With senior stakeholders taking a wider interest in the tangible financial benefits of their people function over the years, the people analytics function has achieved significant growth and influence across the business landscape.

However, this raises one very important question—a question that all people analytics and HR leaders should discuss at every people strategy meeting. As the growth of the people analytics function accelerates and technology advances change the HR and people analytics operating models, how does the career path for the people analytics professional evolve? 

The Challenge

As echoed by Founder of Data with Serena, Serena Huang, on the Digital HR Leaders Podcast, there is currently very little opportunity for growth or advancement in the people analytics field. Although there are often several individual contributors on a People Analytics team (analysts, data scientists, consultants, etc.), they are inevitably led by one People Analytics leader, leaving only one position for the other team members to aspire to. As a result, we see people analytics leaders (or those directly reporting to the people analytics leaders) move from one company to another to find that challenge that keeps them challenged.

Though, it is not only the vertical development of people analytics professionals that is proving challenging. During the conversation with Insight222's Managing Partner, David Green, Serena made an insightful observation.

"Not everyone wants to grow vertically every two or three or five years. They might want to expand their skillset, they might want to expand their industry."

But with the function often seen as specialised, siloed and limited to HR, horizontal growth can be equally challenging. This is further compounded by the fact that there are still organisations – or shall I say functions - that do not yet fully understand the value and potential of people analytics, limiting the opportunities for growth and development within the function.

Setting a Strategy to Empower People Analytics

Driven by notable people analytics trends such as employee listening, societal change, the skills-based organisation, digital transformation, and generative AI, the people analytics operating model and career path strategies must change.

The capabilities within the people analytics ecosystem are evolving rapidly to adapt to the ownership of these trends and ensure the function is able to deliver value for the organisation. This presents an opportunity for organisations to develop a more well-rounded, agile, and flexible strategy to support the career growth of their people analytics professionals. 

In an interview between Geetanjali Gamel, the global leader of workforce analytics at Merck & Co., Inc., and Insight222's David Green, on the way forward for People Analytics teams. Geetanjali shared a very interesting strategy to help build the career paths of people analytics professionals.

She coined this as the Capability-Capacity-Connectivity model - based on the idea that if a company could build capability, reallocate its capacity and drive connectivity between this specialised team and other parts of the business, that new career paths and opportunities could be both created and discovered.

Prioritising Specific Skills

If part of the goal of a People Analytics strategy is to provide insights that will help to support, advance and retain talent within an organisation, then we cannot forget the career path of the People Analytics team as part of that overall strategy.

However, it is important to note that it is not just about the future roles of people analytics but also the skills required to propel the function forward. In our 2023 research, surveying over 270 companies, we found that leading companies in people analytics invest in three core skills: people analytics consultants, data scientists, and behavioural scientists.

Our upcoming research, 'Building the People Analytics Ecosystem,' supports this. However, considering the trends governing the people analytics function over the past year, the latest research—which you can sign up to receive below—suggests that investment in additional capabilities is required.

Our findings highlight five core capabilities that are essential and non-negotiable to the successful functioning of a people analytics team. These roles must report directly to the people analytics leader, regardless of the tenure of the people analytics team or the size of the organisation:

1. Consulting: Building strong relationships with senior HR business partners and business executives is key. People analytics consultants ensure that the insights provided enable the right decisions to be made.

2. Data Science and Research: Employing advanced analytical approaches to address complex people-related business challenges is crucial. These teams need skills in statistics, data science, research design, advanced mathematics, programming, machine learning, and industrial/organisational psychology.

3. Employee Listening: This capability involves utilising surveys and natural language processing to understand employee sentiment and inform people analytics projects.

4. Analytics at Scale: This involves turning an insight, prediction, or algorithm into a product that can be scaled across the enterprise, ensuring that both HR and business leaders have access to the necessary workforce data.

5. Adoption: Ensuring that people analytics products are embedded across the organisation requires capabilities in project management, change management, and communications.

In addition to these core capabilities, four additional capabilities within the People Analytics Ecosystem may report directly to the people analytics leader or elsewhere:

1. Reporting: Operational reports, metrics, and scorecards are often managed by people analytics teams, though some mature teams move this function to an HR operations team.

2. Data Governance: Ensuring the proper management of data foundations, including privacy and ethical use of data.

3. Workforce Planning: Integrating people analytics and workforce planning capabilities can help in developing skills taxonomy and strategic workforce plans.

4. AI Strategy: As AI adoption accelerates, understanding and leveraging AI within HR becomes crucial. This involves roles such as machine learning engineers, data architects, and prompt engineers.

Therefore, to effectively build the career paths of people analytics teams, ensure engagement, retention, and, most importantly, the business value and scalability of the function, organisations need to adopt a flexible approach that allows professionals to develop horizontally and vertically. This includes opportunities to move into adjacent functions within HR or even other functions outside of HR.

Boost HR Data Literacy

Perhaps not the masses, but part of the capability portion of the strategy Geetanjali describes focuses on increasing data literacy among internal HR clients and empowering the larger HR team with the capability to perform at least some of the analyses they seek independently. Not only does this create a greater understanding of analytics within the company, but it also helps to ensure that the insights from analytics projects are applied successfully.

It also frees up the analytics team from some of the more time-consuming or mundane tasks that can occupy their focus and block the opportunity for their own skill development.

Build Your People Analytics Career

The opportunity for People Analytics professionals to move into analytics teams in the business and take their knowledge of HR and people management practices is one clear opportunity for career progression. There is also a great opportunity for HR analysts to apply People Analytics know-how in other parts of HR and to use these techniques to partner more effectively with the business in many of the broader HR roles, which can allow them to stretch their capability and experience for their benefit and that of the company as a whole.

Like the old story of the cobbler's children who went shoeless, the people driving People Analytics can often be overlooked as a focus group for the very strategies and insights that they generate. We are definitely at a point where analytics skills are increasingly important across all of HR – and the whole organisation for that fact - and that will hopefully benefit career development for People Analytics professionals as well as the HR profession as a whole.

To learn more about how you can build people analytics career paths in line with the People Analytics Ecosystem, we recommend that you download our latest research for an in-depth analysis.

Press Play on your Career in People Analytics with myHRfuture

Whether you want to become a data-driven HR business partner or advanced in analytics, our learning journeys will guide you every step of the way. Our short, sharp, technical how-to training courses help you build practical skills and knowledge that can be applied immediately on the job so that you can work smarter, not harder.

Allow us to take the guesswork out of the skills you need to build with the HR Skills Assessment; not only will we identify your current capability levels and learning opportunities, but we will also build you a personalised learning journey that you can follow to build the skills you need for success to advance your career.

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