In terms of professional philosophy, I likely share the very same ambition you all have.

I am deeply passionate about our industry and our people, driven to ensuring we are recognised as a vital strategic asset in our respective businesses. More than that, I want to see us making a real and observable difference to how we support our teams to grow, collectively to achieve our business goals but also individually to ensure we always stay ahead of the challenges and disruption that come our way.

As an insights leader, if you can create a working culture and environment that breeds positive business impact through personal growth, great talent will surely and actively seek you out.

One group that is united against this goal to create a vibrant and dynamic professional culture that attracts the best talent is the MRS Senior Client Council. The SCC brings together a select representation of insights leaders from many well-known brands and is focused on collaborating in support of the MRS but also with each other to give advice, share best practice and align on industry policy that impacts us all.

One particular initiative the Senior Client Council has been focused on relates to talent and how to embed the contemporary capabilities needed to be a world-class insights and analytics team. This initiative was borne out of a number of observations, not least a Forbes report that found over 80% of workers expect their employers to provide relevant learning and growth development opportunities and yet only around 30% of employees were satisfied with the training currently available.

As such, we wanted to guide all insights leaders on how we more effectively invest in and plan learning strategies for our talent to ensure we are strong, ever more relevant and have all the insights and analytics capabilities and competencies we need to meet the challenges and disruption we do encounter.

In essence, owning the creation and onward support of a dynamic culture that attracts and grows great insights and analytics talent. No more lip service paid to planning professional learning programmes.

In completing this paper, we defined five major capability pillars required to be considered a ‘world-class’ insights and analytics team.

The first two are pivotal and wholly expected:

•          Market research skills
•          Analytics skills

While the remaining three are:

•          Business acumen
•          Effective relationships, and
•          Activation and impact.

Within each of those capability pillars, there are around seven or eight individual key competencies.

Within business acumen, it is accepted that team members should have at least a basic understanding of company financials, Insights budget allocation and how Insights Strategy should be aligned to company strategy, as well as being able to articulate the ROI of insights projects and platforms.

Within effective relationships, our team talent needs to be proficient in ‘influencing and persuasion’ and equally, ‘empathy and emotional intelligence’.

Within activation and impact, our colleagues should understand the difference between ‘change management’ and being a ‘change catalyst’ – that is, to understand and act on the differences between ‘process’ and ‘proactivity’.

Even in the more traditional market research skills pillar, is the return and resurgence of needing to be highly competent at ‘desk research’. indeed, many of us have always asked our teams to reflect on, ‘what does the business already know’, and to explore this before we even contemplate writing a new brief for the next primary research study. And in the advent of AI knowledge retrieval, synthesis and dissemination, there should be no excuse for not doing this.

Finally, the paper has sought to enlighten and provoke on what new capabilities and competencies our Insights team should invest in as a result of AI-driven changes to our workflows. Chief amongst these are further enhancing our competency in ‘higher-level strategic insight generation’, ‘ethical and responsible AI oversight’, ‘scenario planning and predictive analytics’ and ‘experimentation and prototyping’. Time will be the judge as to which new capabilities take priority but a good leader should already be planning for this change.

The most enlightening take-out from this capability framework is the need to have our teams and talent engage externally of the insights teams over being internally focused on study design and project management tasks. To have huge impact, we have to engage up, down and across the business.

The conclusion being that while traditional technical skills training continues to be hugely important, we should also be actively deploying training and capability building programmes focused on broader competencies such as business strategy formulation, soft skills that heighten engagement and connection with stakeholders and modern communication skills development that drive us to share instructive direction over basic research study observations.

Since we published this capabilities framework, it’s been shared and used to help other client-side insights leaders focus learning plans and training priorities – successfully avoiding a learning and development experience that only one-third of employees are happy with.

The paper is available to access on the MRS website. 

Nick Rich is an insights consultant and adviser, and was previously vice-president of insights and analytics at The Carlsberg Group