Business analytics in practice and in education: A Competency-based perspective

Business analytics is a fast-growing area in practice. The rapid growth of business analytics in practice in the recent years is mirrored by a corresponding fast evolution of new educational programs. While more than 130 graduate and undergraduate degree programs in business analytics have been launched in the past 5 years, no commonly accepted model of business analytics curriculum yet exists. Drawing on competency-based curriculum design literature, we take the first steps towards initiating a debate on the model curriculum in business analytics. We analyze a sample of business analytics job announcements from different industries and identify a preliminary set of business analytical competencies sought in practice. Further, we examine six existing graduate programs in business analytics which reveal divergent approaches to business analytics curricula. These institutions were selected since they offered a graduate degree program in business analytics for at least two years. Our findings indicate that there are significant variations in the program structure in terms of program length (10 to 18 months) and flexibility (electives comprise 0 to 37% of the course work). We also found that the programs vary greatly in the coverage of both traditional analytics and the new emergent technologies and analytical methods. We conclude with a commentary on the emergent trends in business analytics in practice and the opportunities presented by these trends for the academia.