Why we’re giving away data science training materials for free

A core tenet of our mission at Data Society is to empower employees and teams with powerful data science skills, and provide them with the tools to implement analytics to automate processes and find new insights.

Over the past four years, we’ve seen amazing results, such as students who reduced the time of major processes by over 90%, and others who saved their companies over half a million dollars after a couple of weeks of training. Participants in our trainings leave with thousands of lines of code that they can immediately use, and it has been incredibly gratifying to hear their stories.

However, the more we trained analysts in the implementation of these data science techniques, the more we heard similar refrains during and after our programs:

“My manager doesn’t understand what I’m doing”

“My ideas aren’t being heard”

“I don’t have the infrastructure to use these new skills”

In fact, we heard this so often that we developed an executive data science training program to help executives and managers understand the awesome potential of data science and build a shared vocabulary. When we deliver these high-level trainings, we’ve seen a new level of collaboration and a much faster adoption rate of a data-driven culture. This is typically the catalyst that organizations need to implement widespread transformation.

We’ve spoken to a lot of frustrated Data Scientists about the difficulty of being truly effective without the proper support of their non-data scientist colleagues and managers. Typically, non-data managers have a hard time understanding what tools data scientists need. They might purchase shiny tools for tens of thousands of dollars that a data scientist can build with free, open-source languages like Python or R programming in a day. Alternatively, they might not understand how time-consuming data cleaning and collection can be, which leads to miscommunication.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have generalists who will go to data scientists for every data task, from simple SQL queries to sorting Excel spreadsheets. This bombardment of requests limits the bandwidth of data scientists to focus on more advanced analytics, and can become overwhelming after a while.

That’s why we’re giving away a free data science communicator toolkit for data scientists to bridge those communication gaps and help their colleagues gain a better understanding of data science.

In order for us to make this as useful as possible, we created a 5-minute survey to understand you, the Frustrated Data Scientist (or analyst / manager, etc), better. Once you complete the survey, we’ll send you our free toolkit that is based off the feedback we receive from you. The materials include an instructional guide and a deck about data science methods and tools that you’ll be able to deliver to your colleagues.

This free toolkit will help you improve communication, build a data-driven culture, and become the office hero (cape not included in toolkit).

Enjoy saving your team time and money!