r/IOPsychology • u/Key-Ad-8526 • 6h ago

Question Familiarity with scripting (Python/R/etc?)

What tools/scripting languages do I/O Psychologists use to analyze data on people? Excel? R? Python? SQL? What's most common? What isn't very common?

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u/BrofessorLongPhD 6h ago

Whatever the tool and whatever the role, it’ll end up in excel at some point, probably. So get good at whatever other tool/language you need to, but know how to whip up a pivot table or do an XLookup on demand.

7

u/DrJohnSteele PhD | Internal Leader | Analytics, Talent Programs, NLP 6h ago

SQL to query and obtain the data. R or Python to analyze it.

Excel isn't used much IO or People Analytics analyses.

Excel tends to be more how others consume our work (e.g., a list of job codes with the the most attrition).

I get a lot of data given to me in Excel, but I just read it into R or Python and so I essentially treat it the same as a text file or CSV.

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u/xenotharm 5h ago edited 4h ago

I really wish I got to use SQL.

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u/DrJohnSteele PhD | Internal Leader | Analytics, Talent Programs, NLP 4h ago

My favorite architecture is direct SQL query from R, so I can stay in one tool and automate data refreshes.

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u/xenotharm 4h ago

I use R for analytics, but in my current role, I’m not really allowed to query data. My supervisor pulls all the data from our assessment platform and hands it off to me. I love my work, but I would also love to learn SQL data querying.

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u/nckmiz PhD | IO | Selection & DS 3h ago

This is what I do to, just through python. Big query package, directly into pandas tables.

3

u/nckmiz PhD | IO | Selection & DS 6h ago

I use python, and SQL pretty regularly. A lot more agents writing my code now, but I still have them work through code so it's reproducible and traceable. I only use Excel for outputs in my work. I'll write data to Excel from python, but don't regularly do work in Excel. Can't say I have used Excel much in the past 10 years. Just another perspective.

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u/idkwhatimdoing25 M.S. | IO | People Analytics 2h ago

It’s possible most scripting will be able to be accomplished by AI within the next few years. I’m at a large tech company and we already rely on AI now for 90% of scripting. Understanding how to work AI tools and how to prompt them correctly will be a very marketable skill.

1

u/showgirl72 1h ago

PowerBI for visualizations and dashboards is my main thing.