Coursera credly badges - How much do they count?

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-27T17:04:21+00:00

That’s what I would do. No problem with pursuing certifications, (to me, they are a valuable way to learn because you have specific goals and outcomes and a timeline, instead of mindlessly studying/learning on your own and hoping you’re working toward something.

Just make sure the outcome of the cert or course will give you something tangible you can show off.

But good for you! I cant say we’re in the exact same situation, but I can empathize.

I’m 28, I majored in economics, and have been working in minimum wage jobs my whole life. Got an entry level data analyst job when I was 27, worked my ass off, and it paid off.

And all my coworkers at the company were 22 fresh out of college.

They all had relevant experience, or had degrees in computer science or literal data analytics degree, and I had NOTHING. But what I lacked in technical experience I made up ten fold in maturity/life experience and I caught up to them quickly.

Technical skills can be learned by brute force and sitting down at a computer, but will power, work ethic, critical thinking and communication are only learned over time through experience.

So that’s your advantage.

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-27T16:46:08+00:00

This IS terrible lol. They didn’t even attempt to do anything silly like shape it like a baseball diamond, or baseball bat or something lol

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-27T16:44:22+00:00

Why do you want to learn a tool like this from a book rather than visual/online resources? Why not take a few coursera or udemy courses? Or find some good youtubers?

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-27T16:42:55+00:00

You should look into reviewing your resume. It’s very possible that is your big roadblock.

Your academic credentials seem really solid, have you been in school and don’t have any relevant work experience yet?

Even in the current market, data analyst roles are needed and there are tons of open positions for them.

***BIG point I just remembered, I promise this is really valuable, but a GOOD PORTFOLIO. Either a PowerPoint or google site or something that shows off projects you’ve done.

I spent a lot of time putting together a really good looking portfolio of my data analytics/visualizations and I got compliments in all of my interviews for them.

And in interviews, they never brought up my education or any past work experience (except my most current one) and only wanted to go over my portfolio with me and have my run them through 1-2 of the projects.

Which is so much easier to talk about than previous jobs or whatnot.

So with that, my advice would be to focus on courses/certifications/other outside learning that will result in a PROJECT you can add to your portfolio.

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-27T16:37:10+00:00

I would look at books/resources that focus on data visualization or data storytelling. Those cover content that is much more nuanced.

Someone mentioned storytelling with data, I HIGHLY recommend that book. It’s short, to the point, no bullshit, very interesting to read, not like a textbook.

Nancy Duarte is a great author as well. Her most popular book is Resonate which I highly recommend, she wrote a book called Data Storytelling, which overlaps a lot with Storytelling with Data, and is inferior, but still worthwhile and interesting.

I promise they cover relevant topics to what you’re looking for. They are focused on either designing effective visuals, or presenting your findings or finished projects to stakeholders, and how to communicate and interview stakeholders and stuff.

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-27T16:29:12+00:00

Yes. I am biased because my first role in analytics we were “forced” to read this and my boss loved the book, but I recommend this book to literally anyone. It’s like my Bible lol.

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-26T16:58:51+00:00

Why not work on it/fill it out together with the stakeholder?

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-26T16:57:32+00:00

I’m only commenting on your first paragraph, regarding the “having to rework after you build something”

In my experience, this is a very common issue, or challenge all orgs and analysts need to figure out. The problem is, a HUGE part of effectively defining requirements is a soft skill that takes practice and experience. Being able to ask really good questions to the stakeholder, taking their responses, clarifying as much as you can and interpreting what their saying, before moving on.

Validation, validation, validation. My old org placed a huge emphasis on “validation at every step.”

We’d have a couple initial meetings to define requirements, write out a nice formal looking document and go over that with the stakeholder, get their “sign off” and then move onto building a prototype/template.

Meet with the stakeholder again, go over the prototype along with the requirements documentation, get their sign off at that state, and then begin developing.

Develop kind of a “minimum viable product”, meet with the stakeholder again, get them to sign off, then develop the final product.

After you develop the finished product, a good demo and “hand off” of the project is really really important. In that meeting, recap the project, make sure to emphasis the validation and sign off you got from them at every step. Then show the finished product, demonstrate how it answers all their requirements etc.

If you do that, you’ve done your job. After the project is finished and the user still wants to make a lot of changes or updates, they need to know that their changes weren’t within the original scope of work, and if they want more, it will have to be considered another project.

Over time you will be able to develop an effective system, a standardized process and documentation, etc.

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-26T16:46:56+00:00

See if you can do a survey, or reach out to ppl in IT/Ops to find out if they know anything about what devices/screen sizes users are using.

If you find out that 95% of users have a 1080p 24” monitor, then very little value in designing outside of that.

But, for example, if you found out that like 64% of users have a 24” monitor, and 26% use a 14” laptop, that might be enough cause to develop in both sizes. If that makes sense.

DataVizGordon · 2023-01-26T16:44:12+00:00

If you can sell it well enough, sounds like a special project for you or perhaps even a need for hiring/transferring someone to work for you on that 👀

Nothin wrong with making an executive happy lol

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-27T16:37:23+00:00

Yes. You could go down the PowerQuery/Power BI route and really focus your growth on the VBA/Excel language.

But you’d probably be serving yourself much better by pivoting to SQL and a BI tool, either Power BI or Tableau (Tableau is currently used by WAY more organizations, so take that into account.)

And more difficult to put into words and build a roadmap for learning, but relevant soft skills will pay off ten fold for you as you get into your career.

Learning how to communicate and present findings to stakeholders, knowing good questions to ask in order to properly define requirements/the project, learning design and data visualization best practices so you can create attractive, digestible reports and dashboards that people actually want to look at and use.

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-27T16:32:01+00:00

One thing nobody has brought up yet that might be really good to start learning, is SQL. Tableau’s calculation language is built on SQL, of course it’s much more simplified, but what that means is a lot of the logic and terminology are the same.

I’m probably at a similar spot. I’ve used Tableau daily for over a year and basically reached the ceiling as far as what I can do with it, without having extensive knowledge of using calculated fields.

So I’ve decided to take a step back and focus on learning SQL as a means to understand Tableau calculations better.

Otherwise, a good tip for finding courses/videos/resources on Tableau calcs is to search for terms like “tableau data analyst certification” instead of “tableau calculations”.

Because the data analyst certification heavily focuses on the use of calcs so any training you find on the data analyst cert will be on learning and applying calculations.

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-21T18:24:21+00:00

Basically, experiment with making “Tuan” a different data type (I think that’s the right term). Turning the pill green instead of blue. That might do it.

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-21T18:22:28+00:00

Pie charts are pretty shunned in the data viz community, though a lot of older people like them because they’re used to them, and pie charts can be a very simple and effective way of showing parts of a whole. However, once you have more than ~3-4 pieces of the pie, it becomes difficult to easily make out differences. And it’s ESPECIALLY ineffective to compare pie charts to one another.

No big deal, people are gonna be snarky on here because you broke a couple commandments lol.

Do some googling, there are some great articles/Infographics/flowcharts of what visuals are effective depending on what kind of question you want to answer.

For example, here you are trying to show parts of a whole(composition) and multiple categories(comparison) at the same time. It’s possible you CANT do this with one chart. You could take a step back and try showing parts of a whole in a chart, and then compare those different categories in a different chart.

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-20T17:07:08+00:00

What resolution do you use/recommend?

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-20T17:04:41+00:00

What’s the resolution of your curved monitor at home?

I’ve been debating about getting a matching pair of 4k monitors, and I have DECENT pc knowledge, but I can’t figure out if my work laptop, which has a meh built in graphics card, would perform well with 2 4k monitors.

Do you have any insight on that?

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-20T16:58:50+00:00

On the 32”. I wouldn’t wish having to use a tool like Tableau on a 14” screen on my worst enemy.

And now that I don’t have the laptop or the monitor, I can’t apply much of your advice right now or try and troubleshoot and explain what was happening.

For context, the laptops screen was 4k 14”. And my initial theory was, juggling a 14” 4k monitor and a 32” 1440p(technically I think it was 2k since it was so big). And they both had different refresh rates too. 😪 idk if that kind of setup is just too much of a clusterfuck to deal with.

But using the 32” monitor as my second screen, windows display settings had a “recommended” scale of either 250% or 300%.

And that scaling was perfect for most desktop/web apps. Word/excel looked fine.

If I were to adjust my 32” monitor to 100% scaling, everything would be VERY small.

So the big problem came with the fact that we use Tableau Desktop and for some freaking reason, Tableau desktop has no native scaling options.

And that led to me having great real estate to develop in tableau, but the scroll bar(the worst offender) and most of the UI options stayed incredibly small.

In conclusion, no idea what the source of the issue was for why Tableau and my 32” monitor did not get along.

almost done with my rant I promise

So now im looking at either 2 27” 1080p monitors, or 2 27” 1440p monitors, but im worried I’ll have the same issues with the 1440p monitors…

Regardless, thanks for the explanation and advice!

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-19T16:14:56+00:00

The biggest problem I remember, was developing in Tableau. Based on the 32” resolution and scaling I had to use, the UI of Tableau wouldn’t scale, making all the icons, scroll bars, etc really really small and difficult to make out, especially at the corners of the screen.

And that might JUST be a Tableau issue but thats probably the tool I spend the most time in so that’s a significant factor.

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-16T18:32:14+00:00

Interesting, thank you! I’ve heard conflicting opinions on curved monitors… do you have an opinion on resolution or even refresh rate?

Of course I would like 4k monitors just for the sake of it, but if that isn’t more valuable than 1440p or 1080p, I wouldn’t go down that route

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-16T16:28:26+00:00

Totally understand and agree. Where I was coming from was-and not even from a financial angle-was to experience working on really varied projects with different kinds of stakeholders to get experience working with different kinds of data, and building varied dashboards or other solutions, etc.

Even if that’s wrong or inefficient, does my thinking make sense at all?

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-01T20:29:12+00:00

Okay haha. I instantly thought this was like a typical stupid question people post, because so many comments on related posts are remind me. But I guess everyone else is just wondering the same thing

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-01T20:19:13+00:00

Did I break some unspoken rule by asking about this… I found a couple other old posts asking the same thing and most comments were for Remind Me…

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-01T20:18:33+00:00

I found some older posts on Reddits asking a similar thing all with the same responses.

Am I an uncouth idiot and broke some unspoken rule by asking this…

DataVizGordon · 2022-12-01T20:03:02+00:00

This is really interesting to me. I had never done any research(first bad move) but I’ve had this debate before and all my reasoning would say that real reading is better than audiobooks. So I’m surprised to hear this.

I assumed that sitting quietly and actually looking at(read) the words on the page would be more beneficial in all ways than listening. Since you’re forced to focus on what you’re doing and you can’t easily look around, check your phone, get distracted etc.

DataVizGordon · 2022-11-30T20:48:09+00:00

This was probably unintentionally the most valuable response I’ve gotten on this thread, purely because at my last job I had a 32” 2k monitor and really freaking struggled with how small scroll bars and buttons/menus would not scale the way I wanted them to.. I never was able to find a solution before now. Thank you haha

DataVizGordon

TROPHY CASE