Oakland University Enhances Courses with the Qlik Academic Program!
Business students achieve 85% pass rate in Qlik Academic Program qualification
With each passing day, more and more organizations are starting to leverage the benefits of data analytics to improve customer service, enhance operational performance, identify new business markets and drive revenue growth. Long gone are the days where business and data analytics remained exclusive to IT professionals. Analytics skills now appear in job descriptions for many industries such as healthcare, automotive, financial services, marketing, human resources and education. However, it is a challenge to find people who combine quantitative computing and business domain knowledge with the requisite analytics skills.
To help fill this skills gap, Oakland University Business School created the Department of Decision and Information Sciences (DIS) which runs several courses aimed at helping students meet the demands of the job market. Based in Rochester, Michigan, Oakland University was established in 1957. With 20,500 graduates and undergraduates, it is now recognized as a student-centered, doctoral research institution with a global presence. Established nearly 50 years ago, the University’s School of Business Administration integrates classroom learning with real-world business experience and 88% of its graduates secure professional employment within a few months of graduating. The university is also recognized by the Institute for Business Technology among the top 50 schools in the IS Job Index.
Among efforts to equip students with the skills required for the future, the university has made significant strides by integrating the use of data analytics into its Management Information Systems (MIS) and Statistics courses. Having used Qlik Sense for data analysis in manufacturing engineering, Professor Jerry Roek recognized the importance of analytics in business. This in-turn prompted the professor to seek support from Qlik to integrate its Academic Program into Oakland’s MIS curriculum. By using Qlik Sense, the students are not only gaining exposure in building applications, but they are also getting hands on experience, allowing them to understand how the tool works.
“Each week, we cover a variety of topics using the Qlik Sense application. These include creating sheets and visualizations, basic Qlik Sense terminology, filtering, searching, master items and data sources. Each lecture is supported by the Qlik videos which are outstanding. They are right to the point and show students in detail what they have to do to get quick results.”
– Professor Jerry Roek, University of Oakland
By inducing the Qlik Academic Program at Oakland – university professors, students and researchers gained free access to Qlik software and resources to help in the training of data analytics. Students were also provided with online learning resources, including instructional videos, lecture notes, handouts, and real-world interactive business use cases made available through the Qlik Continuous Classroom
