How programming knowledge can revolutionize your contributions in people analytics & beyond
It may seem too far-fetched to suggest that you need to be a programmer to best contribute to people analytics. But trust me, I do so with reason. Recapping, there was a point in my career that involved procrastinating over picking up programming skills. But once I pushed past that phase and got out of my comfort zone, I’ve never regretted to date, the efforts invested in programming. For one, it made me question the way I did things traditionally, push for efficiency through automation, and opens doors to perform any statistical analysis for business insights. The focus of this article would be to enlighten (and convince hopefully) on why any amount of effort invested in programming will reap huge benefits for anyone aspiring to be a budding people analyst or simply any HR professional for that matter.
Some common myths around why Programming isn’t for HR
Let’s start by looking at some potential reasons why this whole idea could still sound alarming.
- Firstly, an HR organization isn’t generally perceived to be technical. On that note, popular MS Office tools like Excel are already a stretch use case. Then wouldn’t programming simply scare people away?
- Secondly, the fact that programming is only for other core Data Scientists/Analysts. It isn’t for everybody because it is simply too tough and too much for a support function like HR.
- Thirdly, where does an HR professional have the time? HR is too busy attending to ever-evolving employee matters (no special thanks to COVID for making matters worse!). Doesn’t programming require setting aside A LOT of time, attending courses, getting certifications before you can even barely scratch the surface? Juggling personal and professional lives is already a blur many days, so there’ll be no time left to even think about self-development.
Gradually emerging out of the comfort cocoon
There is so much advancement in technology and digitization around us. This would inevitably (if not already) affect the traditional way of how we get work done, and that has scared almost all of us at some juncture. The real question then is if everyone is acting on their circle of influence to use that fear as a motivating factor to expand learning beyond what we already know and comfortable doing.
Just imagine, how cool would it be to "parent" automation and AI instead of living in fear of those exact prodigy taking over your current role? If you want to be in control, you can take control by learning the how and taking baby steps towards programming.
I’ll not paint a false image here that programming is simple and can certainly vouch from experience that walking on this path is rather challenging, lined with everyday failures (literally, when you are stuck debugging lines of code that isn’t giving you the expected results), and certainly never meant to reach a final destination because there is always so much to learn. Your goal post thus keeps getting further and further away. BUT once you’re determined that this is the way forward and are wowed by what you can accomplish with every minimal knowledge you gain, like me, you’ll continue pushing with the climb.
Why go beyond existing tools like good-old Excel? Advice: Do it to believe it!
For those that don’t know this, what if I tell you that you can do EVERYTHING your everyday tool like Excel can do AND much more with programming? This is true, and I have evaluated this. In fact, programming languages like Python can even build dashboards, as we would do on Tableau. Imagine that!
That certainly doesn’t mean complete replacement of our everyday use case tools. Remember always that we need to use the right tool for the right task. I would suggest, if you’re dealing with a small dataset and tasked to accomplish something one-off, by all means, go ahead to use the appropriate tool like Excel or BI (Power BI, Tableau, etc.). Though I code, I’m still using Excel to organize raw datasets before branching out to use them on a Python programming platform for further transforms and insights generation.
Taking baby steps, one at a time
If you’re clueless but want to know how you can incorporate basic programming in your work, I would suggest starting simple by replicating your Excel work and always backed up with the rationale that whatever you’re doing will be repetitive. Let’s consider an example – you need to slice one master dataset based on certain filter logic and share the sliced dataset with your stakeholders, and you need to do this at a repeated cadence, say weekly once. There are really several ways of going about such a task – like perhaps an Excel macro. But for me, this would be a typical use case to warm up using programming. You can do everything from simple data filtering, pivoting, look-up, email distribution to stakeholders, to cite a few examples. The advantage of using code for all this is that you programmed the steps one at a time from step 1 of importing the programming packages to step 2 of importing your dataset to further processing steps detailing the subsequent data transformations until you arrive at the outcome. Once you’re done with your code script, you can configure it to run automatically at the same cadence you were previously working on manually, plus you have future-proofed to make any new changes minimally painful, like a change in the filter condition, for example, is just editing one line of code while keeping all other code intact. It becomes super-swift then to turn around on enhancements next time once you have built a well-documented foundational code. Starting with such use cases and getting comfortable will further boost your programming basics to branch into more complex analytics someday. The key is to remember again is, practice makes perfect!
The unsung heroes
Without a proper support system, your baby efforts might inevitably end up in vain. Some of the crucial ones worth mentioning could be—
- Firstly, the HR organization you report to has to allow growth opportunities into this area for your job role by seeing potential values from an automation stand or business insights.
- Secondly, you have no coding or computer science background and thus have stayed away from venturing into programming. Believe me, I started from scratch, too, without prior experience or educational background. Foundational skill for any programmer seriously is the ability to GOOGLE! You’ll realize once you start coding, the more you code, the more you are googling when you get stuck. And someone out there had already encountered the same issues and raised them before, so it’s unlikely you are alone in your struggle and most likely to find the resolution with just searching. Forums like stackoverflow are where I find 90% of the answers to my coding questions. As for theoretical knowledge gaining for newbies, Udemy (or Coursera, etc.) have great tutorials offering starter discounts. Just sign up and browse for basic courses (like those titled Python A-Z with good student reviews), then gradually advance your knowledge based on the business task.
- Lastly and MOST importantly, no external help can really be of much use if you don’t see the value yourself and are willing to walk the extra mile.
So, will you be the procrastinator or proactive action-taker?
There’s never a dull/stagnant moment for a programmer because you’re in an ever-evolving learning phase. Despite all the advancements in the field, it certainly can still be rare to find someone with programming knowledge in HR. If you’re someone like me that wants to be the blue elephant (or stand out), squeeze time to pick up programming and find avenues to experiment with the knowledge at work. The more you practice, you will find out how much more you don’t know and can learn to push boundaries. Happy upskilling!
