Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?
We started to roll out our data literacy programme – Data Empowered Colleagues – this year. The aim is to support our wider data and digital transformation by providing everyone the opportunity to learn key aspects of the data value lifecycle, their role within it, and how to shape fantastic data questions to support their decision making with data storytelling. This programme will result in the formation of an active data academy for every employee, and a data guild for our data professionals across the organisation.
The data academy starts with a survey that opens personalised online training, consisting of tests, videos, and other resources that employees can consume at their leisure. Depending on their role, engagement, and persona, employees are invited to complete an eight-month virtual classroom certification covering a range of soft and technical skills.
The data guild also starts with our personal survey and identifies established or potential data professionals. Again, it offers dedicated certification training up to Level 7 Data Science Apprenticeships, but also will offer work opportunities across short term hackathon events and other key business data initiatives.
All of this is wrapped together with a planned senior manager engagement. This is designed to equip the leaders of the organisation with the tools needed to support our data transformation, by helping them build our data literacy manifesto and learning how to be strong advocates for data-driven questioning and decision making.