Business Intelligence Analyst

MICHELLE KHUSU

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ANALYST

WHY THIS PROFESSION?

Analytics gives me the opportunity to work with many departments and people within the business/ company, including the IT technical people. This then gives me the opportunity to network and also to get to know the ins and outs of the company. Analytics allows you to see how a company is doing, how it can get better, and where it is going wrong and even wasting money.

ANALYSING THE FUTURE

"Always have a few technical skills up your sleeve"

WHAT TRAINING DID YOU DO, AND WHERE?

I studied a BCom at the University of the Western Cape. Maths is essential for this type of career. SQL and Excel skills are also very important, and for those who havenʼt done much of that at school, there are plenty of cheap and free online courses. One that I recently did was Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence with Coursera.

IS THERE A PERSONALITY BEST SUITED FOR WORKING IN ANALYTICS?

Interpersonal skills are very useful to have because you work with a lot of different people from different backgrounds. Analytics provides a huge amount of stats and information to many of the departments within the organisation. How you interact with people will have an effect on your desired results for your work.

DESCRIBE A TYPICAL DAY

A typical day includes creating data analysis for different departments. For example: creating a dashboard for marketing that shows who our clients are in terms of age, how much they spend on our products and where they live. This would then help marketing in their strategies and plans for which specific client segments to target and when.

WHAT IS THE MOST CHALLENGING PART OF YOUR JOB

Trying to understand and meet everyoneʼs needs! We strive to get to a point where each department can have their own dashboard (automated report with all relevant stats) and access data without asking us or waiting on BI to get the data for them. All we would need to do is to make sure that the data is always refreshed.

WHAT IS THE BEST PART?

Job recognition and satisfaction. You get different challenges each day and you never know what request or project youʼre going to be working on. You also get exposed to many other fields such as finance and IT development. This gives you what is called domain knowledge, which means you know the ins and outs of the business.

ADVICE FOR NEWCOMERS?

Learn a programming language or learn SQL for database navigation – it makes life so much easier. Even if youʼre studying towards another career, always have a few technical skills up your sleeve because the workplace is never what you expect it to be and you never just do one thing. Having these skills, on top of your soft skills, will help you grasp the work more quickly, and you will also be a greater asset to any company.

RANKS IN THE TOP 2.5% UNIVERSITIES WORLDWIDE

UKZN has been ranked in the top 2.5% universities worldwide. This is according to the 2022-23 edition of the Global 2000 list by the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) published on 25 April. The list can be found on the CWUR website: www.cwur.org.

According to these rankings, the University is placed 484 out of 19 788 universities worldwide. The Education Ranking is at 497; the Employability Ranking is 361, and the Research Ranking is 475. The rankings place UKZN in 4th spot in Africa and also 4th in South Africa. The University has an overall score of 74.3.

Good governance, management of academic talent, research productivity, quality programmes and the high calibre of staff and students contributed to UKZN’s placement in the top 500 of the world’s leading universities.

The CWUR publishes the largest academic rankings of global universities.

The rankings are unique in that: * Objective indicators are used for all four key pillars underlying the methodology of the ranking (education, employability, faculty, and research) with no reliance on surveys and university data submissions; * Equal emphasis is put on student-related and faculty-related indicators; * 19 788 universities are ranked according to their academic performance. This augurs well for UKZN as students, academics, alumni, funders and global partners want to be associated with high-performing universities with high rankings. Rankings are an independent tool for monitoring performance. They focus on the core functions of universities which include: research, teaching, meaningful community engagement and internationalisation. They assist institutions in measuring their performance and thus selfmonitoring and self-improvement while also fostering healthy competition and best practice among universities,’ said Ms Normah Zondo, UKZN’s Executive Director: Corporate Relations.

About the methodology: CWUR uses seven objective and robust indicators grouped into four areas to rank the world’s universities: 1) Education, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have won major academic distinctions relative to the University’s size (25%). 2) Employability, measured by the number of a University’s alumni who have held top executive positions at the world’s largest companies relative to the University’s size (25%). 3) Faculty, measured by the number of faculty members who have won major academic distinctions (10%). 4) Research: i) Research output, measured by the total number of research articles (10%). ii) High-quality publications, measured by the number of research articles appearing in top-tier journals (10%). iii) Influence, measured by the number of research articles appearing in highly-influential journals (10%). iv) Citations, measured by the number of highly-cited research articles (10%).