Data remains at the forefront of everything. From our cars to our phones, our data creates a never-ending series of footprints. As the presence of data in everyday life continues to compound, demand for professionals who have the skills to interpret it has seen a large uptick.
For example, roles for operation research analysts (a common business analytics title) are projected to grow 23% in the next decade according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—more than four times faster than the average growth rate for all occupations. As the industry continues to boom, the popularity of continued education through master’s degree programs in business analytics or alternative online courses continues to climb, too.
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Several schools on Fortune’s ranking of the best online master’s degree programs in business analytics welcomed more students in the 2021-2022 academic year compared with the prior year. During that timeframe, enrollment more-than doubled at the University of Texas-Dallas and rose 64% at Carnegie Mellon University.
While a master’s degree program in business analytics can be worthwhile, thanks to both salary and career outcomes for grads, there are other things to consider when contemplating an advanced degree in business analytics. Here’s what you need to know.
You don’t have to be a data guru to pursue a master’s in business analytics
For people considering a business analytics program, it’s helpful to have math, statistics, and quantitative skills because that may help them to excel, says Don Harter, director of business analytics at Syracuse University. But it’s not necessary to be a pro in those subjects, as students come from a variety of backgrounds. Syracuse sees students enroll who come from backgrounds in communications, engineering, psychology, accounting, marketing, finance, and supply chain.
“We have seen a tremendous number of career changers who start out in accounting or finance or marketing and they say, ‘I want to move into analytics,’” Harter says. “We want someone who is not afraid of numbers and quantitative approaches to problems, and people who are eager to learn.”
Further, data can be applied to many careers with success, saysSudipta Dasmohapatra, the senior associate dean of MBA programs and professor of practice in business analytics at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Dasmohapatra is the former director of the MSBA program and oversaw its launch in 2021.
“I think the market shows that everybody needs to learn to speak the language of data at a variety of levels,” Dasmohapatra tells Fortune. “We are creating leaders that can work with their teams in order to make better decisions for a competitive advantage. They come from a variety of different types of fields.”
Students should bring logic and passion to the table, adds Gaurav Shekhar, the master’s of business analytics director for flex and online programs at the University of Texas at Dallas.“If you think that you can think logically, if you are somebody who can identify patterns, if you’re okay on the quantitative side, and if you have the intentions of solving problems around data, around numbers, around making recommendations, this is the degree for you.”
Consider how the program curriculum can help you achieve your career goals
Since programs blend both business skills with data analytics, considering course offerings is essential to finding a school that’s a good fit. Syracuse’s program is intentionally developed with four key skills in mind, Harter says. “The four most important skills students should have are something called Structured Query Language (SQL), they should know Python, they should know the language R and they should know machine learning,” he tells Fortune.
Syracuse allows students an opportunity to customize six of their courses, allowing more control over how technical or business-minded the program can be.
“We have the flexibility where students can focus on more technical or more business aspects, but there’s no formal concentration to force people into different groupings,” Harter says. Further, the program encourages students to “leverage the skill sets across the university,” he adds. “We currently have six different schools across campus collaborating for this program, and that is somewhat unique.”
Other institutions may offer several business analytics tracks. At UT-Dallas, for example, students can choose from 80 course offerings.
“The program offers 10 different tracks around things like data science, data engineering, healthcare analytics, cybersecurity, social media analytics, decision and operation analytics, financial analytics, marketing analytics and enterprise systems analytics,” Shekhar says. “Our program is very applied in nature, which means a student who has a role where they interface with the business, as well as the technical teams, can speak both languages very well because they understand how they can break down a business problem and find the solution around it using analytics.”
Tepper focuses on the practical application of business analytics as well as a community approach to coursework, says Kevin Dietrick, the director of the MSBA program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Tepper is the No. 1 program on Fortune’s ranking.
“That practical application is very, very important to our curriculum. Students go through it together, so a lot of their time is not necessarily spent working in isolation on difficult problems,” Dietrick tells Fortune. “You’re working through them in a group, and so for the vast majority of our courses, students are going to be working in tandem to try to get across the finish line.”
Similarly, Georgetown’s curriculum utilizes real-world applications and professional involvement.
“Students will either have a team project or an individual project which has been sourced from some kind of real data and these are really relatively smaller projects,” Dasmohapatra says. “The second thing that you would see in our curriculum is we have a lot of experts that actually come into the classroom itself either asynchronously, where we have interviewed them, or synchronously in our live sessions.”
Check out all of Fortune’s rankings of degree programs, and learn more about specific career paths.
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