IWD 2022 — Panel Reflections
This International Women’s Day, we hosted a panel where three amazing women — Kelsey Botne, Olivia Rennison and Nina Di Cara — spoke to us about their journeys to data confidence. As a data newbie, here are some of my biggest takeaways from the event!
Working as an Arts student, I have had very little exposure to data, and few opportunities to build my data skills. As such, when I need to use data in my work at Taught By Humans, or for any future job or personal project, I need to find another way to learn. The International Women’s Day panel event was incredibly valuable for me, because it revealed to me some of the ways I might go about learning to use data, and offered some other useful pieces of advice. Here are some of the biggest takeaways I had…
Methods of Learning
The first of these takeaways is one that has come up before across our other interviews, but is also one that is important to repeat. Different people have different methods of learning that work best for them. A method that is useful for you, might not be helpful at all for someone else, and that is okay. So, hearing about the panellists’ learning styles was incredibly refreshing.
Kelsey learned to work with data very quickly, on the job. Although this might not seem like a favourable way to learn — it sounds quite stressful! — it is certainly true that learning with a clearly defined purpose is generally more effective. She revealed how she needs to be able to immediately apply the things she has learned, and how her preferred tools for learning are short videos on YouTube or explanations of problems on Stack Overflow.
Olivia learned about data through her A Levels, and undergraduate and Master’s degrees. However, she taught herself about Business Intelligence, at first, through online courses, specifically those offered by Udemy. She likes to figure things out for herself this way, by using online resources as a guide while she makes her own way to her end goal.
For Nina, working with data was a natural progression from her undergraduate Maths degree. However, she spoke about her use of sketching and pictures in her learning. If she is ever in a meeting, for example, and people are describing something, she is normally drawing it at the same time. It is doing that which helps things stick in her brain, because she can recall pictures much more easily than she can anything else.
The Meaning of Data Confidence
Another of the biggest things I learned from the panel event was that there are many different ways to interpret data confidence, and it has a huge variety of meanings for different people and purposes.
For Olivia, data confidence means always questioning. She spoke about the growing amount of misinformation out in the world at the moment, and how questioning things — or not taking everything at face value — is a good way to go about looking at data. This is done best only by knowing how data can be used, stored or manipulated.
Nina described data confidence as feeling capable of managing lots of information and feeling in control of it, or organised with it. A lot of the time, being data confident is just about being able to recall information in the right way.
To Kelsey, data confidence is achieved when you are able to say ‘I don’t know how to do a whole lot of things, but I feel like there isn’t much that I couldn’t figure out’. Data confidence is about knowing that data is not inaccessible; it’s just things that anyone can do. It’s not as hard as it looks, and you can sort it out if you need to.
So, it’s okay if my route to data confidence looks different to other people’s, not just because different people learn in different ways, but because our end goals might actually look quite different.
The Value of Data
Throughout the event, it also became clearer to me just why data is so valuable. It has so much to offer, and the breadth of it is wider than most people, me included, understand.
Both Olivia and Nina spoke about how they love working with data because it, ultimately, boils down to being able to help other people more effectively. Speaking about her love for data, Olivia said, ‘I am a people person too when I wanted to help someone, or help people. And I feel like I’m helping people when I make reports or use data for good things’.
The main reason why Nina likes data so much is because she loves seeing what it can do for people by showing them how they can use their information differently to help them achieve the things that they want to achieve. She reminisced about her experience working with non-data experts in this way, saying, ‘the first couple of times that I managed to use data for somebody, I basically said “look, this is what you could do with this information”. And people say “oh my gosh, really?” And yeah, “this is something you can do. I can make you the spreadsheet and it will just automate it before you know it”’. Data is valuable to Nina because it changes and improves processes for people in ways that they don’t expect.
Having learned data specifically for her job, Kelsey finds value in data because it makes her better at her work. Working in tech, or more specifically, startups, where things are moving very fast paced and changing all the time, data allows her to better track things and iterate much faster. She spoke about how it enables her to ‘see what’s working, see what’s not working, and figure things out’. It makes her better at what she does, because she can spot problems quicker, plan ahead and be much more strategic by using it.
So that was just a snippet of the brilliant and informative discussion between our panel of women on International Women’s Day this year. You can watch the full event on our Vimeo.
We want to thank all of our panellists and to everyone that came along to our event again for their time and ongoing support!
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