Every company and venture comes with risk. In eCornell’s Risk Analysis certificate program, developed by Linda Nozick, director of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell, professionals learn how individuals and businesses can avoid, mitigate, share and diversify risks. The certificate includes four key modules: risk analysis foundations, risk evaluations, risk modeling and risk perception.
In a recent conversation with eCornell, Nozick discussed how the program charts out risk in a quantitative and statistically focused manner.
How do we quantify risk?
“Measuring risk is actually really difficult. It is one thing to say: Something’s risky. But once you have to ask ‘how risky,’ you have this question of how to put that risk in context with other risks. And we can talk about this really in an interesting way, when we think about valuing human life or how we handle risk in the public sphere. We make very different decisions about investment for risk mitigation on the highway system than we do in a nuclear power plant. You see the massive difference in funding. We try to illustrate that by looking at specific application domains and statistics with understanding that probability distribution. How likely is an outcome and how bad is it?”
What is risk perception and how does risk attitude affect decision making?
“Risk has a lot to do with how people interpret things, and we don’t interpret them all the same way. And so I think it’s important in the risk space to kind of understand how your perceptions, your attitudes toward risk make you more vulnerable to risks or help you mitigate risks. Somebody who’s really risk prone doesn’t worry so much about risk, and they take more risks than their company would like them to. You are trying to understand how risk attitudes affect decision making. Attitudes actually do drive how you make choices . . . that’s really what this whole thing is about: How does your mental headspace impact your decision making when it comes to risk?”
Is this course content constrained to risk professionals?
“Not at all. This course really is agnostic with respect to the application domain. We talk about financial risk. We talk about health risks. We talk about all sorts of risks. There really is that opportunity to see the applications across different types of business professionals and roles and industries, which could really give folks interesting perspectives and a lot of fundamentals as they’re changing careers or moving up in their career.”
Equip yourself with the tools to identify risks and apply strategies that protect you and your hard work — no matter your industry — in eCornell’s Risk Analysis certificate program. Learn more and enroll now.
