Institute of Analytics Professionals
A while ago I decided to join the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia.
The Board of IAPA is currently working on accreditation requirements ..
This has been done with the acknowledgement that if we are to gain a position of status and respect in the community and are to be recognised as professionals who are skilled in the Analytics field, we must have appropriate entry and membership standards.
Accreditation requirements will be rigorous, to ensure that our profession is valued and esteemed by our clients and we are treated with deference by sister professions such as statisticians, actuaries and operational researchers.
For Full Membership
This level is the normal entry level for individuals who:
* have graduated with a Bachelor or higher degree in a quantitative discipline and at least a year of vocational experience in the Analytics field or
* have at least three years professional work experience in developing, practicing, managing or lecturing in Analytics or related discipline
I am strongly in favour of this initiative, and would like to hear from others as to their views. Comments should be open on this post, if not click on the post header and go to the individual post (not the front page where there are several posts). If that does not work please try my contact page. Apologies for the run-around but I am having difficulties with Wordpress, simultaneously trying to open it up for comments and combat blogspam.
OK, why a separate society for analytics?
Well, imho data analytics is a fusion discipline. It is not just statistics, not just data mining, not database manipulation or programming, not machine learning, not business intelligence, not web analytics alone, and not confined to knowledge discovery in databases.
It demands strong quantitative skills : I’d almost go so far as to say it requires a degree in statistics, except I think I am probably representative of so many who iterated towards this discipline out of left field (in my case, High Energy Physics, a dose of graduate Statistics, Market Research, lots of programming and a dash of Econometrics).
So I guess I would also say it demands diversity of experience. You need, as they say, to have been there.
No organization can mandate qualifications of this level of abstraction, and I am pleased to see that IAPA is being generous and open minded in its affiliation requirements.
This is the way to build a community of “Like Minds”, and I commend them.
If there are similar initiatives elsewhere, I’d appreciate if you’d let me know.
Shane said,
March 12, 2007 @ 4:18 pm
I agree the IAPA is a good idea, but there doesn’t seem to be much on in Melbourne. What has the IAPA been up to in Sydney?
BTW I would encourage you to turn commenting on for all posts. Do you have the Akismet plugin installed? A captcha plugin would also help.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Spam_Tools#Captcha
Shane
deanabb said,
March 13, 2007 @ 12:33 am
It will be very interesting to see the actual requirements. I’m all for this kind of organization, and that there are strong requirements for membership, but because of the nature of the community (and I agree that data analytics as described here is a fusion discipline), it may be that pinning this down will be problematic.
If the primary reason for strong accreditation is “o ensure that our profession is valued and esteemed by our clients and we are treated with deference by sister professions such as statisticians, actuaries and operational researchers”, I think the problem is that there is almost an inherent conflict right here–those that are most esteemed by customers, in my opinion, are those who are not PhDs (generally), whereas the reverse is true for other professions like statistics. We’ve discussed this issue in my blog.
And that’s what’s too bad–I love the idea, but whenever we try to institutionalize good ideas, things never run quite so smoothly!
John Aitchison said,
March 14, 2007 @ 4:57 pm
Thanks Shane, I have installed Akismet and I will see if I need the captcha. I don’t think the IAPA has been doing much yet (still sorting itself out) although it does list a lot of jobs and a few resources .. supposedly IAPA has a branch in Melbourne, and Baycorp (in Melbourne) is asking for (academic?) collaborators in work on credit scoring etc - there are a couple of papers there too, one from Cam Mence from ANZ (I think in Melbourne) which talks about ABS data. So, I guess there is plenty of activity around the old town, but perhaps not much as yet of an analytics community.
Dean, nice comment. As you say, there are inherent conflicts in organizations .. maybe IAPA is not needed, just more analytics blogs
» Traps for (young) data miners [ Data Sciences Analytics ] said,
July 29, 2007 @ 7:42 pm
[…] I think we can all do with reminders, from time to time, of the many traps and pitfalls that there are in data analytics.. so I thought it worth passing on a link to this article Identifying and Overcoming Common Data Mining Mistakes via IAPA. . ( If you are an Australian statistician/data miner/ data analyst , then I reckon it is a good idea to join it and subscribe to the alert service .. there is often an interesting meeting or two floating around, particularly in Sydney or Melbourne). […]
John Aitchison said,
August 11, 2007 @ 7:32 pm
there is a meetup group in Sydney Sydney Data Miners, Web Miners and CompLingers Meetup Group at http://web.meetup.com/36/