Payroll employees have long been the ones to fill out excel forms, the ones that insert and transform the data, but are rarely responsible for reading and seeing trends in the data that they work with daily. Many new jobs have come around data, even cool job titles such as those like “Data Scientist”. The problem is though, that payroll is becoming ever more automated and payroll/HR employees are finding themselves with less time running payroll, and more time doing other tasks. All parts of companies are becoming more and more tech ran, and this trend will only continue.

"Many payroll professionals were never really taught how to look at trends and truly understand data."

While attending a recent virtual payroll conference, many questions were asked in the Q&A on how to read data and access analytics as a payroll professional. This is because payroll professionals are once again, doing less payroll, and more analyzing data altogether. However, many were never really taught how to look at trends and truly understand data. Many have said once they are asked to present a certain set of data in their field, they often have to go ask the finance department or a data scientist, or maybe even IT. With the growth of AI, analytics, and big data, to work for a company that uses large amounts of data, you have to be able to read and learn from it in all parts of the company, including payroll and HR.

LEARN "PEOPLE ANALYTICS" TO SEE PROFITS THAT ARE 82 PERCENT HIGHER THAN AVERAGE OVER THREE YEARS.

The growth of data boot camps has become commonplace as well, just take a look on LinkedIn and search data boot camps, you can find not only camps themselves, but even companies that specialize in teaching data analytics as well. New majors are coming into colleges and universities, such as Data Science Majors, Data Analytics majors, and even AI and ML majors/minors coming into some universities and colleges. Improved HR analytics has been directly linked to productivity and profitability. One notable example comes from energy giant Chevron, which reported a 30 percent increase in productivity after overhauling its approach to HR analytics.

They’re not alone, either – research has found that organizations using ‘people analytics’ to drive HR and business decisions often see profits that are 82 percent higher than average over three years. Big data is only encompassing more areas of information to cover, and with more information, comes more ways to use and learn from it.