INFORMS launches continuing education program

Know anyone in the high-end analytics profession who says they learned everything they needed to know in kindergarten? Not likely. In fact, with technology changing, few analytics professionals can even say they learned everything there was to learn in grad school.

With the need for analytics professionals to continually upgrade their skills, INFORMS recently introduced the first two in what will be a series of continuing education courses to let operations researchers and analytics professionals update their skills and introduce new concepts.

The initial courses are: “Essential Skills for Analytics Professionals” and “Data Exploration and Visualization.” More courses will be available in 2014.

To ensure that the courses are valuable and that they help professionals do their jobs better and help them qualify for career advancement, INFORMS identified courses that provide vital job skills. The courses will be two days in length, offered in a classroom setting and held in conjunction with INFORMS meetings, as well as offered in major cities at specialized training facilities, including those at company and government locations. The courses will be offered initially in the United States, but INFORMS has plans to make the courses available internationally in numerous countries.

Taking note of the increasing number of courses that are now offered online, INFORMS is exploring the development of online courses, with some given in real time and others available on demand. This online component is slated for a 2014 rollout.

Students who complete the courses and pass the exams will receive professional development units (PDUs).

Conscious of the need for improvement, INFORMS will monitor reactions to the courses and use the feedback to make modifications so that students get the most possible from their instruction.

A closer look at the two initial courses that have been scheduled:

Course: Essential Skills for Analytics Professionals

Participants will learn practical tools for integrating their analytical skills into real-world problem solving for businesses and other organizations. The course provides approaches that can be applied immediately to a wide variety of settings, whether within a participant’s own organization or for an external client.

By the end of the course, participants will:

• learn to link their subject-matter expertise to the challenges of messy, unstructured problems, organizational noise and non-technical decision makers; and
  
  
• understand best-practice techniques, including: problem statement summaries, issue trees, interview guides, work plans, sensitivity analysis, stress-testing recommendations, the “Pyramid Principle” of story logic, story-boarding, slide-craft, delivering presentations and fielding questions and answers.

Faculty: Patrick S. Noonan
Patrick S. Noonan is professor of Practice of Decision & Information Analysis and associate dean for Management Practice Initiatives at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University. From 1996-2000 he also served as assistant dean and director of MBA programs. He has been a visiting professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and he has taught short courses at Aalto University (Helsinki), ESAN (Lima) and Universidad ORT (Montevideo).

Noonan began his academic career on the faculty of the Harvard Business School, where he received his Ph.D. in decision sciences.

Noonan’s traditional coursework at Emory – which includes decision modeling, game theory and data analysis – has earned the Distinguished Educator Award 12 times and “Last Lecture” speaker role six times.

Course dates and locations: Sept. 26-27, 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Seaport Conference Center, 459 Seaport Ct., Redwood City, CA 94063; and Nov. 7-8, 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Gestalt Partners, 1325 G St., NW, 10th Floor, Suite 1020, Washington, DC 20005

Editor’s note: For more on Noonan and the “essential skills” course, see “Inside Story” in this issue of Analytics magazine.

Course: Data Exploration & Visualization

Participants in this course can expect to be re-introduced to approaching data in a powerful yet playful manner. They will see and experience how exploration and visualization can corroborate existing hunches and questions, reveal unexpected patterns, as well as stimulate new perspectives and insights.

During the course various commercial software will be used. The focus is on understanding the underlying methodology and approach into how data should be approached, handled, explored, and incorporated back into the domain of interest.

At the end of the course, participants will:

• have confidence to explore new data using the exploration/visualization approach;
  
  
• be able to approach and deploy interactive visualization;
  
  
• understand how to identify practically meaningful discoveries;
  
  
• experience using state-of-the-art visualization software; and
  
  
• think more creatively about data and insights.

Faculty: Galit Shmueli and David R. Hardoon
Galit Shmueli is SRITNE Chaired Professor of Data Analytics and associate professor of Statistics & Information Systems at the Indian School of Business. She is best known for her research and teaching in business analytics, with a focus on statistical and data mining methods for contemporary data and applications in information systems and healthcare.

Shmueli’s research has been published in the statistics, management, information systems, and marketing literature. She authors over seventy journal articles, books, textbooks and book chapters, including the popular textbook Data Mining for Business Intelligence and Practical Time Series Forecasting. Shmueli is an award-winning teacher and speaker on data analytics.

She has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Maryland, the Israel Institute of Technology, Statistics.com and the Indian School of Business.

David R. Hardoon is associate director of Business Analytics at Ernst & Young Singapore, Advisory Services. He is leading the analytics practice and is responsible for the positioning of business analytics advisory and services to clients across different business sectors. He is also an adjunct faculty member of the School of Information Systems and Singapore Management University in Singapore and an honorary senior research associate at the Centre for Computational Statistics & Machine Learning, University College London in the United Kingdom.

Hardoon has been engaged at various conferences and workshops to speak on research and business related topics in machine learning, data mining and business analytics. He also regularly tutors, advises and provides consulting support in his field of expertise – analytics and business analytics.

For more information, visit the INFORMS website (www.informs.org) or going directly to https://www.informs.org/Certification-Continuing-Ed/INFORMS-Continuing-Education.

Course dates and locations: Sept, 30-Oct. 1, 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Seaport Conference Center, 459 Seaport Ct., Redwood City, CA 94063; Oct. 3-4, 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Minneapolis Marriott City Center, 30 South 7th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55402.

Learn more about both initial courses and the INFORMS Continuing Education program by visiting the INFORMS website, www.informs.org; going directly to https://www.informs.org/Certification-Continuing-Ed/INFORMS-Continuing-Education; or by contacting Continuing Education Program Manager Thedra White: e-mail: [email protected]; phone: 1-800-446-3676 or 443-757-3570.