Why We’re Starting SF Data School

There’s a lot of options for learning how to work with data and we think most are great. In fact, Serge and I have led classes and/or been students at some, interviewed at others, helped kickstart a university program, and will hands down continue to recommend and extract resources from them all.

Yet, we still see space in the market and more importantly a chance to impact the next generation of data practitioners. Specifically, we believe there’s an opportunity to:

• Perfect the Learning Roadmap
• Shine a Spotlight on Analytic Fundamentals
• Dig Deep into Nuance
• Unearth Courses for Non-Tech Industries
• Provide an Abundance of Context and Real World Examples

Perfect the Learning Roadmap

It’s incredibly difficult yet crucially important to simply know where to start in learning analytics. It feels safe to assume this is the case for most things: learning to play the piano, cook, train for a marathon, photography, and the list goes on. This won’t happen overnight, but we’re on a mission to build perfectly packaged curriculum for anyone looking to understand, analyze and communicate insights from data.

Shine a Spotlight on Analytic Fundamentals

It’s never a good feeling to successfully finish a complex task, but not fully understand what the task is for. For instance, becoming an advanced user of Excel or being able to write complicated SQL queries is great, but it’s not so great when one can’t explain how the query actually works. We see this quite often, and sometimes are victims ourselves. There’s an opportunity for us all to embrace our inner tortoise, slow down and own the fundamentals.

Dig Deep into Nuance

Analytics is a game of details. There’s typically more than one way to approach an analysis, generate a statistic, make a mistake, communicate an insight and more. It’s hard to dig deep, but we know it matters and think there’s an opportunity to uncover as much as possible.

Unearth Courses for Non-Tech Industries

We love technology, but analytics is everywhere. Restaurant managers, sales representatives, small business owners, and the list goes on. Most professions revolve around a tremendous amount of data and we see an opportunity to help supplement the understanding of its application.

Provide an Abundance of Context and Real World Examples

Learning should be an exploration. All of our favorite college courses as students, and post-college courses as teachers were heavily embedded with case studies and daily-use examples. We see an opportunity to double down on this approach in everything we create.

There’s definitely more that comes to mind, but these five items stand out the most. Stay tuned for more, and in the interim feel free to hop on our Official Launch email list at: www.sfdataschool.com.

– Serge and Colby