Professional Development for Analytics and Data Visualization?

March 3, 2015 8:17 AM

A new role at work is requiring me to have stronger analytics and data visualization skills. My boss has asked for a professional development wish list for next year, and I’m having trouble finding the right thing.

A new role at work is requiring me to have stronger analytics and data visualization skills. My boss has asked for a professional development wish list for next year, and I’m having trouble finding the right thing. This General Assembly Analytics class seems to cover pretty much the exact content I am looking for, but I’m in Madison, WI so two nights a week in Chicago would be pretty rough.

Things that I am interested in:

• Either an online course, something local (in Madison, WI) or a training in person for 5 days or less
• Classes that make sense for a public sector, non-financial focused analyst (so not all about calculating profits and losses or google analytics)

I do not have a coding background, so while I can usually pick up that kind of stuff reasonably quickly, I would need a class that starts “from the beginning” in that area.

Have you been to any courses or trainings you thought were particularly good?

posted by mjcon to Work & Money (5 answers total)

Check this out: https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1 It is a bit programmy and challenging, but should give you lots of core skills over the entire run.

You should also go the library, or your bookseller of choice, and read through all of Edward R. Tufte's books on visualization. They are interesting, enlightening and set a nice high water mark for what visualization can do. He also periodically runs a one day course that I would suggest attending only if it's in your area.
posted by Sleddog_Afterburn at 9:46 AM on March 3, 2015 [4 favorites]

The UW System is building a new online master's degree in Data Science. Maybe one of next fall's courses would suit you?
posted by yarntheory at 10:27 AM on March 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I and some colleagues have taken a few of the Johns Hopkins courses, and by and large we thought it was pretty poor - what we had hoped would give us a fundamental basis in data science was more like "Watch the lectures and then troll Stack Overflow to answer the problem sets."

Another colleague did some of the courses in Syracuse University's Applied Data Science course and found it a better experience.

Just anecdata, but thought I'd share.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 10:57 AM on March 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

So the course you link to is intended for data analysis within Excel and SQL. Are you looking for a course specific to those formats?

If so, I agree that the JHU Data Science courses aren't for you - the focus is on on moving your data into R to clean, manipulate and analyze it. Also, without a programming background, there's a certain amount of How To Draw An Owl in the difficulty curve.

If I were in your shoes, one thing I'd be thinking hard about is whether my goals were more to expand my professional skills in this area in general, or to solve specific problems within my work environment.
posted by deludingmyself at 11:56 AM on March 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

Because you're close to Epic, it would be convenient for you to take their "fundamentals of SQL" class. (I think their Verona headquarters is about 30 minutes from Madison.) My colleagues have taken this class and said it was aimed at very beginners. However, if you do not work in healthcare, than it will take more time to translate directly to what you are doing.
posted by tinymegalo at 4:06 PM on March 3, 2015