Month: September 2020

Categories
Analytics

3 Reasons: Business Analytics at Nanyang Business School

Business Analytics Specialisation at Nanyang Business School

Having recently graduated in Business Analytics, here are 3 reasons why I picked Business Analytics:

1. Management Science and Problem Solving Skills

My biggest takeaway from doing a business analytics degree was that merely knowing how to code in R, Python, SQL, etc does not make you a good business analytics student. Instead, understanding the problem forming and solving framework is key in tackling any business problems which we want to solve. All my modules consisted of heavily hands on projects for me to exercise good business sense, along with a sprinkle of technical and statistical flavour.

Ultimately, in order to succeed in Business Analytics, it is not about how good your algorithm is, but how your proposed solution solves the problem at hand! While coding is a must-know, it is definitely not the crux of business analytics.

You may be interested in this article if you would like to get started on bridging between analytics and management.

2. Classroom Diversity and Versatility

Business analytics gave me the chance to meet classmates with a variety of interests. I enrolled into business analytics to make an impact in the marketing and management sectors and adding value through analytics. While going through the Business Analytics curriculum, I managed to also embark on Human Resource projects, as well as a real-life business analytics consulting project with Aon. Do stay tuned in future for updates.

I had the opportunity to interact with friends working in various sectors, including Finance, Supply Chain, Logistics, Consulting, Data Science. Previously, I had internships in Market Intelligence, Digital Marketing, Product Marketing and Human Resources in the Automotive, Information Technology and Medical Devices sector. Currently, I’m putting my knowledge to the test in the retail sector!

Hence, you can see that the beauty of business analytics is that it can be used anywhere!

In the meantime, here is a post on how to maximise your experience in Business School!

3. Relevance of Business Analytics in Industry 4.0

Initially, I took business analytics to future proof myself. All around the world, we hear buzzwords like Industry 4.0, or big data being the next big thing. Especially in Singapore, there is an increased emphasis on Technology and Analytics. All the universities in Singapore have started offering analytics as part of their degree programme offerings. In NBS, the analytics cohort in 2018 (Based on the database classes, our core module) was 4 classes, in 2020 it has almost doubled to 7 classes. Therefore, we can see a clear increase in supply of classes to meet the increasing industry demand. (Hope you like the casual economics, and fun fact some countries call business analytics econometrics!)

Do stay tuned to some of my future blog posts on my Business Analytics curriculum review as well as other topics in the near future!

Next, you may want to read this module selection guide if you have decided on Business Analytics! Otherwise, you may want to read this to select your General and Unrestricted Electives.

We have also did a tiering of modules in NBS and NTU on our Youtube Channel!

If you liked our post, do bookmark this site, or follow us on our LinkedIn page as we look forward to creating new content for you every week.

Image credits: Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Categories
Analytics Management

Integrating Analytics and Management: Where and How to Start?

Recently, while at work, I was given the opportunity to run some data analytics on some data in order to create some business insights and recommendations for a colleague. While I have learned about Business Analytics while in school, implementing it in real life as a one-man analyst is not just a walk in the park.

After practicing in real life and coming out with some insights so far. Here are some possibilities you could explore if you are keen on introducing data analytics into your day-to-day management work.

1. Establish the Goal of your Project

When given a project, there is surely an end goal which is required by whomever has assigned you the project. One way to establish the end Goal of the project is to ask the project leader who has provided the project. If he or she does not have a goal in mind, you could look into the data to propose the possibilities. With a goal, it would be easier to scope your project.

2. Determine the Nature of the Project

Once you have established your goals, you will have to figure out the nature of your project. Is it more descriptive in nature? Or more predictive? Do you want to see what your data says, or try to use the data to predict something else? With the nature of the project in place, it would help you to know whether you should be focusing on descriptive or predictive methods, especially since there is so many analytics tools out there and there is no way you can try everything on the same project in a limited period of time.

3. Try your Visualisations and Models

With so many models out there, which to use? I am also in the process of figuring this out and you could stay tuned to future blog posts if I come across the chance to do more projects.

For now, a good example of visualisations can be through Tableau, Google Analytics and Excel Charts.

A good example of models can be Machine Learning Models through R, Python and Microsoft Excel.

4. Prepare Insights, Recommendations. Rinse and Repeat

Once you are done with your models, you have to summarise your insights which are paired with specific recommendations. You can then engage your project leader, check if everything is going along the right direction. Over time, if you can continue to work on the project, find ways to consistently relook at the data, the insights and think of ways to improve the model and the connect to the business.

At the end of the day, when you are doing analytics, always focus on the needs and requirements of the business to propose strong insights and recommendations, and not the models which you are using.

If you’re interested in how to formulate insights, do take a look at my analysis of 500 users on Google Analytics.

Looking to improve on your skills amidst this pandemic? Here are some skills you could learn to future proof yourself!

Categories
Management

Make the Most Out of Your Business School Experience (NTU Nanyang Business School Graduate)

Cover on Business School Myths

After attending business school for 3 years, here are some of the reflections which I have which may be beneficial to all who want to study at business school. Do note that this is an account from my own experience and many other students may experience vastly different experiences. Here are some tips from me to make the most out of your business school experience:

1. Do as many internships as possible, across different industries, and different functions.

While in Nanyang Business School, and many other business schools, we would have one compulsory internship which we may have to complete, I encourage you to go out of your comfort zone to experience the different industries. Some of the benefits include the following:

Firstly, by having more internship experience, you can gain a better understanding of the world of business. Many industries operate in different styles and manners. Having experienced the automotive, information technology and medical device industries, I felt that despite having roles which were in business, in Talent Management, Market Research and Marketing, I could apply my business and analytics knowledge in a variety of ways. This allowed me a better understanding of how what I learn in school can be actively applied.

Secondly, you have more touch points to stay as relevant as possible. You will get to understand what are the skillsets required by each industry, and you gain a head-start compared with other graduates without prior experience in the industry. An understanding of the business operations in the role would allow one to connect the dots and grow to understand more on business functions and responsibilities.

Thirdly, culture. By having more internship experiences, you have the opportunity to compare the various kinds of cultures in each organisation. This would determine whether you believe that you fit into a particular company or industry. By seeing more types of cultures, as fresh graduates, we could also better discern what kinds of cultures fit our personal goals in developing as future business leaders.

If you need help on looking for internships, this post may be useful:

https://tanweixiang.com/ntu-nbs-internship-hunting-guide-tips-from-an-nbs-graduate-with-3-mnc-internship-experiences/

2. Try to work with different people.

While you may feel comfortable with just working with your closest pals sometimes, actively mixing it up once in a while allows the chance to tweak your working patterns to fit an ideal role.

More often than not, when you are working with the same people across different modules, you end up fulfilling a particular role in the group, be it as the one who leads in the discussions, the contributor, task manager and so on, and this may be a missed opportunity in trying something different.

By working with different people, you get the chance to get more creative and hone multiple skills, sometimes going just specifically on design and presentation, and other times managing extremely complex calculations. By actively switching up things, I found it an impressive learning opportunity for me.

3. Surprise yourself by going out of your comfort zone.

Many naysayers may say that in business school you are learning the same thing as everyone else, which means you are not really set apart from others. I would beg to differ.

Some ways which I managed to actively surprise myself to grow my learning experience:

  • Joining over 7 communities during the course of my studies.
  • Starting a profit-making small business and collaborating managing the end-to-end of the business with both business and non-business students.
  • Going for an exchange programme to France where I had the chance to learn from many different cultures.
  • And so on…

For me, I believe that my business school experience was a great opportunity to learn, grow, lead and serve. I hope that you would actively seek out internships, work with new people and go out of your comfort zone.

In addition, if you liked reading about this post, do follow us on our LinkedIn Page. Also, you might know why I picked business analytics at Nanyang Business School!

Image Credits: Original image by Wengang Zhai on Unsplash

Categories
Analytics

What I Learned from Analysing 500 New Users Using Google Analytics

An image to capture attention from reader

Hi everyone! It’s been quite a while since we had a new analytics post. This time, we are doing some analytics on our own website here at https://tanweixiang.com/. Over the past two months, we have gained close to 500 new users, and therefore we decided to curate this special post as a reward to show some behind the scenes web analytics.

Do read this post, click around, share it, for us to have more complex data to be analysed in future!

A quick overview of Google Analytics, there are some general reports on Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions. Audience is basically who views our posts. Acquisition answers the question on how we get the audience. Behaviour answers questions on what content our audience may be more interested in. We would not be writing about conversions as we have not researched too much into this yet.

The types of reports available on Google Analytics.

Audience

1. Most of our Audience are from Singapore.

For the past two months, Top 3 Audience are from Singapore, United States and Hong Kong.

For the past two months, our top 3 Audience are from Singapore, United States and Hong Kong. It is aligned with our expectations as the content is mostly tailor made for Singapore, and shared through social media accounts with a high Singapore following.

2. Most of our Audience access the website with a Mobile Phone or Tablet.

Top 3 Systems used are Android, iOS and Windows.

From this, we found out that 80% of our audience access the website using a mobile phone or tablet. Therefore, we know that it is important to keep our system optimised for mobile phones and tablets, which typically have a smaller screen size than laptops and desktops.

Acquisition

1. While Largely Driven by Social Media, We have grown a Direct Audience and Achieved some SEO.

About a third of our audience comes through direct and search engine traffic.

While social media remains the key to some of the post traffic, we are heartened that there is also a large amount of organic traffic coming in. With this, we feel more confident in curating original content for great readers like you.

While we’re at this, do take a look at one of our posts which may have been missed on:

Key Takeaways from my In-office turned Work-from-Home Internship

2. Our Top Social Media Traffic is LinkedIn, While Instagram Follows Closely Behind

Linkedin, Instagram and Facebook are our top 3 social media.

LinkedIn remains as the top source where users visit. A key possibility is that the blog attract more readers in the Business sector. Being a blog on Analytics, Innovation, Marketing and Management, this is consistent with the expected audience. Instagram remains close behind as student content also drives some of the traffic for the website.

Behaviour

1. Our Readers Tend to stay on Each Page for 1.5 Minutes.

The average time each user spends on a page.

1.5 minutes is the current duration our readers tend to spend on a page. The implication could be that the content may or may not be interesting enough, or just the vast sea of content all around and there is not enough time to read through everything. When we manage our own digital posts, we could try to benchmark on how long to post, in order to ensure that the attention span of the audience is not overlooked.

2. Our Top Pages includes the Root Domain, as well as posts catered to Business School/ University Life

Our top 3 posts, as well as our main page.

This summary of views by page title indicates the content which interests readers more. A good blog post generates great viewership, this is why we will continue to curate posts which interest you as the reader.

That is all for the analysis for today! Hope you enjoyed, do follow us on our channels, we only have linkedin so far! https://www.linkedin.com/company/tanweixiang/

To read some of our top posts, do click the links below:

https://tanweixiang.com/ntu-nbs-internship-hunting-guide-tips-from-an-nbs-graduate-with-3-mnc-internship-experiences/
https://tanweixiang.com/three-reasons-why-i-picked-a-specialisation-in-business-analytics-at-nanyang-business-school/
Nanyang Business School: Business Analytics Module Selection Guide