The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Coding for HR Analytics

HR Analytics is about finding efficient ways to read and interpret data. One of the best ways to tackle this is to become good at the coding needed to do those tasks.

I have used R for the last few years and am an advocate for using it over other options such as Excel. Simply put, it’s much more efficient and has greater capabilities.

While it can be a bit of a learning curve, R will repay your efforts with more efficient and thorough analytical abilities. I think it’s worth the effort to learn and suggest that anyone new to R just practices with it as much as possible.

Want to be amazingly great with coding for HR analytics? Here’s how:

Make the effort to learn R

First of all, for productivity and depth of analytical abilities, I would suggest that any HR coder needs to learn R. I find it amazing that nowadays in an office environment the productivity can be very different among colleagues, some working still on Excel and very few adventuring with new tools like R.

From personal experience, I can tell you that those who branch out and learn R often take productivity to levels they haven’t reached before. The fact is that R can allow them to get more done in less time.

You can use repeatable coding, look at and process data more simply, and access better data manipulation capabilities. Basically, some time spent on learning now can payoff later in terms of streamlining your HR analytics abilities.

Learning a programming language like R is a lot like learning a spoken language. When you learn a spoken language, the typical goal is to become “fluent.” The more “language” skills you have with R, the more you can do. I’ll get into some ways to improve your skills with R below.

Start with the basics

There are several free introductory courses for R – these are great to get a good grounding in the basics. Take a look at the Free Introduction to R Programming Online Course or Introduction to R for Data Science. Both of these will get you started with basic skills, provide you with feedback and share instructive videos with you.

If you are coming into HR analytics with more of a background in HR than analysis, you may also find it useful to freshen up your statistics skills. This way you can start applying statistics to your work with R. Some resources to look at include: Data Analysis and Statistical Inference, Basic Statistics or Inferential Statistics. There is also a statistics track available, Statistics with R Track at Datacamp.

With a few basics under your belt, it’s important to keep practicing. Like any language you learn, the only way to improve is to practice, learn from mistakes and practice again.

Use peer review

I believe in the power of peer review for advancing your coding capabilities. You can learn a lot from it, very quickly. This means you’ve just got to practice – first try to write some code and then ask somebody to review it for you. This might be a colleague who has good skills with R, or you can find people online who will review.

One thing I don’t suggest as a learning tool is copying and pasting code. By copy-pasting an already written code, you just don’t have the same learning opportunity, or understanding of how the code works. It is much better to set yourself a reasonable target and then code something, which can be later improved. Start out small if you need to, and work your way up.

Compare against something you know already

This year I personally spent one month of my time at work in coding a very lengthy calculation. Basically, I used R as a macro for calculating our so called “annual travel allowance”, which is an amazingly complicated entitlement. It is based on the kilometric distance from London to the place of origin of all staff members, the age of their dependants and their marital status. That’s a lot of data!

The colleague who does these calculations on Excel does so on a yearly basis. The work also takes them about one month of time, but there’s a key difference. The code I created can now be reused every year. Next year I can do the same job in half an hour, rather than spending a whole month buried in Excel.

This is a great example of how R pays off for anyone in HR analytics. Get your regular tasks done more quickly and free up time for other projects. Comparing to something you already know also provides a bit of a “sense check” for the coding. Does it pay off to use R over Excel for the task? In this case, definitely yes. (Some analysts still argue for Excel on smaller data sets).

Learn from online forums

There are a few online forums from which you can pick up a lot of good information. One I personally spend a lot of time on is Stack Overflow. I learn a lot from browsing the questions and answers already posted there. Quite often, something I am looking for has already been answered. It’s a very active community and I have a great respect for people who are answering questions on Stack Overflow.

You can also ask questions yourself on Stack Overflow. This may seem a little daunting, but generally, you get a good reception. Well-received questions tend to contain just enough information that your problem is clear and can be reproducible, while at the same time avoiding unnecessary details. You should also try to search through current questions and answers first, to avoid repeating something that has already been asked.

Most of the time, people want to be very helpful and give good advice in these forums. I personally trust people who demonstrate being engaged for the community and who are sharing ideas for free. I tend to believe that those people have much more to offer than just what they offer for free.

Enter coding competitions

If you want to turn up the heat on your coding skills, a competition can be just the challenge you need. Sites such as Kaggle or Analytics Vidhya run competitions that are especially good for newer coders who would like to upskill. Whether you win or not, you’ve just had a great learning experience.

I am planning to launch my own competition very soon on an HR Analytics subject, too. Stay tuned and sign up here for updates.

Final thoughts

There are many options open to you for learning R, and a very vast library of advanced skills to keep you learning. Like any language, the only real way to become amazingly great is to practice!

Peer support is a great way to check and improve your skills. You can find skilled R enthusiasts in many places, including within the HR community and in online forums. The “R way of doing things” may be a bit different from what you’re used to, but there are several helpful resources to improve your skills.

Above all, keep going! HR analytics requires you to go beyond the basics and to tackle real data. Learning to code efficiently is a skill practiced over a period of time.