Data Analytics Professional Certificate

Learning Outcomes Student Profiles Program Schedule Instructor Bio Success Stories Register Now

Program Overview

Leaders and managers today are faced with increased competition, economic volatility and unprecedented quantities of data. Many make decisions based on limited information, historical precedence, personal experience, or even just pure gut feeling. This unduly influences them and often leads them to rely on subtle biases, misinterpretations and inaccurate assumptions. Successful leaders turn to those with business data analytics skills to identify problems and trends faster, improve reporting accuracy, develop better strategic plans, and make better, data-driven decisions. Business Data Analysts help their companies explain customer behavior, tailor products and services, forecast the impact of decisions, discover the drivers of operational challenges, accelerate business by sharing revealing, in-depth visualizations across their organizations, and help boost profitability.

Offered in partnership with the Woodbury School of Business at Utah Valley University, the Data Analytics Professional Certificate Program (the “Program”) is designed to be a powerful learning experience focused on developing outstanding business data analytics and business intelligence (“BI”) professionals. This unique Program will help you discover the stories hidden in data and enable you to see beyond the what and get to the why. It will empower you to offer a higher level of value to your company or organization by providing accurate, data-driven, and actionable insights. It will also help set you apart and demonstrate your expertise, credibility and confidence as you earn the Data Analytics Professional Certificate.

Expert instruction includes case studies, online videos and hands-on experience with powerful BI tools. Successful completion of the Program will give you the ability to find, model and analyze data, leverage analytical techniques and best practices, align BI initiatives with strategic goals, and visualize and communicate insights for better, more informed decisions.

Learning Outcomes

The Program provides Participants with an intensive, engaged learning experience by doing, rather than just participating in lectures. Through the 10 live interactive, online instruction sessions (one per week), Participants will complete cases, assignment, and exercises using one of the tools each week to ensure mastery of the material. The real learning occurs through hands-on instruction that goes beyond mere business intelligence theory, as Participants apply their learning and experience with actual data from real-world case exercises, as well as design and publish their own dashboards to demonstrate their capabilities to employers. The time to complete assignments and exercises outside of class is approximately 2 – 3 hours per week.

The Program also includes ready access to self-paced learning components, materials, and tools, including 20 hours of on-demand video instruction, 150+ articles, and 135+ downloadable resources that can be utilized to augment learning during and after the Program

Student Profiles

This program is designed for new, experienced, and emerging managers, team leaders, and supervisors looking to improve their understanding and application of data analytics techniques and technologies. The focus is primarily Business Data Analytics, though the concepts are applicable across any industry.

Program Schedule

UVU Executive Education and the Woodbury School of Business at UVU have a long-established reputation for the successful delivery of high-quality leadership, management and professional education programs. Business Data Analytics is an interdisciplinary field that identifies patterns, unearths hidden insights and predicts trends. Courses in the Business Data Analytics Professional Certificate Program focus on powerful business intelligence and data analytics topics, principles, best practices, and tools.

The Program focuses on developing expertise with three of the most sophisticated and powerful data analysis and BI tools – SQL, Excel, and Tableau. The most common and widely available tools, they are also among the most requested skills by employers. While some prior knowledge of Excel is helpful (e.g., basic formulas, charts, formats, etc.), experience with the tools is not a pre-requisite, and no prior programming experience is required.

Session 1 :: Intro to Business Data Analytics

This session explores the field of data analytics and business intelligence (“BI”), traditional and big data, and the roles of other data-oriented fields and professions common in data analytics projects, such as business analysis, data science, data engineering, computer programming, AI / machine learning, mathematics, statistics, and web analytics, among others. Excel’s analysis tool basics are introduced.

Session 2 :: Planning & Managing Business Intelligence Initiatives

This session centers on the BI project pathway (planning, wrangling, modeling, applying, etc.) in framing business problems and research questions in terms that can be answered through various BI and data analytics methods (e.g., descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics). The legal, ethical and privacy issues that affect BI projects are also covered.

Session 3 :: Data Sourcing

This session develops capabilities in navigating the web of online information sources and data analysis resources (e.g., data.gov, Google Trends, Kaggle, Quandl, etc.), learn about web scraping, API’s, data formats, data variables, and more.

Session 4 :: BI Tools

This session presents the software, programming languages, applications, databases, and hardware that are used in data science projects and discover how the most common tools are used in business intelligence to create data science models, including Structured Query Language (SQL), Excel and Tableau.

Session 5 :: BI Analysis, Part 1

This session develops familiarity with the goals and strengths of common data science analyses types, including a) data visualization and trend analysis; b) clustering, classifying, predicting outcomes and anomaly detection; and c) association rules, optimization, and A/B testing.

Session 6 :: BI Analysis, Part 2

This session develops familiarity with the goals and strengths of common data science algorithms, including a) regression; b) decision trees, decision trees, random forests, and ensemble models; and c) neural networks, and evaluating the validity, generalizability, and ROI for different approaches.

Session 7 :: Extraction with SQL

This session provides hands-on experience with the basic functionality and commands of SQL to query, extract, sort, group and aggregate data from online relational databases, enabling extraction and deeper diving into complex data to find answers without having to wait or rely on others.

Session 8 :: Analysis with Excel

This session provides hands-on experience using Excel to clean and manipulate data, prepare and summarize data (using various classes of functions, creating PivotTables, PivotCharts, slicers, etc.), perform analysis and interpret results, use the Analysis Toolpak, and present data using conditional formatting, bar charts, line graphs, sparklines, and scatterplots to spot trendlines and forecast results.

Session 9 :: Visualization with Tableau

This session provides hands-on experience using Tableau to visualize data, including working with the Data Connection interface to import data into Tableau, sort, group and explore data, create calculated fields, design reports, build visualizations, create maps, report results, and publish powerful charts, graphs and dashboards online.

Session 10 :: BI Final Project

The final session is the culmination of the business data analytics experience featuring the design and completion of an end-to-end data project that incorporates all of the methods, skills, techniques and tools learned in the Program.

Instructor Bio

David Benson PhD MBA

Dr. David Benson serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship in the Woodbury School of Business at Utah Valley University and as Lead Faculty for the Business Data Analytics Professional Certificate Program. Prior to joining UVU, he served as Professor of Strategy at Brigham Young University. His research has been published in a number of top journals, including the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Business Venturing, and Organization Science, and he has been profiled in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and Nature Biotechnology.

David previously worked for Electronic Data Systems and Ford Motor Company.

David holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship and Corporate Strategy, and earned his MBA in Business and Corporate Strategy (where he was one of only five full scholarship recipients), both from the University of Michigan. He earned his BS in Accounting with a minor in Spanish from Brigham Young University.

Success Stories

"Professor Benson is very knowledgeable and was truly interesting in helping improve the student's skillsets so that they could get better jobs."

"How quickly I was able to develop a pretty good understanding of so many data analytic tools with professor Benson’s help."

"The Video Speed Controller has been a game-changer for me. I have been listening more to a lot more learning content and actually getting through to completion. I also appreciate all your recommendations for learning SQL as well as Excel and Tableau. The SQL section is a stretch goal for me and the amount of resources will help me be successful."

"He is a great, professional, inspiring, and generous person. I have no words to express my gratitude to him. Under his impact I have been studying the subject on regular base every day. Thanks more times to Professor Dave Benson! "

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