Looking Back & our Predictions and Plans for 2019

Christmas and the holidays are always a good time to look back and reflect on what has happened over the past year – and what a year it has been! In this article, I briefly want to look back at 2018 and take a glimpse ahead at 2019.

I remember reading a hypothesis on why time seems to go faster as you become older. The idea was that this happens because when you get older, more things happen to you that have already happened to you before. Looking back, those memories become a blur as less and less truly new events stand out anymore. The writer proposed that you should keep doing things you haven’t done before in order to make time go slower.

Whenever I talk with my business partner Nando about things that happened in the past, I notice that I keep overestimating how long ago they happened. Things that happened 2 weeks ago, feel like a month ago already. Following the hypothesis, I assume this is because there’s so much happening in a very brief period of time that I estimate it to be much longer ago.

Before looking forward to 2019, I would like to present a brief overview of our main changes and achievements in 2018.

• Last week we celebrated Christmas with the team. Last year we were with 5 people, this year we were with 12!
• We added 6 additional programs to the 3 courses we started with at the beginning of this year in the AIHR Academy.
• The existing three programs have been completely revamped to ensure the highest quality.
• In 2018, we’ve welcomed well over 600,000 people on our AIHR blog, who visited the website close to a million times!
• We started our corporate People Analytics learning solutions. Our aim is to advance people analytics capabilities internally and to build a data-driven culture in HR.
• We’ve introduced AIHR as a brand and moved away from Analytics in HR and the HR Analytics Academy to the AIHR blog & academy.

The AIHR team just before the Christmas dinner!

People involved in analytics know that making predictions about the future is difficult. However, some writers on analytics have made it an annual tradition to make a set of qualitative predictions for the coming year so I thought we should jump in with five predictions of our own.

Actually, they are not really predictions but phenomena we are already seeing today. Our position in the market gives us a good overview of what’s happening. In addition, we frequently engage with readers, customers, and leading people analytics company. We are seeing a number of (early) trends that we expect to continue to see throughout 2019:

1. The demand for practical, hands-on information about analytics will keep growing. We’ve talked enough about the importance of analytics, now we need to get our hands dirty and actually do it. Earlier this year we’ve had the pleasure to welcome our 2,000th student. Demand for hands-on training programs is growing exponentially.
   I’m also seeing this in the offline conference space where practitioners are becoming the more popular speakers. People are looking for ideas on how to do analytics themselves.
2. People analytics education in academia will be taken much more serious. In the past month alone I’ve been contacted by two universities in the Netherlands. They asked me to help in the development of their people analytics curriculum. These programs include master’s programs and executive education.
   For some reason (I’m not entirely sure why), the Netherlands has always been a leading country in people analytics. It wouldn’t surprise me if we will hear much more about these kinds of programs next year.
3. We’re seeing more and more HR analytics case studies being published in different industry papers. I’m also seeing a small increase in research on HR analytics – although this is still severely lagging behind.
4. Data-savviness will be a major part of the HR business partner’s role and we expect this to exponentially increase in the coming year. The implementation of people analytics findings is becoming more and more of a bottleneck for people analytics teams. HR business partners play a critical role in the implementation of analytics so involving and training them becomes increasingly important for long-term people analytics success.
5. We expect digital HR and HR analytics to integrate more. There are some early signs of this already and this will only increase. HR analytics never happens in isolation and we think that the importance of HR systems side is underexposed.

We at AIHR want to have the solutions already finished by the time the market is ready for it. This is why we are working very hard on a set of very practical tools that help in doing people analytics. These tools help companies take the steps to get to people analytics success quicker.

An example is our People Analytics Roadmap, that we launched as part of our learning community. All of our new students can access the roadmap. They can use it to see where they are now and find the resources that will help them advance to the next step.

We also strongly believe in the last trend I mentioned, the integration of digital HR and analytics. In our strategic plan, we’ve included a number of fantastic initiatives that we hope to announce before the summer of 2019. Some of these will have a major impact on the visibility of People Analytics in the broader HR community.

All in all, 2019 will be a very exciting year with many more things to come. We are very grateful for the support and trust that so many of our customers and readers have placed in us and we look forward to working together to advance data-driven HR in 2019.

Happy new year!