What Does a Tax Specialist Do? 2025 Career Guide
January 15, 2025
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This course is part of Introduction to Business Analytics and Information Economics Specialization
Instructor: Douglas B. Laney
18,316 already enrolled
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(277 reviews)
(277 reviews)
Understand key analytics concepts, types of technologies, and related roles.
Identify key components of real-world analytics solutions in various industries and business functions.
Conceive new ways to leverage or adapt existing analytics methods to business problems.
Know what makes an analytics project successful, and be aware of key analytics trends.
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Businesses run on data, and data offers little value without analytics. The ability to process data to make predictions about the behavior of individuals or markets, to diagnose systems or situations, or to prescribe actions for people or processes drives business today. Increasingly many businesses are striving to become “data-driven”, proactively relying more on cold hard information and sophisticated algorithms than upon the gut instinct or slow reactions of humans.
This course will focus on understanding key analytics concepts and the breadth of analytic possibilities. Together, the class will explore dozens of real-world analytics problems and solutions across most major industries and business functions. The course will also touch on analytic technologies, architectures, and roles from business intelligence to data science, and from data warehouses to data lakes. And the course will wrap up with a discussion of analytics trends and futures.
This first module exposes and explains key data and analytics concepts from Big Data to data warehousing to natural language query, and everything in-between. Next we will explore various analytic techniques, types of visualizations, and types of analytics solutions. The course will continue with identifying and learning about key data and analytics roles and organization structures, including chief data and analytics officers, data scientists, and analytics centers of excellence. Alternatives to direct hiring, such as outsourcing and crowdsourcing, will also be covered. Finally, the course will scrutinize analytic trends and futures.
18 videos9 readings2 assignments
Over the course of the module, you will also see how data and analytics in each of these organizations can be used in similar ways, in similar business functions. Accordingly, you will appreciate that to be truly data-driven, you need not only look to examples in your own industry, but, also learn and apply analytics concepts from organizations in other fields.
11 videos2 readings1 assignment
In this module you will learn a bunch of crucial analytical roles and the emergence of new roles in organizations from the C-suite down to various analyst roles. You will take a brief look at the job descriptions and the responsibilities. You will also put yourself in either a job seeker’s or a recruiter’s shoes to see what kind of skill sets are the most important and which position fits you the best. For example, it will introduce you to the three core skills of the data scientist and the crucial soft skills required to be a successful data scientist.
11 videos2 readings1 assignment1 peer review
This module explores telling stories, through data, that connect emotionally with your audience. It will also review examples and figures that make the concept easy to understand. You will learn the major do’s and don’ts of creating dataviz and rules that lead to the clear depiction of your findings. This unit specifically focuses on Dona Wong’s guidelines for good data visualization and charts. The last leg of Module 4 teaches the three tests that help you improve your visualization. In the final step of dataviz execution, you will learn the McCandless Method for presenting visualizations. This five-step process produces the most effective communication of the graphics to your audience.
14 videos4 readings1 assignment1 plugin
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Taking this course by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign may provide you with a preview of the topics, materials and instructors in a related degree program which can help you decide if the topic or university is right for you.
Taking this course by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign may provide you with a preview of the topics, materials and instructors in a related degree program which can help you decide if the topic or university is right for you.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Degree · 1 – 3 years
277 reviews
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Reviewed on Jul 24, 2021
Great business Analytics I learned from this course
Reviewed on Aug 8, 2019
Excellent course, very practical and gives students new ideas by highlighting what other companies are doing.
Reviewed on Jun 25, 2022
Liked everything except the peer-reviewed assignment. Four reviews is too many. It took several weeks to get submissions to review after I had finished everthing else.
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