Data Confident — What Does This Mean?

Everyone should be data confident, and Taught by Humans is on a mission to make this a reality.

Data, data, data. This word is thrown around a lot. From looking after your personal data (and fun terms such as GDPR and cookie settings popping up on every website), to the idea that data skills are needed by everyone no matter their job.

Data is often something which scares people, it reminds us of our email address being stolen in a data leak. Or maybe it makes us think of boring spreadsheets and school maths (yay percentages).

However, whether you love it and see the magic, or if you hate it, data has definitely become an everyday, necessary evil. There have been many calls for companies and individuals to improve their data skills, and this is often worded as everyone needs to become data literate. MIT Sloan gave a working definition of the term data literacy as “the ability to understand, acquire, clean and manage data, know how to filter, sort and aggregate it, and communicate what it tells you”.

To me, data literacy sounds a bit intimidating — words like acquire and aggregate might not make sense to everyone (especially when talking about data). I like to think there is another step, which is more accessible and achievable for everyone. And I’d like to call it data confidence.

Lots of jobs interact with data in a number of different ways, and being able to use data and talk about it with confidence is essential. This can look completely different depending on who you are and what you do. For example, a teacher may want to use a spreadsheet to quickly calculate or track their class’ test score. Someone who works in marketing might want to combine data from multiple sources into one place, and make beautiful visualisations showing engagement. Both of these individuals will have specific tools provided by their employer and they need to learn how to utilise these (rather than learning a coding language which they won’t use in work). And that is a big part of data confidence to me — meeting people where they are with the skills and tools they have to help them make data work for them.

Whether you want to understand how to use formulas in spreadsheets, become a master of a dashboarding tool (such as Tableau, Power BI or Google Data Studio) or learn Python to start building Machine Learning algorithms, data confidence is for you.

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Our mission over at Taught by Humans is to provide education for humans. By humans. Powered by tech.

Recently we’ve been focusing on Spreadsheet Skills, a great way to share your Data Confident journey. Come learn with us as spreadsheets shouldn’t be scary.