Training Industry Magazine - July/August 2020 - 45

ASSESSMENT: IS YOUR ORGANIZATION DATA DRIVEN?
Review the statements below and award yourself between 0 and 3 points depending on whether the statement does not
describe your organization at all or describes it quite well. Calculate your score for both categories and review your results on
page 46.

DATA INFRASTRUCTURE

DATA LITERACY

I can easily access the data I need without asking for
the help of others.

My company routinely offers data trainings and other
educational opportunities.

I can easily access the data I need in a timely manner.

Most of my colleagues understand the importance
of data.

Data is automatically collected and stored on a
continuous basis.
The data we have is accurate and of good quality
(e.g., few missing entries, few duplicates, accurate
measurements).
Our data is stored securely either internally or offsite.

UTILIZE SEASONED
DATA PROFESSIONALS
There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
Any good data scientist will routinely
borrow and reuse tested code from
colleagues and other projects. If your
organization already has a data team, tap
into that resource. Take them a specific,
measurable and objective question, as
well as an idea of the available data.
They're sure to have some ideas. For
instance, to determine the best syllabus
for an executive-level course, you might
ask your data team to look at what topics
are most frequently cited, both favorably
or unfavorably, in course evaluations.
The results they obtain with text mining
methods are beyond the expertise and
ability of many L&D teams.

START WITH PAIN POINTS
Data Society offers highly-customized
courses that teach complex data science
concepts and techniques. Whether
it's a class in R, Python or another
programming language, learners need
to get their hands dirty and practice
new techniques on real data. This once
posed a huge challenge for our content
creators, since programming languages
are dynamic and datasets are constantly
changing to meet client needs. It meant

Our organization has a set of data standards that reviews
how data should be collected, stored and analyzed.
My organization emphasizes the importance of using
data to track initiatives.
I am expected to present data metrics when I explain
conclusions and decisions.

constantly updating our training materials
with fresh code. Fortunately, data
scientists like to optimize. In this case,
they built a bespoke content authoring
tool, allowing us to automatically update
coding snippets in instructional materials
and standardize formatting. This
resulted in improved quality and a huge
savings in time. The team reduced its
creation time for an hour of content from
40 hours of debugging, topic alignment
and formatting to just five. If that doesn't
get content developers lined up for a
ride on the data train, nothing will.

LEARNERS NEED TO
GET THEIR HANDS
DIRTY AND PRACTICE
NEW TECHNIQUES
ON REAL DATA.

If you don't have a team of data
scientists on hand to help you innovate
at this scale, start smaller. The point is
that you start looking at your pain points
and thinking about how technology and

data can be used to find a better, more
optimized way.

SET INTERIM MILESTONES
While you should never shy away
from developing a long-term vision for
leveraging data, set interim milestones
to hit along the way. Data scientists
learn basic programming syntax and
modeling methods long before they
learn advanced neural networks. Some
may never learn advanced neural
networks if it's not crucial to their work. If
your instruction runs off of Google Docs
and PowerPoint, don't expect to set
up an advanced analytics program by
the end of the week. You may need to
start with a task as simple as cataloging
the types and descriptions of data that
you have access to - known by data
scientists as a data dictionary. Likewise,
you may never need to employ artificial
intelligence if your business needs stop
at predictive analytics.

UNDERSTAND AND
ADVOCATE FOR DATA
GOVERNANCE
Data governance is the management of
the overall quality, integrity, relevance
and security of available data. L&D

T R A I N I N G I N DUSTR Y MAGAZ INE -DATA FLUENCY IN LEARNI NG 2 02 0 I WWW. T RAI NINGINDU S T RY . C OM/ MAGAZ I NE

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Training Industry Magazine - July/August 2020

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