Build your data skills with the Data Literacy Trail on Trailhead

The future speaks data – do you? Despite data skills being the most in-demand skill in today’s (and tomorrow’s) job market, there’s still a data literacy gap. 

Get the training you need to ask the right questions, make better decisions and grow your career. Start building your data skills – for free – with the Build Your Data Literacy Trail on Trailhead. In support of our ongoing mission to help people everywhere see and understand data, the Trail is now available in Japanese, German, French, Spanish (Mexico), Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese and Korean. 

Why you need data skills (and why you need to be proactive about building them)

Employers want data skills. In a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Tableau, surveyed recruiters ranked data literacy as the most in-demand skill for entry-level job candidates today. Why? Again, from the same study: “Data literacy efforts lead to significant benefits in increased innovation, greater customer and employee experience, and more.” 

And yet, there’s a gap:

• Organisations aren’t offering data-training programmes: Despite wanting data-savvy candidates, employers aren’t investing in data training and upskilling initiatives. According to the Forrester data literacy study, only 40% of employees say their organisation has provided the data skills expected of them.
• Employees crave data skills and lack confidence in their data proficiency: Nearly 80% of employees say they’re more likely to stay at a company that provides necessary data skills training. However, only 25% of employees feel fully prepared to use data effectively and just 21% are confident with their data literacy skills. 
• Academia isn’t providing adequate data training either: Academic institutions can’t keep pace with the changing skills requirements of the current and future workforce. Less than half have data literacy skills initiatives in place, according to a Tableau-commissioned study by Forrester Consulting. Though more than half of digital natives believe data skills should feature more centrally in education, only 43% of this age group consider themselves data literate.

To fill this void, we created the Build Your Data Literacy Trail on Trailhead. 

How to start building your data literacy 

Anyone can learn new, in-demand skills to kick-start their career on Trailhead, a free and fun online learning platform from Salesforce. There you can quickly level up your skills with free training modules (or Trails) and guided learning paths (Trailmixes) on countless topics, with hands-on exercises, step-by-step instructions and support from the global Trailblazer community. Learn everything from soft skills like leadership and presenting to technical skills like Salesforce CRM or marketing automation strategies.

The Build Your Data Literacy Trail on Trailhead teaches you to interpret, explore and communicate effectively with data. With content broken into seven brief modules, expect to spend just over three hours in total learning the fundamentals of data literacy: 

1. Data literacy basics
2. Well-structured data
3. Variables and field types 
4. Aggregation and granularity
5. Data distributions
6. Variation for data comparisons
7. Correlation and regression

This platform-agnostic Trail doesn’t require prerequisite knowledge and is based on industry standards and best practices, plus vetted academic course materials. 

Who can benefit from data literacy training? 

We’re long past the days when only data scientists needed to know their way around a dashboard. Anyone can benefit from this data literacy training, specifically: 

• Business professionals: Ask better questions and make better decisions, faster, with data. Future-proof your career by learning in-demand skills that employers are asking for.
• Organisations: Strong data cultures – where people across the organisation can explore, understand and communicate with data – drive innovation, collaboration and organisational success. Learning to engage with data and ask the right questions leads to higher performing and more adaptable organisations, Francesca Gino reports in The Business Case for Curiosity for Harvard Business Review. "When our curiosity is triggered,” says Gino, “we think more deeply and rationally about decisions and come up with more creative solutions."  
• Informed citizens: Better interpret the data you consume in every aspect of your daily life, from data points in a news article to the cost of your daily commute. 
• Students: Get the data skills to stand out for success, land your dream job, and make an impact. This Trail can serve as a prerequisite for or component of analyst or data science training. 

What else is Tableau doing to close the data skills gap? 

Tableau is committed to training 10 million people with data skills over the next five years, from building data literacy in individuals to enabling organisations and academic institutions to train and upskill. 

Honouring that commitment spans a range of programmes, from Tableau Academic (enabling teachers and students with free software and learning resources, like the Data Literacy One curriculum for the Canvas learning management system) and Tableau eLearning (such as the free Data Literacy for All data skills course) to the Tableau Community. 

Build your data literacy

Ready to start building? Get started with the Build Your Data Literacy Trail on Trailhead.

Help Tableau close the data skills gap by making the #PledgeForData. Pledge to start learning or level up your skills and share your knowledge with others.

And don’t keep it to yourself: Help us build a data-literate world by sharing the Data Literacy Trail with your peers, network and organisation.