Continuing education for analytics professionals

INFORMS’ popular continuing education courses will be held June 20-21 (“Essential Practice Skills for Analytics Professionals”) and June 25-26 (“Data Exploration & Visualization”) before and after, respectively, the 2014 INFORMS Conference on the Business of Big Data in San Jose, Calif. Register early to save $100.

Essential Practice 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, story-boarding, slide-craft, delivering presentations and fielding Q&A sessions.

Data Exploration & Visualization

Attendees will experience first-hand the power of visualization in exploring data as an adjunct to tried and trusted analytics methods. Using a hands-on lecture and case study approach, attendees will walk away with a proven framework for data exploration that is directly relevant to real-world problems in many fields. Incorporating popular free and leading software tools to facilitate hands-on learning, attendees will be able to directly apply the methods and techniques from this course in their work, regardless of their visualization tool of choice.

At the end of the course, participants are expected to:

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