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….