Business Analytics Education: A Latent Semantic Analysis of Skills, Knowledge and Abilities Required for Business versus Non-Business Graduates

Market demand for business analytics (BA) professionals has been skyrocketing in recent years, but challenges arise in developing BA programs. In this study, we seek to uncover the key components of skills, knowledge, and abilities (SKAs) that employers require for this emerging profession by business degree and non-business degree (e.g., computer science, engineering, statistics, mathematics). We used Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a text mining technique, to analyze text data of BA position dvertisement on LinkedIn, and adopted the educational framework of Bloom’s taxonomy as a sensitizing lens to interpret our results. Our analysis reveals differences in the SKAs for different education: Business graduates are expected to have SKAs in mathematics and BI technologies, while CESM graduates are desired to have business strategy and market knowledge. KSAs are also identified for BA positions that are open to any other academic degrees. Implications on BA program and curriculum design are discussed.

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