Today's College Grads are Ill-prepared to Meet Industry's Needs for Data-Savvy Workers

Siloed approach to teaching business intelligence means students lack critical skills

News provided by

Teradata Corporation

Jun 27, 2011, 09:00 ET

ATLANTA, June 27, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Even as the growth of big data is skyrocketing, universities worldwide are struggling, and too frequently failing, to adequately prepare students to meet the demand for employees skilled in business intelligence, or BI.  This is the finding of an international survey sponsored by Business Intelligence Congress II, a meeting of business intelligence professors and industry professionals co-hosted by Teradata University Network and the Special Interest Group on Decision Support, Knowledge and Data Management Systems.

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"The State of Business Intelligence in Academia 2010" found that while employers need workers who possess both an understanding of BI and business, the vast majority of universities fail to produce qualified graduates. Too often, graduates have a highly technical understanding of BI, without the understanding of business required to apply those skills to business needs, or they have a broad understanding of business, but lack the deep understanding to capably perform BI.

Industry needs new employees who have both technical and business skills: statistics and math, business and communication. However, today universities teach these skills across programs, with no one program completely meeting the needs of industry. Only a dozen graduate schools have an actual BI concentration or degree based on a program that integrates all the content that matters for BI.

The need for highly skilled BI workers by 2018 in the US alone is projected to exceed available workforce by as much as 60 percent, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report in May. That report projects that by 2018 an additional 190,000 "deep analytical talent" workers plus 1.5 million more "data-savvy managers and analysts" will be needed to take full advantage of big data in the US alone(1). (Source: (1) McKinsey Global Institute, "Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity," May 2011.)

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Barbara Wixom, associate professor at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce.

"It's clear that evidence-based decision-making and the data analysis required to support it are now part of the fabric of many areas of business across many industries. This requires that business intelligence be part of the curricula of many different university majors. The survey shows that too often education in and experience with BI offers too narrow a view of BI and is not reflecting real-world contexts."  

Scott Gnau,

Chief Development Officer, Teradata Corporation.

"Three megatrends have contributed to the shortage of qualified employees – the data volume across many industries that is orders of magnitude larger than even five years ago, the onslaught of new applications and new data sources, and the new focus on business optimization that requires analysis of many different types of data. These factors are driving universities and companies such as Teradata to take bold steps to meet the need for a larger pool of future employees."


"Business intelligence is a new career role, a function that sits between the technologists and the business. These people have to know the language and problems that are unique to a particular industry, they need to look into the operational side to understand what data objects are required, and they must have a full understanding of analysis."


"The challenge is that to sit between these two sides requires mastery of a large amount of knowledge, but those who can do it are well positioned for a career because they are a very valuable asset."

Relevant Information

  • Given the emerging importance of big data and data analysis, hiring managers reported a pent-up demand for the skill sets, and they are having a difficult time finding enough qualified students. They are most interested in students with hands-on BI experience (74%), and experience with emerging topics (66%), and working with large data sets (54%).  
  • In an effort to provide the comprehensive understanding that students need, professors often turn to corporate educational resources. The corporate educational resource used most often is Teradata University Network, used by just under half of the professors and students.
  • BI is offered as a concentration or degree at the undergraduate level at only three schools out of 129 surveyed. At the graduate level, 12 schools offer BI as a concentration or degree.
  • Individual BI courses are taught at the undergraduate or graduate levels at 80 schools – but the course is offered by a single, isolated area of the university (e.g., an MIS department, a statistics department).
  • Hiring managers report they most often hire new BI talent from business information systems (51%), followed by computer science (41%), other areas of business (38%), and math or statistics (34%).
  • Survey respondents indicated that hands-on experiences have twofold importance since business students can gain BI technology proficiency and computer science students can experience BI-supported business applications.
  • 339 students from 62 universities worldwide took part in the survey. Forty-three percent indicated that they would like to see a clearer link between the study of BI and jobs.
  • Professors responding to the survey were from more than 129 universities around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Norway, Singapore, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the United States.
  • The survey findings were presented to the Business Intelligence Congress II in Saint Louis on December 11 and 12, 2010. Compared to the BI Congress study conducted at the end of 2009, the BI Congress II study was exponentially larger in that it included not only more academic professionals than in the previous year, but it also included students and industry professionals.
  • The survey was conducted by Barbara Wixom, co-Executive Director of the Teradata University Network, an associate professor at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce and Director of UVA's M.S. in M.I.T. graduate program, and by Thilini Ariyachandra, an associate professor of MIS in the Williams College of Business at Xavier University. It was sent to members of the Association for Information Systems and their students and a variety of professional BI channels, a triangulated sample of faculty, students and industry professionals. Respondents were university faculty, students, and industry hiring managers or recruiters from all over the world.
  • Workforce data provided by McKinsey Global Institute, "Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity," May 2011.

About Teradata University Network

Teradata University Network is a web-based portal for faculty and undergraduate and graduate students in data warehousing, business intelligence/decision support, and database and is provided at no charge to universities worldwide. Led by academics, Teradata University Network currently has more than 2,500 registered faculty members and nearly 17,000 student users from over 1200 universities in 85 countries.  

Teradata is a trademark or registered trademark of Teradata Corporation in the United States and other countries.

SOURCE Teradata Corporation

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