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The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
(INFORMS) is planning to establish the first certification program for analytics professionals. In an interview with OR/MS Today Editor Peter Horner in the December 2011 issue, INFORMS President Terry Harrison discussed analytics, one of INFORMS' strategic directions in general and the related certification thrust more specifically . Following is a brief summary of what he shared regarding the development of what will be known as the "certified analytics professional" (CAP) program:
- INFORMS plans to start offering an analytics certification within two years.
- Existing certifications that touch on the analytics domain are vendor specific.
- INFORMS will be the first professional society to offer one specifically aimed at analytics.
- By moving quickly, INFORMS has an opportunity to become recognized as the professional society that sets industry standards for analytics professionals.
- INFORMS has assembled a group of subject-matter experts to define the boundaries of the body of knowledge a candidate must know about analytics.
- The certification will consist of a standardized test, as well as a review of the candidate's resume or work portfolio.
- The market value of the CAP is expected to increase over time, as the demand for analytics professionals grows.
"I-shaped" people have great credentials, great educations and deep knowledge - deep but narrow. The geniuses who win Nobel prizes are 'I-shaped,' as are most of the best engineers and scientists. ... It is the ability to work in an interdisciplinary fashion and to see how different ideas, sectors, people and markets connect. ...
It is within this context that the INFORMS Analytics Certification Job Task Analysis Working Group, in a two-day meeting, discussed the shape of knowledge to be covered by the CAP certification.
Thomas H. Davenport identified three types of analysts: 1. analytical amateurs (i.e., can use spreadsheets); 2. analytical semi-professionals (i.e., can use visual tools and create simple models); and 3. analytical professionals (i.e., can create algorithms).
... the Working Group also wants to ensure that CAP does include some level of depth across the broad range of tasks performed and knowledge required by analytics professionals. For this reason, CAP will be appropriate for the analytical semi-professionals in Figure 2(b), as well as the "T-shaped" and "Pi-shaped" analytical professionals, as indicated in Figures 2(d) and 2(e), respectively. However, it will not be a suitable certification for the "analytical amateurs" represented by Figure 2(a), or the "I-shaped" analytical professionals in Figure 2(c).
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Gregory Piatetsky, Editor, KDnuggets: It seems natural that SIGKDD, ACM group for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, which organizes the top conferences in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, would also be interested in a certification program.
As Past Chair of SIGKDD, I have reached to SIGKDD Executive Committee about analytics/data mining certification, but did not get any response so far. It seems that SIGKDD - run by volunteers who are busy with their full-time jobs mining big data - will have hard time competing with other professionally run organizations like INFORMS.