ReCAP: Josh Zimmerman

Name: Josh Zimmerman

Employer: Principal Financial Group

Job Title: Data and Operations Research Scientist

Primary Job Functions

• Quantitative Research in Finance

Date CAP Certification Was Earned

March 15, 2019
 

How did you first hear about CAP?

I first heard about CAP when I was recommended to obtain it for my current job. I didn’t know much about INFORMS or CAP at first, but I learned more about them from reading online and talking with my coworkers.  

How does being a CAP help in your workplace?

Being a CAP in my workplace helps because our team of data scientists work with a lot of different business areas within Principal Financial Group. It is important to be able to translate any type of business problem into a solvable analytics problem. The soft skills required for the CAP are very useful for communicating with stakeholders and understanding their business problems.

Do you think CAP should serve as a hiring mechanism? Should it apply equally to government jobs and industry jobs?

Having the CAP on your resume will definitely increase your chances of landing a great job in the data science or analytics field. CAP should be a highly sought after certification in the data science and analytics field, regardless of whether a job is in industry or the government. There are not that many certifications that can be acquired in the analytics field, so CAP is certainly a valuable certification to have.

Finish this sentence: To me, being a Certified Analytics Professional means…

… being someone who can readily adapt to solve any type of analytics problem, not only by using a wide variety of quantitative methods and techniques, but also by framing the business problem into one that can be solved using data and analytics. It means someone who is fluent in all aspects of analytics, has the right combination of technical and soft skills, and can manage analytics projects from start to finish. 

Was the exam harder or easier than you thought it would be?

It was harder than I thought since it covered a wide range of topics, some of which were new to me. Having a background in statistics, I was familiar with most of the questions on data and modeling, but some of the other topics such as optimization and business problem framing were a bit more challenging for me. You really need to understand all the steps of an analytics project from start to finish to pass the exam. 

What are some current issues/trends/challenges in analytics that you see?

Machine learning methods are popular these days. However, they are often used without understanding how the underlying algorithms work and how there is also uncertainty in the predictions produced by these methods. It is always important to identify the reasons why a chosen method would be appropriate given the context of any problem. It is also useful to provide a range of possible values for the prediction in addition to a point estimate of the prediction to attempt to account for the uncertainty in the prediction. This is easy to do for a linear regression model, but it can be more complicated to create a prediction interval when using machine learning methods.