Business Intelligence Jobs
I received an email where the sender wrote: “I found that there are many job openings in Business Intelligence area both local and oversea. How could students study this field since there is no major in Business Intelligence? Please advise.”
Answer: Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the application of information technology to identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, to support business decision-making. A BI system is also called a Decision Support System (DSS) where it provides historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Major functions of the BI system are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics. There is NO degree in Business Intelligence as it is often taught in Information System Management (ISM) courses. If you are interested in this career, you must build your knowledge and skills in the following:
- Basic Programming Skills: Every Information Technology (IT) field teaches programming languages and data structure. However, beside the common languages such as C++, Java or C# you also need to build your skill in some scripting languages similar to how Excel has macros. These languages may require some effort to learn, especially many do not have resources to refer to.
- Relational Databases: You need to take some database courses and understand how relational databases work. Most BI jobs do require skills in Database, Data mining etc.
- Structured Query Language (SQL) this is the programming language used exclusively for extracting information from databases. Since SQL does not change much between different databases, so learning one is enough to apply to all databases.
- Analysis Skills: There is no specific course teaching this specific skill so you will learn these skills mostly “on the job”. Most companies understand this and willing to train employees after hiring them.
Although, many job openings stated that they prefer someone with 2 years of experience but due to the shortage, many companies will hire graduates in Information System Management (ISM) or computer graduates who has taken Database courses then train them to be Business Intelligence Analyst. Of course, if you want to work oversea, you must have foreign language skill too. My choice is to learn English as it is still the preferred language that allow you to work in many countries.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
