To survive a recession, you must train your non-technical staff to be citizen analysts

Has there ever been a more difficult three-year period to build and maintain the optimal workforce? Three years ago, when the global economy was spinning on all cylinders, the recruiting market was tight but largely stable. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, with many industries pausing to adapt to pandemic business conditions, followed by massive layoffs. 2021 brought the big layoff with a large number of employees – often including very long tenures – moving on to try new opportunities. And now we are seeing signs of a recession.

We know that organizations need all the help they can get from their data to survive an economic downturn. However, there has been a shortage of data scientists since the role became commonplace in organizations more than a decade ago, and the problem has only gotten worse over the past three years. With a skills gap and a talent shortage, leaders will need to find creative solutions without tapping into their already tight IT departments.

Capitalizing on available data requires connectivity between business systems and processes to leverage data across silos, making accessing the best available data as easy as possible. This is essentially an IT function. In addition to an active data management strategy, getting the full value of your data requires a workforce made up of trained and licensed ‘citizen analysts’. While many organizations have traditionally tried to build sufficient capacity for data scientists, using citizen analysts provides a more scalable workforce to realize the value of your organization’s data. And there are probably quite a few citizen analysts in your organization today, but they need to be retrained.

How to upskill your non-technical staff?

Technical competence is often not a major factor in a citizen analyst’s success. Instead, successful citizen analysts are those with a strong intuition about how to handle uncertainty with data, combined with a desire to analyze possible paths forward and then use data to point to the best path.

The most successful citizen analysts have the following five characteristics that you can tap into when training.

Natural Curiosity

Natural curiosity and genuine interest in solving problems makes a citizen analyst spend the necessary time analyzing data and coming up with more informed solutions. Managers can encourage natural curiosity by asking employees to discuss alternative approaches and the pros and cons of each. In doing so, employees are rewarded for having explored several possible avenues before landing on a path forward with an understanding of the risks and benefits of their chosen path.

Feeling of empowerment

By feeling true ownership and the freedom to use the information you need to make decisions, citizen analysts can address challenges directly. Empowerment can be promoted through open assignments. For example, a citizen analyst may be asked to review the past month’s financial results and present changes and possible causes compared to previous months. The task assignment does not dictate how the work will be done, but does require the citizen analyst to review available information and draw conclusions.

Preference for action in a world of uncertainty

The information available is rarely complete and completely accurate. Actionable individuals are more willing to assess the quality and completeness of the information available and decide how logical it makes sense to rely on that information. Organizations create a supportive environment for action bias in uncertainty through open discussions about the inputs given to decision-making and by recognizing and accepting when a chosen path forward is rightly based on knowledge and experience (often referred to as “gut feeling”. “) instead of hard facts.

The Citizen Analyst: Willingness to see the situation as it is

Data often reveals new insights and challenges beliefs that are accepted as facts. It is important to be open-minded to come to new realizations and to challenge the status quo, which is important when you are faced with uncertainty in your company.

Storytelling skills are critical to a citizen analyst

To make compelling recommendations to support decision-making, citizen analysts need to be able to create and present compelling stories that incorporate data for everyone to understand, which is as much an art as it is a science.

Creating a supportive culture for the citizen analyst

Once identified, citizen analysts can be nurtured through a combination of competence development and the creation of a supportive culture for data-driven decision-making. Introductory courses on data science, storytelling, and risk management suitable for upskilling citizen analysts are readily available on most major commercial learning platforms. In addition, you must make critical cultural changes, as noted above, to enable and reward citizen analysts for using data as part of their day-to-day operations.

In the short term, hiring data scientists and other technology workers may become easier than it is today, but we have enough history to know that there is often a shortage of technology workers. By taking a multi-faceted approach to both recruiting talent and upskilling your existing workforce, you can overcome the uncertainty ahead and be prepared for the next big layoff or consolidation.

Julie Furt is VP of Global Delivery at Languages