PolicyViz podcast – Episode 188: Chantilly Jaggernauth
Chantilly shares some specific tips on how to learn data skills. how to
You can self-teach yourself, but if you study from a book or follow videos, practice what you learn with your datasets. Getting a real-world hands-on experience early also doesn't hurt.
I love to self-teach myself things, I love watching YouTube videos. I’m also very active when I’m when I’m learning something. So in addition to watching videos, I’ll also be following along with my own dataset.
But what was unique about my journey was that at the same time that I was a student, I was working for Johnson & Johnson... (...) I was fortunate enough that next summer to actually be placed in a role where I could start to analyze data and see how such a large organization uses data. So I would say, me teaching myself and then also having some real world hands- on experience very early on assisted me in my journey.
Find a few peers or mentors to get feedback. feedback
The best way to get the best feedback would not be from the community as a whole but more so from a mentor. Right? So I would say, for new individuals who are looking to get feedback, constructive feedback, because there are so many individuals who are online who could give you good feedback, could give you bad feedback, I think the best feedback might actually come from you finding one or two individuals who are in your circle who can provide you with constructive feedback.
There's no reason for kids to learn a bit about data early on!
I’ve done a data literacy type of mini training at a daycare, where we were using building blocks. We were counting, I was asking them questions in the form of, what we would say is a business question in the adult world, I was asking these little babies these questions, and then showing them how it can use their building blocks to answer those questions, and then we were constructing graphs that produced the final answer.
So I would say, all right, we have all these blocks scattered together, what’s the first thing that you want to do if you want to know how many red blocks are in here. Obviously, you want to pick out all of the red blocks now. If you want to tell your mum when you go home, how many red blocks you had to play with versus the green blocks or the blue blocks and make a case for why you all need more roadblocks, you have to make a picture to show her that. So how tall should the red bar be compared to the green bar based on the number of blocks that are available – so I think it can be in any level.