To work with data, both hard and soft skills are needed, says Tableau's Alexandra Roza

Data skills are now among the most popular skills that people seek to acquire, but there's more to them than the technical aspect. In a conversation with People Matters, Alexandra Roza, head of Tableau's customer solutions division in APJ, explained that working with data involves a mix of both hard technical skills and softer aspects such as organizational culture and communication and collaboration skills. Here are the highlights of what she shared.

How do we identify the individuals within the organization who should most urgently be upskilled in data?

In the past, you would have a group within your organization that were essentially the curators of data, a very rarefied group of data analysts whom you would go to any time you wanted some numbers or projections. We're moving away from that today, to a model where we want everyone in the organization from the CEO to the front-line service person at the checkout counter to see and use the data.

Now, you will have some people in your organization, like your finance department, who are working with data every day, exploring it and distilling results. You will have other people who are more viewers of data, who receive a report. And then we have those heavy users that are really creating the data, building the dashboards and doing deep dives, whose skills have to be very robust. But you will also find that people move between roles. They might go from being a heavy user one day to a consumer the next, or vice versa. And you have to keep that in mind, because people are moving roles and the requirements of roles are changing so rapidly in this environment that everyone has to have a foundational data literacy, so that we can all speak the same language.

So before organizations even look at upskilling, they really need to think about what their data culture is, how they want to embed data in everything that they do—to look at it, make decisions based upon it.

Then, they can figure out what skills people need based on what they are doing in their roles.

Given that training takes at least a few months to produce results, how do we ensure that people acquire skills relevant to both the current landscape, and the future?

That's a good question, especially now that we're moving at such a rapid rate compared to the pre-COVID world. LinkedIn released a future skills report in 2019 that showed data science is becoming a lot more prevalent, and I think it's eventually going to be the basis of everything we do. So, if you want skills to be relevant, you have to look at how to build them in from very early on.

One of the things we're doing at Tableau is working with schools to start to build those data literacy skills at a young age. We're talking about future-proofing individuals here. We actually have an academic program where we provide licenses and resources to instructors and students so that they can embed data literacy into their curriculum. And we're working with quite a few of the universities here in Singapore to embed that skill into academics, so that when they teach, they bring data into that discussion.

And I think the demand for these types of skills is just going to explode. As we go into AI and we start building this into various products and how we navigate the world, I think it's simply going to become a natural rhythm of what we do.

How can HR practitioners upgrade their data skills to stay current with the needs of the organization? Where should they begin?

HR is definitely one place where data skills can make a huge difference. The richness of the data that HR has access to is phenomenal. From an HR perspective, it is really about understanding what role you are going to play and how the data fits into it. For instance, there may be specific reports that are integral to your organization, like attrition reports or hiring reports, that show where improvements can be made.

It's particularly interesting that a lot of HR functions don't realize the richness of their payroll data. You can see so much information from your payroll data—there is a very robust picture of how your organization is contracting or expanding, and all the related changes. Imagine, as an HR practitioner, that you're able to take that data and use it to decide how you will invest in headcount next year. That is the direction workforce planning is going in. And I think we've got to get away from being scared of the technology, and embrace it.

What about business skills—how do those fit in with the data and technical skills?

While people tend to think about data as more of a technical skill, what we're starting to see more and more is a lot of soft skills coming into play. Some of the organizations that we're working with are spending a lot of time on change leadership, and that's something that requires people to develop collaboration skills in order to do very well.

They have to be able to communicate—it's about telling a story, so that even if people aren't able to show the data they can tell the story around it.

Here's an example that I've seen work really well: where senior leadership decides that instead of showing PowerPoint slides in a meeting, they're going to show the dashboard, and everyone will talk through it and work with the live data during the discussion. And then people start to interact with what they see in front of them. That's a cultural change, but it also need the skills to present that data and talk through.

So it's not just the technical skills that we're seeing, it's a lot about soft skills and building a common language that we can speak together. And a lot of organizations are really starting to think about how to embed communication and collaboration skills into their competency framework. Some of these things might not be traditional—maybe five years ago we weren't even looking for it—but now we're starting to think about it. Take the example of HR, where practitioners have to be very data literate because they're dealing with a lot of information from their systems. We're starting to see a lot more onboarding programs and corporate programs that work on building that data literacy.

In conversations around upskilling, people will inevitably ask: "What's in it for me?"and what they will gain from learning the new skills—advancement or promotion prospects, or just employability. What's your take on that?

Speaking from experience, we've had customers come to us and say that by being a data leader, they've seen career progression, or they've seen opportunities open up for them in terms of their networks and how they're perceived in the wider community. I can actually share a few examples from our Tableau community: recently, one of our contributors, Jayshree Dawrewar, was nominated for “Data Leader of the Year” at the “Women in IT Awards Asia 2020” for her vizzes on Tableau Public. And one of our Tableau ambassadors and featured authors, Vinodh Kumar, actually made a successful career switch from NLP chatbots to data visualization due to his passion in the area. He is now part of the data democratization team at Citi.

But when it comes to "What's in it for me?", I think there are three levels: the individual level, the organizational level, and then there's a greater good. The individual might get a promotion, the organization might become more profitable. But going beyond that, there is some really amazing work coming out of data organizations like the Tableau Foundation: using data to help communities fight malaria, or tracking dengue hotspots and finding the commonalities and correlations to keep them under control.