With the explosion of Analytics globally, there has been a resonating impact in the need for educational courses to cater the same. The Indian Education industry has grabbed this opportunity, and showcases several courses to meet the need of the hour. Some of the leading institutes in India like IIM’s and IIT’s have started analytics courses in some shape and form.

There is a huge thirst of knowledge amongst the young graduates and entry-level consultants to find resources to expose them into the world of analytics. The industry has realized the importance of Analytics and is booming with new opportunities to enhance their performance by cashing on it. There still exists, a gap to balance this opportunity against an appropriate candidate profile. What the industry is now looking for are experts who can directly step in to take charge of the business. They need someone who knows the in and out of analytics, but at the same time poses industry specific knowledge & management skills.

The good news is that the Indian education industry has realized the need of this hour. Some of the premium institutes are in process of, or already have restructured their courses to provide exclusive courses in analytics. One such course worthy of mentioning is PGPBA (Post Graduate Programme in Business Analytics) by Great Lakes institute of Management. The course, with its first batch commencing from Nov’13 end; will be focusing on the current market needs while equipping the students with the required knowledge and skill set.

Most existing courses in India just focus on analytics or the ‘Business of Analytics’. From my talks with various analytics leaders and recruiters, I have realized that Business acumen is an integral part of Business analytics, almost encompassing 40% of required skill set from a professional. Also, for deep (read ‘Hardcore’) statistics capabilities, organizations tend to recruit PhD’s in Quants/ Stats. For a whole rounded analytics professional, firm today certainly look for good business acumen along with skills on data manipulation, interpretation and visualization.

Therefore, the need of the hour is a course with deeper roots into the industry. Most aspirants of analytics today do not have a prior business degree. For example, before digging deep into marketing analytics, the course should tell students in-depth about marketing itself. This aspect is something that is missing from most pure analytics courses today. And certainly a strong aspect of PGPBA at Great Lakes.

This course exposes students to real industry scenarios, by providing 2 exclusive modules purely focusing on industry. Students are given an opportunity to work on various case studies, encompassing various domains in analytics like web analytics, healthcare, risk retail etc. There by providing a firsthand business exposure.

[quote cite=”Prof Bappadita Mukhopadyay, Program Director, Post Graduate Program in Business Analytics”]The Great Lakes PGP-BA program is designed and delivered in close collaboration with some of the leading analytics companies to prepare candidates for business and managerial roles in the Analytics industry. This learning outcome gets mirrored in our curriculum which is a unique combination of General Management, Analytics and Industry exposure across various domains in analytics such as retail, risk, healthcare, supplychain, energy, telecom and social media.

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Moreover, the curriculum for the programme has been designed to include an interesting mix of domain knowledge, quantitative subjects, technical skills and applications. The first few modules of the Programme will focus on domain competency along with hands on exposure to popular analytical tools and techniques. Further into the programme participants will be given expertise in handling large data sets at Virtual Labs setup by Great Lakes; in terms of processing, managing, analyzing and representing them in a format that makes Business decisions easy.

The curriculum will also focus on specific problems encountered in domains such as Finance, Marketing, Web, Health, Energy, Telecom etc, and candidates will learn the Business Analytics approaches to solve these problems. Every candidate will be doing a company project with one of the leading analytics companies.

[quote cite=”Gaurav Vohra, CEO and co-founder of Jigsaw Academy”]We are proud to have partnered with Great Lakes, one of India’s most respected business schools that has been consistently ranked within the top 20 in the country. This partnership will further our goal of developing analytically minded professionals who want to build their careers in the field of analytics, thereby reducing the huge gap in analytics talent that exists in the market today.[/quote]

Great Lakes Institute have partnered with Jigsaw Academy to offer the analytics module of the course. Jigsaw Academy is a world-renowned analytics-training academy that provides industry relevant e training and education in the field of data science and analytics. Their award winning courses are a unique blend of statistics, statistical tools and industry knowledge; all taught through real life examples.

For more information on the program, visit http://pgpba.greatlakes.edu.in/