Your Next Standout Researcher is a Mathematician & Storyteller, Scientist & Artist, Code-Breaker & Journalist

Editor’s Note: This commentary is featured in the GRIT Insights Practice Report. The GRIT Insights Practice Report is your #1 guide to brand success in the insights industry, featuring the GRIT Future List, client perspectives, and emerging methodologies. You’ll learn what’s making strides, what trends are worth following, and where your company fits into it all.

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Being called a “master of none” has long been an insulting term to describe someone, or something, as lesser. This is no longer the case. When you’re looking for your next research hire, that person needs to be a master of none. If they are, they’re better prepared for future success.

Traditionally, market research has been broken down into two very separate houses – the dreaded silos that every expert, in seemingly every industry, has been screaming at you to tear down, get out of and avoid. Researchers are overly familiar with these houses: qualitative and quantitative. The skills that will better equip your researchers for 2020 and beyond is a combination and proficiency in both.

You want to see traditional, technical skills like coding in every member of your team. The tech that’s now in the hands of researchers has increased the scope and speed – not to mention cut costs – of the research, one person can conduct, and coding allows you to further command and optimize every platform you use. Gone are the days where you should expect your researchers to come from a specific school or academic background.

Number-crunching and spreadsheet mastery are, of course, still valuable, but your quants need to be able to unearth the story behind the numbers when conducting their analysis. Similarly, traditional qual research needs to be built on a foundation of hard, diverse data and analysis. Data lakes are melting and blending together to provide a full, 360-degree view of your subject material. Social media data and survey results now complement one another. Similarly, you need quant and qual skills, but you need them together because together you become greater than the sum of your parts.

This all may seem very obvious, but how many research teams still separate their work into the old houses of Qual and Quant? The information lost due to this separation is immeasurable and unknown. There is, undoubtedly, insight and solutions tucked away in inboxes that would provide true business value, but companies never realize them due to the separation of the two Qs. For some companies, specialist quant and qual roles are 100% justified. In those cases, the challenge is to help bridge learnings from both halves.

This skillset might seem rare to find in a single individual, and that’s because it is. However, it’s possible to build diverse teams that could operate with the right combination of qual and quant skills to overcome the traditional research divide. This can be achieved through communication and extensive collaboration. One hand needs to see what the other is doing, and ask questions all along the way. If you can’t find the scarce researcher who can access both halves of their brain ambidextrously, you can at least open the process between the two Qs, so that each camp can learn through osmosis.

Overall, specialized skillsets are still valuable, but the broader and more diverse the horizons within a single researcher or team, the more equipped they are to operate in a research landscape that assigns value to information and data coming from multiple sources.