Does competing in Kaggle prepare you for real life HR Analytics?

Does competing in Kaggle prepare you for real life HR Analytics? In my opinion, the answer is a definite “yes”. Without any assertion that it is right for sure, let me indicate a possible line of thought.

You have read so much about the significant opportunities brought to HR by the digital transformation. Furthermore, you remember that data science is the sexiest job of the 21st century. As a result, People Analytics has become your absolute dream job.

Conscious about the change coming, you decide to attend conferences or meetups on people analytics. You also read regularly top articles on the subject. Eventually, you feel being surrounded by highly skilled people in the field.

While everybody keeps talking about artificial intelligence and machine learning, you want to own your piece of People Analytics. You realise that to take control you have to upskill yourself even further.

How can I own my piece of People Analytics?

You certainly know about Kaggle. Perhaps you even had a go at the most famous Titanic competition. The Titanic sank killing 1502 out of 2224 passengers and crew. Certain groups of people were more likely to survive than others, such as women, children and the upper-class.  The Titanic dataset is a classic entry exercise for aspiring data scientists.

So far, worldwide more than 10400 teams submitted their model of who were the people more likely to survive. It means an entire generation of data scientists has learned data science thanks to the Titanic data set. Perhaps you also built your own binary predictive classification model to identify those most likely to survive. Most likely you used machine learning and R or Python as your programming language.

You are well aware nothing can replace learning by doing. No matter how many articles you read about People Analytics, the best way to understand and to retain concepts is actually by doing it on your own. It is just amazing.

Gaining practical experience

You wish to acquire a practical experience to HR Analytics, but on the other hand, you cannot find an exciting challenge to dedicate your time to. For instance, challenges and datasets need to be closely related to HR.  Although you have intensively googled, it reveals nearly impossible to find HR related examples. Finding plausible HR data sets can be a problem. HR functions are notoriously very jealous of their data. Data protection issues are around the corner.

HRAnalytics.live Competitions

Here at hranalytics.live, we are passionate about data-driven decisions in HR. I am excited to share quasi-real life business scenarios so that you become better prepared. Above all, you will be ready to use data science and machine learning in your professional life. As a long-standing data-driven HR manager, I have been applying the principles of data science for over five years. I have been working in HR for well over 25 years. My experience with HR business problems will put on the right track.

Influential senior managers need to have a good perception of you. You will need to build experience on a long list of different smaller projects, for instance. With time you will become the data analytics expert as well as the go-to reporting guy. It means, the only person able to extract interesting insights from available data.

My promise to you

I will provide you with real-life business scenarios to challenge yourself. You work on cleaned datasets, explore them from different angles, find the story to tell and build appealing visualisations.  With time you will develop a portfolio of ready-to-use solutions to real-life HR Analytics problems.

The whole secret lies in the term ‘reproducibility’. If all competitors have the same task and the same starting dataset, you make it easy for the evaluator to compare the results. Typical examples of reproducible data analysis involve the same starting dataset, code and text files, organised around an RMarkdown source document or a Jupyter notebook.

You will receive valuable feedback for your efforts. I wish I had feedbacks when I started coding data problems. You will be able to improve your work. Feedback will motivate you to perform better and learn even more. Learn from others, be inspired by others and inspire others to develop their coding skills.

Final thoughts

By analysing HR data, you have the unique opportunity to become a pro in benefiting from the power of data science. This power, if harnessed, will help predict financial outcomes and generate a significant economic impact in your business.

You want to stay with your feet on substantial grounds. You know too well about the many dissatisfied data scientists you have met. We know too well that often expectations do not reflect reality.

To come back to the initial question contained in our title, doing well in Kaggle HR Analytics competitions is not enough. Showing to recruiters that you competed well, demonstrates that you are capable of constant learning. It also provides evidence of being able to work in a business team setting. You will definitely get the recruiters attention. Finally, you will be a step closer to a career in data science.

If you enjoy my articles and wish to receive a note of the launch of a competition, please feel free to subscribe to my newsletter.

If you would like additional information to assist you in deciding on participation, please contact me.