Organizations understand more than ever the need to be “data-driven”. For that purpose, companies are making major investments not only in technology but also in skill development. Data literacy refers to the ability to read, understand, create, and communicate data as information (Wikipedia). Data literacy requires an ability to use existing and emerging technology to deal with data, but not only! An article from Harvard Business Review (Links to an external site.), claims the following are among the data skills that organizations are missing:

• Ask the right questions
• Understand which data is relevant and how to test the validity of the data they have
• Interpret the data well, so the results are useful and meaningful
• Create easy-to-understand visualizations so leaders understand the results
• Tell a story to help decision-makers see the big picture and act on the results of analysis

These are not technical skills per se, but they are part of data literacy too.

Read the blog post “Data Literacy skill for the 21st century (Links to an external site.)“. Select a phrase or paragraph that stood out while you were reading, and share why that was the case: did you learn something new with it? did it make you think about something in a different way? 

Write a small post where you paste the phrase you selected in quotes, and then write about why you selected it.

It would be nice if you read a few posts from other students and leave a comment. Something simple like “I thought the same thing while I read it!”, “that made me think too”, etc.