With all the talk — and action — around equal opportunity, pay and personal safety for women in the workplace, we asked ourselves: Why don’t we see more women in workforce analytics roles? As a reference point, our latest research showed that, out of the 644 people with workforce analytics-related job titles reviewed, just under 40% were women.

Workforce analytics skills shortage

The cursory answer to the lower relative level of female representation might be in the analytical nature of the work itself—accepting this outcome as part of the broader challenge found in many STEM fields. That said, it is generally accepted that there isn’t a sufficient supply of talent with the requisite cross-disciplinary skills (at a minimum, HR and analytics) to fill workforce analytics roles today. So, organizations already have accepted that they likely need to follow a non-traditional approach and look for talent with the potential to excel in this area — albeit without all the current desired capability and experiences.

Beyond Technical Skills

Along those lines, we wanted to review what’s really needed to be successful as a workforce analytics professional. We certainly have our own views and have heard from many other practitioners and consultants over the years about their predilections. As with most roles, there are some core technical competencies, but success or failure is often attributed to skills and competencies that are less role — or even function — specific. For example:

As with so many other disciplines, we sometimes see a bias for more specific experience when seeking out workforce analytics resources that limits the potential pool of diverse candidates for this career-advancing position. Let’s take this opportunity to more actively and aggressively seek out women and other diverse applicants to build a new capability within HR from the ground up with diversity in mind (and measurement!).

While the reality is that, more often than not, we have to focus on the day-to-day responsibilities (and “fire drills”) in our current roles, we sometimes emphasize this work to the detriment of our long-term vision. In doing so, we also may lose key opportunities to creatively position diverse resources and give them the needed runway to be successful. As someone who myself runs a women-owned business, I know that I’ve often had to help leaders see beyond their traditional expectations to discover potential untapped talent opportunities, and this dynamic seems to be no different when considering options for workforce analytics resources themselves.

Join the conversation

Please share your perspective: What skills do you see most needed technically and more broadly to advance in this critical HR sub-discipline? And, where do you see opportunities to foster more diversity in thought, experience and every other lens to support innovation in this ever-evolving field of evidence-based HR?