Top data skills to look for in your employees

Organizations see an increase in efficiency, customer trust, customer satisfaction, informed decisions, and cost savings. Our research shows 85 percent of organizations see data as one of the most valuable assets to their business.

To reap these results and fully operate as a data-driven organization, you need to first make sure all your employees are equipped with the data skills needed to leverage insights daily.

“For anyone in almost any business role these days, there’s automation around that role. For instance, on the sales side, it is important to look at your transaction systems. What can we see about what’s happening on our interactions with customers? What processes are being automated, what data is being collected? You certainly don’t have to be a ‘data person’ or know any SQL in order to do that. Just sort of cruising through user interfaces and seeing where are people entering data is a great place to start," says Amy O’Connor, chief data and information officer at Cloudera, in a Forbes article from October 2018.

Data lives in every nook and cranny of a business environment—it lives in your CRM tools, IT conversations, your website, marketing and sales tactics, business decisions, and transactions. Your greatest return on investment for any data management program is when you have your people on the team, using high-quality data to discuss business initiatives and success. What’s more, you have multiple eyes and ears looking for gaps where inaccurate data may be costing you money or leading you in the wrong direction.

This is why it is important for all your employees to be data literate.

To get started, your team needs to learn to be data literate through knowing how to read, write, and argue with data to be fully data operational. (We have a data dictionary ready for you!)

• Understand the holistic view of data and how it intersects into your everyday work through reporting trends, performance, and statistics.
• Evaluate the difference between high-quality data and inaccurate data so you can always use accurate insights to determine strategies and make decisions.
• Analyze validated data through trends, performance, and statistics.
• Communicate by knowing how to tell your story around data and what questions to ask.

As a next step, make sure you look for these top data skills in your team.

• Critical thinking is the curious mindset and effective investigation that uses accurate data to shine light on every angle of the business—one data point could be a catalyst for a variety of channels.
• Analytics is the evaluation of customer trends, web traffic, market trends, and more. Connect your findings with your operational efforts to find what is affecting performance and growth.
• Communication is the necessary skill to tell the business story supported by accurate insights. With strong communication skills, quality data becomes digestible and easy to use to support business needs.
• Data visualization envisions your operation. This skill takes an intangible, technical element and shares the colorful approach to mapping data points to business needs through tools and processes.
• Presentation is the voice to data driven work. Without the skills listed above, you cannot tell an effective business story and share your findings to lead the business toward success.

If your looking for your team to develop these business skills and become data literate, think about offering an informal or formal training or mentorship opportunities. Pairing data literacy with these top business skills will put your business on a data-insightful path, giving you quality evidence to make successful business decisions and, ultimately, grow your bottom line.

Powering your business with high-quality insights, gives you a competitive edge in the market. Learn how validated information can transform your business today.

Take the next step