Last week, our data management education partner, eLearningCurve published a post on Career Growth in a Data-Driven Economy.
The article, by professional resume writer, Jennifer Hay, focused on the need for data management experience and skills to feature in your curriculum vitae as business is becoming increasingly driven by data.
What was unusual was that Jennifer isn’t talking to the usual suspects – IT or Business Intelligence professionals who can talk the technical talk.
Instead, she highlighted a list of common business and administrative functions that are, in fact, data management skills in disguise.
For example:
| If you have … | You have experience with |
| Entered data into rows and columns | Data Collection |
| Formatted and sorted data | Data Preparation |
| Found and fixed data errors | Data Cleansing |
| Calculated totals and averages | Data Summarization |
| Used complex formulas | Data Derivation & Transformation |
| Used array formulas and pivot tables | Data Structuring |
| Used trace dependents & precedents | Troubleshooting and Debugging |
| Linked cells across multiple worksheets | Data Relationships |
| Created charts and graphs | Reporting & Visualization |
| Written your own macros | Programming with Data |
| Found patterns and correlations | Data Analysis |
| Used add-ins like QI Macros & XLMiner | Analytics |
Jennifer gives some advice as to how you can make your CV more relevant by translating what you do into “data speak” – for more on that read the full article.
For me, the article just highlights the relevance and importance of data in everyday business.
Ask yourself, “How much of my time is allocated to one or more of the listed functions?”
I think many of us would be surprised by the results….
