It turns out that Online Trading Academy helps people do exactly what I’ve always been thinking about, learn to day trade!  They teach students how to reach stock charts and buy and sell stocks on a daily basis.  This sounds both intriguing and frightening, but their advertising materials assure you that anyone can learn their trading methodology.

If you google ‘Online Trading Academy Reviews’, you can see that they have a lot of students who have documented and detailed their experience going through the very in-person training they offer.  Its fascinating to see moms, retirees, grandmas, and recent college graduates who have all taken courses and are now able to day trade on their own.  Many people said they do it just in their part time, which is even cooler… you don’t have to give up your day job to day trade.

I think day trading might actually be a nice side job for someone who specializes in Business Intelligence. We are all used to analyzing large amounts of data for little nuggets of gold that can help our businesses or organizations.  Day trading, at its core, is no different than this.  The person who analyzes the data better wins, its pretty simple!

This is a post courtesy of Mike S., a friend of the blog whom we asked to share his story of job hunting in our industry.  Thanks, Mike!

When I started my job search within the Business Intelligence arena I felt overwhelmed and didn’t know where to begin.  Do I search the newspaper listings? Do I put my resume on big job boards, niche job boards, or talk to a recruiter?  I realized quickly that I needed help.  Luckily a friend of mine, Randy, mentioned Jobfox and asked me if I had built my Jobfox profile and career page.  I wasn’t familiar with Jobfox, so I did a quick Google search to find out more.  To my surprise, I saw several claims that Jobfox was a scam, so I called Randy to ask more questions about the service.

Randy was heavily into social networking, blogging, tweeting, etc. so I knew he would be well-versed in the online world.  His comments about Jobfox were extremely positive and he said Jobfox could help me build a professional looking website, profile, and even help me write a professional resume if I was interested.  I asked Randy if he was familiar with the Jobfox scam “claims” and he said no, his experience with Jobfox was great so I began building my profile that very day.

After going through the profile process I was immediately impressed with how my Jobfox Break Through page was laid out.  It not only gave me tools to help me shorten the job seeking process but it also gave me a long list of companies I matched to based on my experience and skills.  I was matching to business intelligence jobs for companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and IBM and I was very pleased how it identified companies I would have never thought of that I was a good fit for, such as Serco or First Data Corporation.  It would have taken me days or weeks to identify this many companies that are hiring for BI jobs, yet Jobfox identified several pages instantly.  I also liked how I could see companies that recently tweeted jobs I might be interested in.

The 30 minutes it took me to fill out my Jobfox profile has saved me days of work.  Not only did it save me countless hours, but I also have 4 job interviews lined up in the business intelligence arena over the next two weeks!  I’ve been so impressed with the experience that I’ve also inquired about the resume writing service.  If I decide to move forward with having my resume professionally written, I’ll follow up with another message about that experience.

I’m not sure why a handful of candidates have written about or claimed that Jobfox is a scam because so far my experience has been nothing short of great. Thanks Randy!  I saw another very similar story to mine on the MDMblog.  If you know BI, you are probably familiar with Master Data Management as well.  Be sure to checkout a similar Jobfox scam experience here.

More to come…

SAS, Accenture, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Actuate, Bearing Point, Cognos, Protiviti, Business Objects and hundreds of other consultants and vendors have all jumped on board, ‘all-in’, behind the idea (and opportunity for money) of Business Intelligence.  Each provide their own information and spin on what it actually is… but at its core they would all likely agree that you must take internal data and information, analyze it to find trends, opportunities, and threats, and then use the information to make critical decisions throughout the organization.  Anything added onto that is simply increasing the scope of business intelligence (which is ok).

The tools to do this have certainly evolved, and some are downright incredible.  Business Objects, a tool that many readers are probably familiar with, has been improving their product for years, and power users can probably make that tool do incredible things.  But, you don’t have to be a power user to build some great reports and find information and trends that the naked eye could never detect.

It is important that a Business Intelligence program focus on doing work that will help the other areas of the business.  It is important to partner with marketing, sales, and operations, to ensure that the work performed is valuable and helpful.  Getting a quick-win with any of these groups helps in getting buy-in from them as well as other leaders and executives within the organization.

It is also recommended that the Business Intelligence group not be considered heavily ‘a part’ of the IT division.  Doing this can make it seem like BI is just another IT function, when in reality it should be a partnership between the business and IT to see what can be learned from the past, and what can be done to be smarter in the future.

When reviewing and analyzing different tools, it’s a great idea to include representatives from the various business areas to see the demonstrations of what can be done.  This will help give them great ideas for what you, using the tool, can do for them to make them better and smarter.  It will also help build a relationship and buy-in for the BI program.

For more information on the ‘theory of knowledge’, visit Sanskrit-iz-ed Meaning of the Word “epistemology” courtesy of the Common World Inheritage