People Analytics: Make People Decisions with Data
Signature Course No. 234 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's People Analytics: Make People Decisions with Data course, in the People, Culture & Engagement category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Every organization makes its most expensive decisions about people on numbers nobody has checked. Whom to hire, why good people leave, whether pay is fair, how many staff next year needs — decided on anecdote, seniority of opinion, and reports that contradict each other because nobody agreed what their words mean. This course replaces that mixture with a discipline.
You learn the discipline in its order. Frame the decision before you touch the data. Inventory the people data you actually hold and define its terms. Check the ground before you build on it. Describe honestly — rates with counts, bases, and periods — before you explain anything. And test every favored explanation against its rivals and its confounders before anyone spends money on it.
The guardrails are the method, not a footnote. People data is sensitive data: minimum group sizes so no cut can point at a person, consent and purpose limits that hold after collection, survey answers that can never be traced back to the person who gave them, and bias checks wherever the data carries the history of human judgment. Prediction is taught with humility — models that flag, humans who decide — and the course refuses, on the accuracy arithmetic as well as on principle, to score named individuals.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Start With the Question: Clean Data, Honest Measures — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Turnover Evidence Brief; then, Module 2 — Answer, Decide, and Prove It Held — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Hiring-and-Retention Decision.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — The Turnover Evidence Brief, a two-page brief that takes a contested nursing-turnover question at Aldervane Health from three circulating stories to a decision the board can make; and The Hiring-and-Retention Decision, a people decision memo weighing three proposals for the same money, with its measurement plan attached so the board will later know whether the decision worked.
The honesty discipline is part of the course. Every figure in the running case is a stated teaching figure on one fixed ledger, so every worked number can be recomputed with a pencil. And the course says plainly what analytics cannot do: data can narrow a disagreement and price a trade-off, but it cannot choose what an organization values — several analyses end, deliberately, at a decision the numbers inform but do not make.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
People Analytics: Make People Decisions with Data is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the decision. A people analysis exists to make a choice better than it would have been without evidence — so every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Turnover Evidence Brief for Module 1 and The Hiring-and-Retention Decision for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
A discipline, not a dashboard. People analytics is the practice of using employee data — hiring, turnover, engagement, performance, pay, and workforce supply — to answer specific people questions with evidence instead of opinion.
Module 1 builds the foundations. The framed question, the inventoried and defined data, the checked ground, the guardrails, and honest description: turnover, funnels, and surveys each read without the illusion they invite.
Module 2 spends those foundations on decisions. Performance and pay read without distortion, workforce planning arithmetic, cohorts and prediction held within their limits, and pilots designed to tell the truth about whether a change worked.
And it makes the work durable. Briefs that carry uncertainty into the room where decisions are made, governance that keeps the practice trustworthy, and a personal standard you can state, keep, and be judged by.
What you will learn
- Frame and ground the work: state the decision first, inventory and define the data, judge its quality, and apply the privacy, consent, small-numbers, and bias guardrails as method
- Describe and explain honestly: rates with correct denominators, turnover and hiring funnels read properly, engagement surveys without illusion, and correlation separated from cause
- Decide with the evidence: performance and pay data without distortion, workforce planning arithmetic, cohorts and prediction used within their limits, and pilots that show whether an intervention worked
- Communicate and govern: decision briefs that carry uncertainty, access and retention discipline, and a personal operating standard for people analytics you can defend
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of People Analytics: Make People Decisions with Data, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Turnover Evidence Brief and The Hiring-and-Retention Decision
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for people who decide about people
People analytics and HR professionals — who produce or commission analyses of hiring, turnover, engagement, performance, or pay, and need a defensible method rather than a reporting habit.
HR business partners and people-team leaders — who sit between the data and the decision, and must know which numbers to trust, which to challenge, and which to refuse.
People managers, operations leaders, and analysts moving into people data — who receive workforce reports and are expected to act on them, and to know when a report cannot carry the action proposed for it. The course assumes ordinary business arithmetic and general comfort reading a table or a chart; it assumes no statistics degree, no particular software, and no prior people-analytics role. It does assume you will handle real people's data in your work, and it treats that responsibility as part of the skill, not an obstacle to it.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Turnover Evidence Brief
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
People Analytics: Make People Decisions with Data is Signature Course No. 234. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.