Big Data Is Defining Today's Jobs
The demand in both private industry and public policy arenas for MBAs and master’s graduates who can process and evaluate multiple information streams is increasing.
For companies to realize the potential benefits of big data they need managers who have the ability to sift through information, solve business problems, and strategize. But companies are facing a shortage of such management talent. According to a McKinsey & Co. study conducted last year, the United States alone will face a shortage in 2018 of 140,000 to 190,000 people with the deep analytical skills needed for processing big data as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to make decisions based on their analysis.
Graduate business schools and management programs have always been a key source of such talent and many have responded to the rapidly changing business environment by including more academic offerings based on data analytics, aka business intelligence, to ensure their graduating students can help meet the looming talent gap.
Test Your Big Data Skills
Your success in today's workplace hinges on your performance in the classroom today. The skills measured on the recently introduced Integrated Reasoning (IR) section of the GMAT exam represent the requisite analytical training and knowledge you will need to grow and succeed in a data-rich world. The IR section of the GMAT exam was developed over several years with your future in mind, based on feedback from 740 b-school faculty worldwide who identified skills important to the academic success of today’s incoming students. Management programs want students who can bring these skills to the classroom, and employers worldwide agree that the skills match their talent needs. The vast majority of the 636 global corporate recruiters we surveyed in February told us the four specific IR skills that the GMAT exam now measures are “very important” skills for their new business hires to have. (See details in the graphic below.)
Discover, Innovate, and Create With Data
There’s no denying we live in an information-based economy. To succeed in it, you need to be adept not only at managing massive amounts of information, but also at determining what is relevant, knowing how to incorporate it into strategic decision-making and problem-solving, and building off of it to develop new products, improve service and productivity, and possibly create new jobs and businesses. This is true no matter where you chart your career path, be it in banking, consulting, IT, manufacturing, health care, government policy, or marketing.
