Sixteen weeks of training joyride in Data School is going to be over soon. It feels like it’s just started, and we are still giving introductions to each other. It was indeed an intensive training and was full of learning, fun and excitement. There was unparalleled support at each step from experts in various fields to shape our new career.
We started our training on Alteryx by Peter Goldsworthy, who is an excellent consultant and educator for various products like WhereScape, Alteryx and Tableau. Craig Dewar our head coach at Data School was there with us at every step. Craig has been teaching, evangelising and providing data viz consulting services to many individuals and organisations. He is a Guru in his field. His tips and tricks always worked. Following week, we got hands-on in Tableau Advanced.
Every Friday, during our training we have to make a presentation on an assigned task which is given on very same morning. It helped us to not only develop our technical skills but also sharpen our presentation skills. It moulded us to work under pressure and practice our learnings. We had our first client project during the fourth week of our training. Working on a client project allowed us to practice our skills on real-world data and to work as a team. Following weeks in our training, we got the opportunity to work on 6 other client projects that too from different businesses. It helped us to enhance our knowledge of various domains and problem-solving with the help of Tableau and Alteryx.
Somewhere between 8th to 12th week we gave exams for getting certified in Alteryx and Tableau. We were given ample practice and resources for the tests. So, clearing the exams wasn’t a difficult task for any of us in the team. These exams helped us to revise and practice various concepts done during training.
Along with getting proficient in Tableau and Alteryx we also learnt various other things in our training like
- Alteryx Server
- Tableau Server
- Data Modelling
- Data Visualisation best practices
- Design principles
- Scrum Project Management
- Presentation Skills
- Project Documentation
- SQL
- Power BI
- Web scrapping and so on.
We were getting trained to become an efficient Data Analyst. All the above training was conducted by different experts, some from MIP and some were external. All the training was full of knowledge and were interesting. Every trainer was passionate about data.
During the last month of our training, we also got the opportunity to teach the topic assigned to other members of the team. Nevertheless, the topic assigned to each one of us was, in fact, our weak areas, but teaching those to others made us practice these concepts intensely. It helped really to get the hook of the topic. We also had a Dashboard Week during the second last week of our training. We were given different and interesting topic each day to present dashboard on it following day. It was a week full of excitement and learning.
There were lots of social gatherings organised from time to time which gave us a lot of opportunities to socialize and enjoy. We also attended Tableau Day out, Tableau User Group meetup and Alteryx user group meetup which was an amazing learning and networking opportunity.
To conclude, these four months were awesome at every point. There was not even a single moment when we felt bored or neglected. It seems like time just flew by. We will be going to our first placements in the coming week. Each one of us from our team is going to miss the time we spent in Data School. With the quality of training we got under the guidance of Craig and the support we get from MIP, I feel confident and excited for the new journey ahead!
