People Analytics Analyst Loves the Detective Work

Name: Faz Abdul Karim (he/him)

PhD: Industrial Organizational Psychology, Indiana University - Indianapolis, 2022

What was your main area of research?

Broadly speaking, I examined how people's ambivalence toward specific policies motivated them to find new information to help them make a final decision. Interestingly, people who were highly ambivalent toward specific policies were more likely to be swayed by consensus.

What is your current job?

I am a People Analytics Analyst for Post Holdings Inc. in St. Louis, Missouri.

I build reports and visualizations that support Post Holdings strategic plans for the talent management team. I work with partners across different business units to understand their business needs and provide data-driven solutions. I collaborate with people from different teams to understand how our data is structured, processed, and validated.

What is your favorite thing about your job?

I love doing detective work of unveiling different ways that our HR systems are imperfect. But more importantly, I love talking to different people about ways to resolve these issues.

What is the most important skill you developed or experience you had during your PhD that now helps you in your current position?

The ability to face persistent challenges - your codes do fail, your data structure is wrong, your cross-reference processes reveal more problems with the system, your boss will not stop pushing you. Knowing that you bring value to the organization is an important antidote to dealing with all these difficulties.

How did you build the skills necessary for your current role?

• Learn measurement theory.

• YouTube is your best friend when it comes to technical sides of building Tableau dashboards.

• ChatGPT or Copilot are essential tools when it comes to troubleshooting data issues, like SQL coding errors, Power Query issues, and Tableau calculated fields and formulas.

How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?

The company's recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn.

PhD graduate ➡️ Project Management Specialist ➡️ Senior HR Research Analyst ➡️ People Analytics Analyst

If someone is interested in a similar role, what would you recommend they start doing now to prepare?

Two main things:

1. Learn how HR works (it's cumbersome, complex, and sometimes unnecessarily inefficient).

2. Practice interacting with Generative AI on a regular basis - -how to create prompts, how to give feedback, and how to tweak things.

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?

I still grieve my decision to leave academia. Academia was and I presume still is a series of political games. I learned early in grad school about the "publish or perish" mentality, which was a huge turn off for me. People are less interested in pursuing high-quality research and more into what is easy and what gets them published.

What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?

Focus on developing technical and soft skills: data analysis, data visualization (Power BI or Tableau), cross-team collaboration, conflict resolutions, Generative AI tools, Excel and Power Query, and audacity to ask questions that no one else is brave enough to ask.