Why business analytics is the newest specialization in our Master of Science in Information Systems and Operations Management
If you’ve ever been curious about how your Instagram feed, Amazon suggestions or Netflix recommendations end up being perfectly tailored to your likes and interests, you can thank a business analyst. It’s because of them that you’re now streaming Wonder Woman after watching all of the Avengers movies.
Now imagine if, instead of Wonder Woman, Netflix recommended you watch The Notebook. A romantic tear-jerker probably isn’t what you were going for.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg in the problems caused by a lack of business analysts and data scientists in today’s job market. In fact, LinkedIn found that there was a shortage of more than 151,700 people with business analytics skills in the United States in 2018. That shortage could affect everything from your entertainment recommendations to disease prediction in healthcare, fraud and risk detection in finance, demand forecasting in sales and beyond. In essence, any business problem that needs to be solved with data is one for a business analyst. That’s why we’ve expanded our Master of Science in Information Systems and Operations Management (MS-ISOM) degree program to include a specialization in business analytics.
Starting in the fall of 2020, you can earn a degree that will help you solve the problems that businesses face every day using data. Specifically, our program will train you to provide domain knowledge of business problems; identify key sources of data to solve business problems; assist in selecting appropriate data science models and techniques that align with the business problem and data; assess model output effectiveness in solving the business problem; provide analysis to business decision makers about the model outcomes; and make recommendations about deployment of successful data science models. You’ll learn all of this in our ten-month, 36-credit program at the University of Florida, the No. 6 public university in the nation.
We recognize that learning needs to go beyond the classroom in order for you to gain the foundation you’ll need to start your career. So, we included a practicum where you’ll get hands-on experience in solving an actual problem of a real business from beginning to end as a student in our new MS-ISOM business analytics specialization.
The shortage of business analysts we mentioned earlier? That’s good news for you, too. With an MS-ISOM business analytics specialization, you’ll be in demand in places like New York City (34,032 people needed), San Francisco Bay Area (31,798 people) and Los Angeles (12,251 people). As more and more businesses rely on data to drive decisions, your skills will be needed in industries beyond what we’ve mentioned, which could spread to other places across the nation and world.
If solving problems, gaining real-world experience and having in-demand skills (as well as being recommended movies you actually want to watch) interests you, the University of Florida Warrington College of Business has a master’s degree for you.
