Why should students learn business analytics?

1. Make better decisions on the spot
2. Come up with world-changing ideas
3. Quicker alertness to problems

As a student under a business management course in the Philippines, it would be beneficial for you to study a course on business analytics or at least read up regularly on updated trends surrounding the matter. Business analytics, as the name suggests, combines data and analysis. You look at data collected and analyze it through the subject matter’s different ways:

• Predictive models based on math
• Statistical tools (Microsoft Excel, software)
• Different forms of testing to find important variables and outliers
• Interactive displays (dashboards, charts, graphs, scorecards)
• Forecasting of old data

When you analyze data using these different ways, you are able to acquire critical results. These results will then be used by important decisionmakers such as stakeholders, company management, etc. to come up with the smartest strategies. Basically, you are trying to turn the unpredictability observed in data into strategies that your brand can use as a competitive advantage.

These are the different reasons why learning business analytics will benefit business management students in the future:

You make better decisions on the spot

A lot of students studying in a business management course in the Philippines aim to reach managerial positions as quickly as they can in the future. The reason they want to be managers is not only because of the higher pay compared to entry-level positions, but also because they have the right to make decisions that will have a huge impact on the brand they will work for. But, being able to make major decisions also means you are vulnerable to major consequences that the company may not have prepared for.

The reason a wrong decision may lead to unforeseen consequences is that of the generally erratic nature of the business field. Your company will always be dealing with new competitors, trends that break old industries, and new consumer needs. All of these will lead to at least one or two unexpected consequences that every business will need to face on a regular basis.

The reasons why these bad business decisions happen are because of the characteristics and attitudes of the managers themselves. They choose wrongly out of:

• Stubbornness to old company tactics
• They acted brashly based on the wrong insights
• They were not careful with the details

Business analytics can remedy all of these problematic characteristics by showing managers data-based evidence on why old company tactics will not work anymore, what details were missed in their former decisions, and how their wrong insights were poorly executed.

You can come out with world-changing ideas

Analyzing data in new ways may bring you fresh new perspectives and ideas. In a study by Google, 64% of those interviewed believed that first, data was making long-term businesses break a lot of their traditional boundaries. Second, non-traditional brands are able to break into the industry and succeed.

We see all these moments of innovation in the news. Smartphones, under Apple, put Nokia to bankruptcy. Coke knew that people were buying less of their soda out of health concerns because it has a high amount of process sugar, so they created a healthier alternative using natural sugar stevia.

When you study the different lessons on how to start a business, one of the important courses you will encounter is in relation to marketing. Marketing is responsible for making sure your business is unique enough to stand out from competitors, thus, making it also appealing to customers. What are the major trends can help your brand become more successful and appealing to wider audiences?

If you want to be non-traditional and innovative, you have learned how to use data in ways that will exactly achieve the desired results. Business analytics helps marketers become more creative by updating them of new trends based on customer data and providing them with different methods of testing their ideas.

You are alerted to problems faster

Professors who are experts on how to start a business thanks to their experience, will repeatedly state how ignorance will be the downfall to any company. Problems will fester in a company without being noticed because its people don’t have the resources to alert them of these issues when they are still small.

They alert of you of problems by visualizing negative changes in your company productivity through their interactive displays. These displays, such as dashboards and KPI metrics, make sure employees are performing 100% every day.

Whenever they are not doing their job, the displays will show off how much lower productivity has gone and these will automatically alert higher-ups of the situation. Because of these displays, businesses are able to successfully prevent under-performing employees from further damaging a brand with their actions.

Key Takeaway

Business analytics is used by businesses to analyze their collected data in different ways. Students should learn about this subject matter, even while they are studying their course because it can greatly benefit them in their chosen career paths. When they start working in the future, they will make better decisions on the spot, come out with world-changing ideas, and be alerted to problems faster.