Coleen Wilder, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Management

Coleen Wilder is celebrating the approval of an undergraduate business analytics major she helped to design. The major will position Valpo graduates to enter into a thriving market.

“By 2018, there is going to be a shortage of 1.5 million analysts and managers who can understand and make decisions using data,” she says, citing a study by the McKinsey Global Institute. “We know there is a demand for these skills.”

Wilder has a deep knowledge about the need for those experts — she was one for 30 years before returning to academia in 2005. She joined the faculty at Valparaiso University in 2011.

Now, in her teaching, Wilder draws on her experiences as an analyst and data-minded manager. She can recount her time working at ArcelorMittal, for example, deciding exactly how much equipment to purchase for a multimillion-dollar chemical lab. Purchasing too much would be a needless expense; too little equipment would slow down production.

“I want my students to recognize how things have changed over my career history,” Wilder says. “Once I wasn’t able to do certain analyses because the data wasn’t available — that doesn’t hold true anymore. There’s so much data now. The problem has changed some in that now we have to pick out the good data and use it wisely.”