INFORMS’ Continuing Education Program and the “Essential Skills for Analytics Professionals” course, see page 18 or click here.