Five Questions with Peter Hayes
Senior Analyst within Strategy and Performance at Edith Cowan University, Australia
We interviewed Peter sitting in The Simpsons chair. He didn’t want to be interviewed out in the Perth hills!
1. What is your job title?
Senior Analyst within Strategy and Performance at Edith Cowan University.
2. Briefly, how would you describe your role in your institution?
I help with:
- state government and Australian Government reporting of student (HE/VET) and staff data
- university level KPIs
- Tableau and Power-BI dashboard creation for university benchmarking
I’m also involved in funding estimates supplied to Government, and I service data science queries for university strategy.
I have worked on projects for:
- predicting student outcomes for targeted retention programs
- optimising admission profiles relative to strategic KPIs
- analysing the effects of changing student learning platforms
- identifying student cohorts with irregularities in student grades, etc.
My background is mathematical physics.
3. From your perspective, what will be the key skills, capabilities and knowledge required for institutional research moving forward?
- A solid understanding of the Microsoft suite and its capabilities, taking raw data through ETL into reporting, then using it to generate predictive or prescriptive models.
- To clearly deliver insights/interfaces to clients that won’t get lost in information overload.
- To have AI and machine learning skills. Currently AI is accelerating my background understanding and proving indispensable for code generation. In the future, I expect AI will develop entire processing streams.
While I am on a learning curve for the newer products on the market, I am progressing in this right direction as access to tools becomes more available to staff at ECU.
4. What do you believe will be the future priorities or emerging areas of interest for institutional research?
- To continue to leverage data to drive key initiatives in student success, course offerings, and the overall campus experience.
- To provide predictive and prescriptive analytics that make sense to clients, and that deliver insights and cognitive connections to pieces of models that currently exist.
- To continually invest in proactively identifying and supporting at-risk students, thereby enhancing retention and academic outcomes.
- To analyse student performance and job market trends that support curriculum alignment with industry needs.
- To potentially drive insights from campus engagement data to help optimise student services and timetabling.
- To analyse research metrics to showcase impact and guide rankings improvements, and to help in securing funding.
- To invest more in research into diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) analysis, to help address access and support gaps.
5. What does being part of the AAIR community mean to you?
The tasks and challenges faced by universities are often quite similar. Sharing both positive and negative experiences is invaluable for benchmarking performance and generating new ideas. I find that uncovering shared difficulties, especially with sector-wide initiatives like TCSI, is crucial. In these cases, while software suppliers and government agencies promote the benefits and comprehensiveness of their solutions, groups like AAIR provide a space for intentionally isolated providers to gain a more realistic understanding of task complexities, potential pitfalls, and likely timelines.
6. Complete this statement:
In my role, I can’t operate effectively without …
… a supportive team. Working with a group of interesting, rational, good-natured people who care about a task outcome is crucial.
Peter Hayes
November 2024
Answer 5 Questions
Would you like to feature in the ‘Institutional Researcher’s Corner’ segment of our newsletter, The Institutional Researcher? Contact our trusty editors with the answers to 5 simple questions, and we’ll feature you in an upcoming issue.
