In our recent article in Research World magazine we asked three leading insights professionals at multinational companies how they approach the challenges they are facing today. In this follow-up we take a more in-depth look at the skills and tools they require in the new reality.
In our first instalment of this story our interviewees explained some of the steps they take to adapt to an increasingly tech-driven industry. They spoke about breaking old habits, embracing new technologies, and flexible approaches. Crucial elements in the whole process are team composition and training.
Vinay Ahuja, Director – Procter & Gamble European Market Operations, Consumer Market Knowledge, Analytics & Insights, believes it all comes down to skills. “Which skills will be critical for your organisation tomorrow to succeed? Which skills are you hiring for? Which ones you are you building? Hiring and team composition decisions are far too often anchored only around individuals. While the individual talent assessment is a very critical part of team formation, few spell out deliberately the critical future skills needed for the organisation.”
He feels there is a lot of good focus on data and analytics today. And although that’s important, the work of insights is even more vast. “Our insights organization at P&G brings together experts from multi-disciplinary fields to work as one team. Equally as important as analytics are our capabilities for deep immersive consumer understanding, as well as the advancements made in the last two decades in the fields of human and behavioural sciences, use of technology for knowledge discovery or process automation all which have so much to offer.”
Ahuja explains that experts from different functions and backgrounds at Procter & Gamble have one common learning framework and they are evolving the choice of skills as they go to remain ahead of the latest developments at any time. “Our focus is on both: encouraging individuals to stay curious and to keep learning, and to offer systemic support to all multi-functional teams to learn together in selected areas. Earlier this year we brought together nearly 250 members of P&G Europe insights, analytics, data science and brand services teams for a very intense and diverse set of skill development sessions, ranging from application of human sciences to advanced analytics. All are equally important for the work of Insights teams because it takes a village to raise a child.”
Successes and failures
On the scale of challenge, even hard skills like using new tools and techniques are relatively easy to teach, says Lisa Courtade, Head of Global Customer Insights at Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, US. “What is much, much more difficult, is establishing a learning mindset. This is really a combination of hiring people who are innately curious, confident in challenging, and willing to test to learn. It’s also about creating a culture of continuous learning and experimentation, rewarding both successes and failures as learning opportunities. And pushing the team to think beyond the confines of their current roles or industries. I always tell people that you can’t think outside the box if you never leave the box. In this context training becomes a combination of both experience as well as exposure.”
Courtade thinks workshops are really helpful for teaching new skills or concepts, such as storytelling. “But so too is sending people to conferences where they hear great stories and get exposed to new ideas and approaches to problem solving.”
Anna-Sterre Mees, Senior Global Consumer & Marketing Intelligence Lead, Philips Beauty, stresses “the importance of developing diverse skill sets from experimentation, advanced analytics and strong quantitative and qualitative capabilities to cover the wide spectrum of consumer insight generation. Having the ability to connect the dots is vital. There is much training to be done to ensure awareness of all the available tools, with specialists driving thought-leadership in each of these areas.”
Personal ownership
Ahuja thinks it is important to put into context all the macro-forces that are shaping the future, of which data and analytics is one very important and exciting one. “You want to think about all the opportunities and future skills, and identify the needs and gaps that are tailored for your team or organisation.”
In the first part of this article he talked about P&G’s UpSkilling program that spans multiple domains, including data science skills. But what is not discussed enough, he feels, is how seriously all professionals – whether 5 or 35 years in their careers – need to take personal responsibility for self-development. He gives a very personal example: “In the early 1990’s I learnt to code – or programming, as it was known back then – in Fortran, Pascal, C++ on my own. Later at P&G I also learnt Quantum, a language designed to run on Unix systems and later incorporated into SPSS. All of these coding languages were for harvesting survey data, manipulation and tabulation. Today I have taught myself the basics of coding with R and Python. My point is not that everyone has to start learning how to code – although truth be told, today’s graduates across all disciplines at more and more universities are being taught computational-thinking, including coding skills. But my point is that is each of us needs to take personal ownership to learn and advance relevant skills in addition to complement your organization’s training plans. My personal motto is: pick a couple of topics or skills ever so often and get deep into them. I choose to be in permanent beta mode. Learning trumps knowledge any day”.
1 comment
” I choose to be in permanent beta mode.”
Great idea. I really like it.