Data Literacy/ Data & Insights for Business Decisions Welcome Guide | by Alexandria Harris

Welcome to the Data Literacy/Data & Insights for Business Decisions Programme! 

This programme is designed to help you improve your data skills, champion data best practices, and drive business impact in your organisation. The journey on this programme is an exciting one. While there will be ups and downs, your dedicated coach will be there to guide you through it all, whether that be teaching you data skills in monthly workshops, coaching you through challenges in your group coaching sessions, or giving you the space in progress reviews to manage up to your apprentice manager and share the amazing work you are doing to apply your learning and make an impact in your team and organisation. By the end of the programme, you will be awarded a Level 3 Data Technician Certificate, which will qualify you to draw insights from data, make impactful data applications and build a data-driven organisation. 

As you progress on the programme, it’s really important to keep your motivation and goals in mind, as this will help inspire you to keep going. Some questions to reflect on are:

• What was your motivation to apply? 
• What does success look like for you on this programme?
• What opportunities lie ahead for you?
• What challenges or barriers do you foresee? How will you overcome them?
• How will you feel once you have achieved the goals you’ve set for yourself?

Reflect on these questions, make note of your answers, and look back on them as your journey unfolds. As you do this, you will see how much you’ve grown in confidence and you’ll be able to track your progress against these objectives. As you continue to see your progress, you will also notice how much of an impact you are making in your role, team, and organisation. Whether you’re increasing productivity through optimising data use, embedding data-driven decision-making or improving revenue and reducing cost, as a data technician, you will be playing a vital role in your organisation’s success.

Learning something new may sometimes be a challenge, so here are a few other tips to consider as you embark on this journey:

• Stay curious: Working with data is all about asking questions and finding answers. The more curious you are in your data work, the more you will discover insights that others may have missed.
• Practice makes progress: Working with data requires a lot of practice. You’ll learn new things every day, so be prepared to spend time practising what you’ve learnt and embedding it into your day-to-day role. The more you work with data, your confidence will increase. And don’t be afraid to experiment and try different approaches to data analysis!
• Learn something new every day: Attend webinars, read industry blogs, and engage with other data apprentices in your cohort and through Community. And as you practise, learn from your mistakes. No one is perfect, and mistakes happen. Use them as an opportunity to learn and improve, rather than feel discouraged.
• Be ethical: Data analysis involves working with sensitive information. Always be ethical and respectful of the privacy of individuals, organisations and the data you are analysing.

**Coach Tip- Understand the KSBs: The knowledge, skills and behaviours (or KSBs for short) are the basis for the content on the DLP apprenticeship programme and how you will be assessed in your End-Point Assessment. Become familiar with each KSB as you go through each module of the programme, so you can consistently learn, practise and effortlessly apply skills to become Data experts and make an impact in your organisation.

Your coach will share more detail on the KSBs in due course.

Get Into the Apprentice Rhythm

"Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out." - Robert Collier

For success on the Data Literacy/Data & Insights for Business Decisions Programme, it is important to familiarise yourself with the rhythm of the programme. This may take a couple of months to adapt to, but this will help to inform your routine on programme. Each month you can expect the following schedule:

• 1 Week before the Workshop - Activate e-learning to be completed (2-3 hours) and the remaining 3 hours to apply your learning, finish your module project, attend Community events, etc.
• Workshop week - Live module workshop (3 hours) and remaining 3 hours to apply your learning, explore further around the module topic, continue your module project, attend Community events, etc.
• Before the next workshop- Group coaching or progress review completed in one of these two weeks and the other time spent completing your module project, knowledge checks, attending Community events, working towards your objectives, and applying the learning.

All of these activities should be logged towards your OTJ.

Throughout your time on the DLP apprenticeship, your Coach will be on hand to guide you through the programme alongside supporting you to achieve your own professional and company objectives. Your Launch Meeting and initial 1:1 Coaching session is a great opportunity to plan and reflect on your apprenticeship rhythms early on with your Apprentice Manager and Coach. 

Understanding the rhythm, enables you to meet the minimum expectation of yourself and strike a balance between the ask from your day-to-day work and getting the maximum value from the apprenticeship. 

What are some ways you can create your own rhythm?

As you progress on the programme, be sure to keep your motivation and your goals in mind. Regularly reflect on how you can apply your data skills to make an impact in your role and team. Stay curious and develop good habits, including regularly logging your OTJ hours and getting into a routine as quickly as you can.

Alexandria Harris is a Data Literacy/Data & Insights for Business Decisions coach at Multiverse based in the UK.