Importance of Data Preparation for Today’s Workforce

As an active and passionate Data Preparation Professional, I wanted to share some observations on the importance of Data Preparation as a skill and discipline for Today’s workforce as things have never been more challenging when it comes to working with data. 

There are many challenges, but these are some of the prominent ones I see regularly I as engage with my peers and superiors across different industries verticals

Turnover

Top of the list is Turnover; Employees leaving an organization for any reasons. This in itself presents a whole host of problems, but one of the biggest is knowledge transfer. When an employee leaves an organization, a lot of knowledge and expertise goes out of the door with them. How they were maintaining spreadsheets, creating reports, what formulas and business logic they incorporated in a business process and why they did it. Sadly not a lot of this information is retained with the company and could be virtually impossible to acquire once an employee has left.

Additionally once an employee leaves, there is an increase in workload for existing employees who have to fill the ‘gap’ until a new employee is hired. In some cases a new employee is never hired and the existing employees are burdened with more work in perpetuity. I see this a lot across many industry verticals and it is a real challenge.

Technical Skill

Next is the Technical Skill of performing data preparation. As a brief reminder this is broadly defined as any self-service process where an employee, manager, executive, has to acquire, transform and analyze data for business needs. Creating a pivot table, performing a join, an append, etc. Given the broad definition and the extensive list of people who do this on a daily basis, and the number of software applications that can be used for this, it can be difficult to ‘judge’ who is technically skilled at data preparation, at least within the context of their job. That said, there are some guidelines and fundamentals that do provide a baseline. Is the employee certified in Excel? Microsoft Excel provides a certification (I did the 2010 one, about a decade ago now, which is crazy), and it gave me a great starting place and boosted my confidence in working with spreadsheets. Additionally, other software vendors that provide data preparation software have certification as well and should be considered as well.

Data Literacy

Equally important as the skill is for sufficient level of Data Literacy. Data Literacy can be defined in different ways, but within the context of Data Preparation, I would define it as follows: “Having a working knowledge of how data works, how to work with data to get your job done”. Again, that’s a broad definition, but it works. To expound upon it a little more employees ought to know where Data comes from (ie what system of record), how was the data generated or captured, is it the best and trusted source? If not why not? Finally, do they know how to get the data and use it for their business needs? There’s more to it naturally, but these are some of the fundamentals. Once again I recommend the Data Management Body of Knowledge and the accompanying certification for the Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP).

Conclusion

In ending, todays workforce have more data to clean and analyze than ever before. They are burdened with not only their work but also with the work of a coworker who has left the organization. Many of todays employees are doing the roles of at least 2 employees. In addition to all this they have to learn software and keep abreast of important and relevant industry changes that can impact them, and learn how to incorporate those changes to their daily work. Yes, it’s very challenging. 

That said I’m an optimist at heart. I believe that there is help for the weary, and it’s a big part of why I love what I do; coaching, teaching, training people how to be better at data preparation. But, permanent change and transformation ultimately requires leadership buy in, and a strategic plan of action to equip more employees with data preparation skill and ways to mitigate knowledge flight with turnover