The Society for People Analytics exists because the field has no obvious way in. People arrive from HR, from statistics, from consulting, from operations, and each of them is missing a different half of the job. There is no degree that covers it and no career path that produces it reliably.
Coaching is how that gap gets closed one person at a time, and I have been doing it since the first cohort.
What that looks like
The Society organises learning around a shared capability taxonomy: sixteen capabilities across technical, consulting, leadership and business. A member starts from what they actually want to learn rather than from a course catalogue, and a mentor is matched to that, not to a job title.
I helped build that structure. With Hilary I made the Learning Compass, which maps the Body of Knowledge, the university programmes and the mentor network onto the same sixteen capabilities, so the three questions a member has, what to read, where to study and who to talk to, all resolve against one vocabulary.
What I am useful for
The technical parts are well served by other people. Where I tend to help is the half that is harder to teach from a textbook: framing a question so the answer will actually change a decision, getting a model taken seriously by people who do not trust models, and knowing which battles inside an organisation are worth having. Most of that I learned by getting it wrong first, at two companies.
I am also a reasonable person to talk to about whether to build something yourself, and about what a career in this field looks like ten years out, since I have now watched a few.
Getting coached
Coaching runs through the Society rather than through me directly, so the place to start is a Society membership and the mentor network. If you are already in a cohort and want to work with me, say so, and if you are weighing up whether any of this is for you, ask me and I will tell you honestly.