The Evolution of Analytics and Implications for Industry and Academic Programs

In this work, we discuss how analytics is evolving in industry and academia. To assess industry needs, we conducted a text-mining study of online job postings for analytics-related positions. We also conducted a survey of academic programs in analytics-related master's programs to ascertain topic coverage relative to industry needs. Based on these two studies, we discuss gaps that we believe need to be addressed. While industry moves along the analytics maturity spectrum from descriptive to predictive to prescriptive optimization-based analytics, analytics master's programs are focusing less on optimization and more heavily on predictive analytics, thus creating the future potential for a gap in the analytics training provided by academia and the future analytics needs of industry. History: This paper has been refereed. Funding: M. R. Bowers gratefully acknowledges support toward the acquisition of data from the Department of Business Analytics and Statistics in the Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee Knoxville. J. D. Camm gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Wake Forest University School of Business Summer Research Program. G. Chakraborty gratefully acknowledges summer research support from Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University. Keywords: analytics education * analytics degree programs * analytics job market * operations research education * operations research job market
Introduction The past decade has seen tremendous growth and interest in the use of analytics in industry. Reacting to this increased interest from industry, we have also seen a dramatic [...]