Empowering Commerce Employees with the Latest Data Skills
by Radhika Bhatt, Mark Brown II, Natassja Linzau, Tyrone Grandison, Jeff Chen
The Commerce Data Service (CDS) — a public startup in the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce — is pleased to announce the launch of the new website for the Commerce Data Academy at http://DataAcademy.commerce.gov.
Earlier this year, the Commerce Data Service started a little experiment to test the demand for data science, data engineering, and web development training by employees and contractors of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
We started with a pilot in January 2016 — where we collaborated with General Assembly, the Commerce Library and LINC (Leadership & Innovation Network in Commerce), to offer classes in Agile Development, HTML & CSS, Storytelling with Data, and Excelling at Excel. Success would be if we got 30 people in each class and the majority had a good learning experiences. Unexpectedly, the class sizes were more than triple what we expected; with a total of 422 registrations and a nearly ninety (90) percent attendance rate.
The feedback from the pilot was sufficient for us to start thinking about how do we scale this initiative. Here we did two things:
- We offered 2 two-week data intensive bootcamps; one on “Data Analysis & Discovery” and the other on “Data Visualization for Policy”,
- We offered 14 additional data courses that were taught by the Commerce Data Service team.
We provided scholarships to a select group of Commerce employees; where the Data Service agreed to pay for their tuition if they agreed to do a Detail with the CDS team for three months working on a project for their home bureau and sharpening their data skills while working with the data experts in the Commerce Data Service.
Back Row L-R: Kevin Markham (Instructor, General Assembly); Steven Finkelstein (Census); Dmitri Smith (BIS); William Hawk (ESA); David Garrow (Census); Adam Bray (Instructor, General Assembly); David Beede (ESA)
Front Row L-R: Karlheinz Skowronek (PTO), April Blair (PTO), Tanya Shen (BEA), Stephen Devine (EDA), Laura Cutrer (NOAA), and Patricia Tomczyszyn (MBDA)
Not pictured: Amanda Reynolds (ITA), Gregory Paige (OS), Andrea Julca (BEA), Jennifer Rimbach (MBDA)
The Data Service was fortunate enough to give out 15 of these scholarships and now has 15 detailees working with us on their home bureaus’ projects.
For the current set of 14 data courses, there have been well over 3,500 registrations. We have tweaked the model from the pilot to cap the maximum number of in-person attendances to 25; while still leaving the online participants unbounded.
As we continue to engage with the Commerce community, we learn more about how to improve the program and its offerings so that it not only aligns with the community’s needs, but it also empowers them in their daily duties.
We are especially heartened that another Federal agency has copied the Commerce Data Academy model and is seeing a similar response.
Through this new website, Commerce employees can view our course offerings, register for classes, and listen to previous classes. All of our courses are available and recorded through Web-Ex, so that employees can attend class virtually and review what they learned later. We believe that by educating and empowering Commerce employees, we can help everyone make better data-driven decisions in their own bureaus.
Through individual education and empowerment, we can help make Commerce an innovative and stronger data-driven agency.
A version of this blog can be found at ESA.
