Skills in the time of COVID: Chats with Leaders Focused on Upskilling
Correlation One - Data Science Assessment & Training Provider
By Michelle Dervan, Partner at Rethink Education. This is part of a series of interviews with organizations training citizens and workers in high demand skills.
Context. Correlation One is a New York-based company founded by Sham Mustafa and Rasheed Sabar in 2015 with the mission of addressing the skills gap for data science talent. Their first product was the Datathon, a live challenge/competition hosted on university campuses and sponsored by employers. Today, hundreds of thousands of students have participated in Datathons across four continents and the company has launched an assessment and training platform that is used by governments and large enterprises.
Co-CEO Sham Mustafa shares background on his path, the company’s approach to upskilling, and how Correlation One has adapted to COVID-19 and its economic implications.
MD: Sham you grew up around your family’s small business in India and started your first company importing cellphones as an undergrad. How did these early experiences shape your path?
Growing up in India in the 80s and 90s, I saw first hand the power of new technology to transform lives. The global demand for software made India a hub for software engineering talent and today India’s IT industry is worth $190 billion/year. India ended up creating millions of high paying IT jobs in two decades for people who were able to upskill quickly. It was amazing to see how upskilling transformed the lives of people who were able to participate in a software-driven economy.
Helping people gain new skills became a passion of mine. Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of entrepreneurs in some of the most marginalized communities in the US and have led dozens of upskilling programs. I was also very fortunate to meet my business partner Rasheed Sabar who was equally passionate about education and upskilling people to help realize their potential. Our work at Correlation One is an extension of this passion; we provide access to upskilling as a vehicle for economic mobility in a data-enabled economy.
MD: How is Correlation One able to solve a need that’s been exacerbated by the pandemic?
SM: The need for data science and digital skills that help workers to stay relevant in a fast-changing economy has just been made clearer by this pandemic. It has also shone a light on the gross inequities that exist in terms of access to these jobs. In our realm of data science and STEM, there’s an obvious need for better representation of women and minorities. Last year we launched the Data Science for All: Women’s Summit, where we trained 300 women for free and paired them with mentors. This year, we’re launching Data Science for All: Empowerment which will give 13 weeks of free training to 10,000 people of color and underrepresented groups. This program does not require a previous grounding in data science and aims to provide a pathway to entry-level data jobs.
MD: What did the C1 model look like before COVID-19 started to impact businesses worldwide?
SM: We launched our data analytics training business in Q4 of 2019 and have trained over 1,200 people to-date. We initially ran bootcamp-style training programs in-person. It was like your typical, executive MBA-type class that was held on Saturdays, with students doing independent study and work during the week.
MD: How did the pandemic change that?
SM: We had to innovate quickly and move 700 students to online-only, synchronous delivery, which was new for us. It was like everyone, everywhere, suddenly realized that what would have taken years in the past was now needing to be accomplished in weeks. We are very happy with the focus on synchronous instruction as it enables a lot of engagement and interactivity in the online course delivery.
MD. There are a lot of training bootcamps and online courses focused on data science training, how does Correlation One stand out?
SM: Existing data science training solutions tend to skew theoretical and lack connectivity to the real-time data needs of employers. We overcome this in a few ways:
Customized curriculum. All students take Correlation One’s data skills assessment before we start a training engagement. We have tested over 250,000 data scientists to date and we use this dataset to benchmark the skills of a cohort. That allows us to customize our curriculum based on the skill level. In other words, we do not believe in one-size-fits-all and use this discovery process to curate the content.
Case-based approach. Our training platform is led by Chief Scientist, Professor Natesh Pillai who is a fully tenured professor of Statistics at Harvard. The training is completely case-based similar to the Harvard Business School case method. Our research shows that students learn much faster and retain more when technical concepts are taught through the lens of a real-world business problem.
We have helped some of the world’s most sophisticated data science employers to build data science teams over the past five years. This gives us an intimate knowledge of the skills and specialties that employers care about the most and train our students so they are employable immediately after graduation.
MD. It can be difficult to quantify the effectiveness of upskilling. How do you approach this?
This is why benchmarking skill levels of students before beginning the training program is so critical. When a student takes our assessment, we are able to compare their skills against a global dataset of test-takers on a very granular level. For instance, we test for 12–15 skills which can range from Statistics, Probability Theory, Linear Modelling, Python, etc. We can measure a student’s level of proficiency in each of the skills tested and see where their skills stand when they start the training. Using this data we can quantitatively measure the new data skills acquired through our training.
More importantly, we take a thoughtful approach to understanding what RoI means for each partner. One recent example was a training engagement with portfolio companies of one of the world’s largest investment firms. For this training, we had companies provide their own data to be used for capstone projects. Our team converted the data into project prompts. One of the teams in the program built a new routing algorithm which saves a Latam-based logistics company over $17 million/year. So we see training as not just a way to upskill talent, but a way for companies to realize massive RoI immediately.
MD: What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned since COVID-19?
SM: The one lesson we’ve all learned is adaptability. You’ve got to be able to adapt quickly to the needs of the market. A big part of this is continuously investing in our own growth and development and surrounding ourselves with people who help us to get better and stay ahead of the curve. We recently brought Professor Sheena Iyengar from Columbia Business School on board as an advisor. Sheena is author of the Art of Choosing and an acclaimed researcher on the psychology of choice and decision-making. To get her perspective on business strategy has been invaluable.
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