Extra degree to get a career?

Kynthia

I don't know the area you are looking to specialise in so I can't say for sure what qualifications would help. However I would be surprised if having an English degree was really confusing employers and holding you back. Most people with arts and humanities degrees are in fields unrelated to their studies, and the older you get the less interested employers are in degrees.

I find employers are much more interested in experience and are more impressed with industry specific qualifications that are relevant. Things like ACCA, CIPD, CIMA, various IT qualifications, etc.

marlot

I've worked in a number of companies, and am not aware of many analytics roles in HR.

If you really wanted to do extra study, I'd look at something like CIPD (if you want to stay/advance in HR) or CIMA (if you wanted to focus on analytics). Management Accounting does MUCH more of the analytics stuff, and there will be more jobs around.

danenglander

Hi,

Here's a good Udemy course which is at 90% off: B2B Sales Blueprint, the Path to x3 Sales within 12 Months

Do you want to win more deals? Do you want to multiply your results with apps, tools, and outsourcing? By the end of this course, you’ll know how. Also, you will have created your very own custom sales script.

Coupon Code: FatWallet_5-5 valid until May 5th

CharllieSays

Firstly, thank you everyone for the great advice!

To give you an idea of my future aim:

http://www.indeed.co.uk/Human-Resource-Data-Analyst-jobs
http://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/human-resources/hr-analyst

This isn't what I'm applying for now though. This is what I want to move into later on. At the moment I've just been applying for any HR admin/assistant roles (temp or perm) to get into a larger HR team. Before that I was applying to any general assistant analyst jobs or anything payroll related that could lead to it. I have about 5 years experience doing payroll, finance and accounts in various past roles, so I had assumed it would be easy to get back in.

Madvixen/Dancing Fairy - I will have a look into getting a certification if what you say is true. I tend to just specify 'pivot tables, lookups' on my CV. I'll check out the Microsoft qualifications.

Agrinnall - I know someone who did this role in the past for a large bank, with no finance qualifications (just CIPD), and as far as I'm aware no previous finance experience. Just moved from HR assistant to HR data analyst, then to HR comp analyst to HR manager.

Cynthia/Marlot/Getting Ready - I am studying the graduate CIPD at the moment, but looking for something else to take alongside as it hasn't been as intensive as I expected and I'd like to add to my 'mathy' qualifications while I have the free time. I will have a look at those websites and see what courses they do.

Golden - I think (from what I've read so far and the people I've known in these roles), a general business/finance analyst tends to require more specific finance qualifications in comparison to an HR analyst within an HR team. Saying that, my sister has a few basic GCSEs and has been asked to apply for a business analyst role in the public sector. So I have no idea how it works any more!

InsideInsurance

I think as others have said, a pure HR DA is going to be a little uncommon but the roles certainly do exist. I imagine in a lot of cases the HR data analysis simply sits with the normal MI/BI team for the broader organisation.

As a data analyst you need good excel skills, like pivot tables and vlookup but generally SQL is the skills that are tested and the excel element is assumed. Unfortunately each database server's implementation of SQL is slightly different so being able to talk about the differences between say Oracle and MS SQL.

If you want to be more reporting than deep data then the tools for analysis like Cognos, Business Objects become more important with an ok knowledge of underlaying technology like data cubes

WobblyDog

If you're aiming to specialise in data analysis it would be worthwhile studying SQL and tools such as Sql Server Analysis Services (SSIS) and Sql Server Reporting Services (SSRS). It's generally possible to buy developer/student licences for tools such as this quite cheaply, so they can be installed on a home PC and used for home-study.

I wouldn't bother hiding your English degree, but I would try to emphasize recent experience with in-demand IT technologies.

makeyourdaddyproud

WobblyDog wrote: »

If you're aiming to specialise in data analysis it would be worthwhile studying SQL and tools such as Sql Server Analysis Services (SSIS) and Sql Server Reporting Services (SSRS). It's generally possible to buy developer/student licences for tools such as this quite cheaply, so they can be installed on a home PC and used for home-study.

I wouldn't bother hiding your English degree, but I would try to emphasize recent experience with in-demand IT technologies.

Neither of the BI stack apps SSIS or SSAS would be any use without real world experience using them. They are very large application domains, and simply "buying" and "installing" at home will get you nowhere. You will not become proficient learning them at home.

What you do need to become a pro in those apps is understanding how they relate to real world problems: how you score metrics given a problem domain (which is unique to every employer), how you build workflow threading across heterogenous sources to load disparate data, what constraints on you schema (nulls, check constraints, referential integrity etc) will limit what data you can move and how you move it, what isolation schemes persist movement of said data without blocking. It get's nasty - how normalised is your data, is it 3NF and beyond?

SSIS seems outside of what you want to do, unless you're happy to shuffle datasets around all day. Many pros hate SSIS, as it is bulky, overcomplicated, and many end up resorting to fudge xpcmdshell over BCP for pure nonlogged data loading.

Excel is a good tool to have, unfortunately ODBC support providers for both Oracle and SQL Server is buggy - resulting in failed data loads, rollbacks and data integrity semaphore breaches if using Excel as a mutable presentation layer for the big data apps (SQL, oracle), but this is a less than perfect solution owing to Excel's limitations too. I would, however, recommend SSRS for presentation delivery.

Now SQL. Each database product has their own extension but you can at least set your SQL mode to ANSI and this should aid portability - even so your schema's data types may not be compatible. T-SQL is very powerful in the right hands so I would recommend at least understanding @@ERROR conditions in code, Try Catch exceptions, and CAST or CONVERT if your working to convert to Excel's datatypes.

A Data Analyst might not be so concerned with operational idioms or sprocs of SQL Server (for example) but becoming familiar with XML and how you break apart the XML tokens using TSQL would be an asset on a CV.

Zack_Smith

Sure, why not? Have you looked at job adverts for narrowing down your choice?The job description should imply what they want exactly. Then again, it's always a better option to add more value to your CV. I did full fledged online finance course & gained a certification fro the Bluebook Academy. That was something very good for me.

Cycrow

madvixen wrote: »

You would be amazed at how many people of our age (I'm an 80's baby also) can't do them though. I got an excel qualification with my last job and it's proved exceptionally useful. You can tailor a CV all you like but a qualification is the proof that you can do these things. An excel qualification that costs say £100 may be a very worthwhile investment.

Yeah even some technical people dont really know excel. My knowledge of Excel is limited, although i can do the basics, and some people i work with dont really use it at all. And we are all programmers