Today’s Rising Data Analytics Talent Is Ready For Us, But Are Companies Ready For Them?

I have always enjoyed college recruiting because the reward of discovering and acquiring new talent has a far greater and lasting impact. Recently, I had my first experience in recruiting for a data analytics intern at our AGCO Acceleration Center. I can’t help but to wonder what factors can predict the success of a data analyst, one of the best jobs in the country.

• Is it the quantity of data analytics tools within a candidate’s portfolio? Writing “proficient with MS Office” is definitely not going to cut it today.
• Should I prioritize subject matter expertise or business acumen over technical competency? Understanding the problem is critical to asking the right questions to solve it.
• What about experience implementing similar solutions at other firms? It’s always great to have someone who can step right into the job.

After a day at the career fair and interviewing 13 candidates, I was thoroughly impressed at the quality of the candidates and the breadth of end to end knowledge about data analytics, from data engineering to ETL to modeling to visualization, and telling a story with data. These used to be different roles across IT, engineering, and business units, but the incoming workforce will be able to do it all within the same role. It’s an exciting time to be part of the data revolution. I then realized that the better predictors to the success of our data analytics intern have less to do with the candidate’s background and more to do with whether the company is ready for them, for example:

• Availability and quality of data – you can’t hire someone to generate raw data, and it takes time and planning to collect them. Since the launch of AGCO next generation telemetry solution, AGCO Connect, not only do we have a brand new intuitive user interface, we have a state of the art backend infrastructure that is ready for data exploration.
• Internal subject matter experts who are ready to engage – whether it is internal subject-matter experts or business analysts, they need to share the passion, mindset, and certain capabilities as the incoming data analytics workforce, who will need guidance to navigate how they can apply their current toolsets to the latest problems.
• The right problems to apply data analytics resources – it is tempting to just upgrade Excel charts with Tableau, or automate certain SQL queries with AWS (Amazon Web Services) or Glue ETL tools, but the real power of data analytics lies with exploration and experimentation. With the rise of interdisciplinary innovation, there shouldn’t be a shortage of interesting problems to be solved, but not all of them can be solved and should be solved with a company’s limited and precious resources.

I am pleased to report that we made an offer to a highly talented young lady who accepted and will be starting with the Fuse team this fall. She knows Python, R, Java, C, HTML 5, CSS, XML, JavaScript, Weka, Tableau, Hadoop, Redshift, MySQL, and more. She worked as a software developer after getting her degree in Computer Engineering, and she recently completed a business intelligence engineering internship in Seattle, building an end to end ETL pipeline.

AGCO is in a position to be ready to maximize the talents of this new person because we are open data pioneers with an understanding of data quality. We have engaged subject matter experts to help the intern, and we have identified the right problems to apply these resources—always with an eye for further optimization. We can’t wait for her to start.

To learn more about how AGCO is transforming into the digital age, visit www.FuseSmartFarming.com or read more on the blog.

Written by: Matt Wong
Matt Wong is the director of Fuse product strategy in North America. Connect with Matt on Twitter @mcwong1999 or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcwong1999/