Kieran Kepler

"The field of analytics is wide open, and that makes it interesting to me"

Business Analytics & Statistics - Alumni

Kieran Kepler started his career in economics before changing lanes to pursue business analytics. He graduated from Haslam’s MSBA program in December 2016 and immediately accepted a position at KPMG, a global network of firms that provide audit, tax and advisory services. “I’m doing consulting work with the federal government, specifically in the data analytics space,” he says. “It’s exactly what the MSBA program prepared me for.”

In his first two years on the job at KPMG, Kepler put his technical skills to the test. “I’ve also learned the core consulting skills revolving around client work and project life cycles,” he says. “It’s been going very well so far.”

Kepler has worked with the same Department of Defense client since joining KPMG, creating database tools that can generate high quality reports. “They have a fairly good database system, but they can’t accomplish what they need to with the tools they have,” he says. “To address that, we extract the data, blend it, and produce the report they need to see for their organization to run efficiently.”

Currently, Kepler serves on a team that’s developing predictive models to anticipate when the client’s customers will pay their accounts receivable. “I’m more on the functional side of that, but it’s important to know how to explain what we’re doing and be able to provide a connection point between data scientists and those in leadership at the organization,” he says. “It’s not enough to have the technical skills. You have to be able to communicate results to the non-technical people you’re working with.”

Kepler’s background in business analytics makes him a commodity. “I’m always in demand within the company because they still don’t have enough people who can do what we’re trained to do in the MSBA program,” he says. In the future, he hopes to continue delving into analytics and its various offshoots, including machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing. “The field of analytics is wide open, and that makes it interesting to me,” he says. “There are so many facets of it that I want to learn more about.”