Haslam College of Business - Alumni Spotlight: Haley Hubbard

Haley Hubbard (MSBA ‘14) is currently working at Vendor Registry in Knoxville, Tennessee, as the director of business analytics. Hubbard leverages her degree for visualization, light analyses, A/B testing, development of company-wide KPIs and customer segmentation.

“Prior to earning my Master’s of Science in Business Analytics, I earned a bachelor’s from UT in accounting and attended the University of Texas to obtain my Master’s in Professional Accounting,” she says. After earning these degrees, she worked in forensics services at PwC in New York for three years and in Dallas for two.

“The majority of my work focused on white collar crime investigation, and this is where I discovered my love of disparate data analyses,” Hubbard says. “I recognized that the wave of the future in almost every profession is to have strong analytics skills in addition to your initial focus, and I made the decision to return to school for another degree.”

Hubbard’s most current project involving analytics aims to visualize data to see what is going on the business environment. From there, her company has begun testing different scenarios and measuring the impact. “We have tested website layout, paths through our system, marketing content and subject lines,” she says. “Our company takes a scientific approach to decision making, opting for testing hypotheses to see which solution produces the desired result. We have used many sources of data including customer inputted, company generated, financial, email activity, and web traffic data for these analyses.”

Working for a startup company, one of Hubbard’s greatest difficulties is not having much data for analyses. “This is a challenge we continue to fight,” she says. “However, we have approached our data gathering with a forward thinking mindset considering the types of questions we would like to answer.”

But the challenges are worth the trade-off for Hubbard. “This role with Vendor Registry has given me the opportunity to make strategic business decisions using analytics and see those decisions through from concept to execution,” she says. “I hope to continue to have these experiences as our company grows and begin using some predictive modeling to answer some of our questions. My hopes for my career are to run an organization or department using a variety of skills but driven by databased decisions.”

Hubbard says the greatest benefits of attending the MSBS program at Haslam were the teamwork demanded of the students and the involvement of the faculty. “I knew coming into this program that I had many strengths but also many weaknesses that I needed to strengthen,” she says. “What I learned was that all of my classmates had the same issue but with a variety of strengths. Forcing us to work as teams allowed us to learn from each other in addition to what we learned in the classroom. Also, my classmates and I often found it helpful to work in the department because our faculty was easily accessible and would often come sit at tables with us to review our questions.”