IOHRM Student, Skylar Ritchie, Leads App State's Text Analytics Workshop

First-year student, Skylar Ritchie, flexed his analytic muscle during an extensive workshop involving App. State’s Marketing department on Friday, February 19th. On behalf of the Office of Research Consultation, Skylar and Dr. Shawn Bergman used their expert understanding of text analytics to demonstrate to users how to use the text analytics package in IBM SPSS Modeler.

Text analytics has become a major strategic tool for organizations looking to better understand consumers and employees in our increasingly high-tech world. The text analytics package in IBM SPSS Modeler can be used by the University’s Marketing Department to help automate the process of making sense of the massive amounts of textual information they continually receive. From that point, users can better gauge things like customer sentiment that can then provide strategic focus towards reaching different consumer demographics.

The first half of the workshop was designed to teach participants the principles of text analytics. Skylar and Dr. Bergman then walked the audience through the package’s various features and capabilities. At over 100 slides and 20 videos, the main points of the comprehensive training session are also posted on the Office of Research Consultation’s website as a continual resource for users.

Skylar and Dr. Bergman made sure to emphasize the need to correctly set the software’s parameters prior to analyzing your data so that the end results can be properly understood. This critical first step is one that Skylar believes was most surprising to participants.

Applying the software’s capabilities to various HR functions is what Skylar says he finds most interesting about the package. “Given the large quantity of employee opinion surveys that companies receive each year, I could see text analytics being useful for detecting themes in employee responses and determining which areas of the business they feel positively or negatively about. HR managers might use the results as part of a predictive model that could forecast voluntary turnover and could create targeted organizational development initiatives to get at the root of the problem,” Skylar said.

The IOHRM program is proud of its students, like Skylar, who continue to demonstrate their ability to be on the cutting-edge of the I-O Psychology and HR fields.

Skylar Ritchie giving a power point presentation
Published: Mar 1, 2016 7:49pm

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