The enterprise is driving up demand for data scientists, but all the evidence suggests a big shortfall in the number of professionals with the expertise to transform data into tangible business insights. This ‘Big Data skills gap’ was recently illustrated in Wikibon’s Big Data manifesto “Big Data: Hadoop, Business Analytics and Beyond”, which warns that the United States is likey to “face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions” by 2018.

The worry is that US enterprises could suffer by failing to interpret their data and missing out on key business advantages. While the few data scientists out there will be rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of all the extra dosh they can make from selling their services, CIOs could soon be facing plenty of unwelcome headaches.

Data Literacy: The New “Computer Literacy”?

But not everyone believes the situation is as desperate as the experts make it out to be. According to Dave Fowler, founder and CEO of business intelligence platform Chartio, most organizations should be able to bridge this skills gap by themseleves. He believes that what we’re seeing is not so much a lack of qualified data scientists, but rather a slow realization that ‘data literacy’ is just the next stage in the evolution of what we define as ‘computer literacy’.

“Data literacy today reminds me a lot of computer literacy 20 years ago,” Fowler told me.

“Back then very few people knew how to use computers well, and there was a huge demand for IT “computer guys” to fix things for us. Today data is becoming common place to all jobs, and our equivalent IT guy is now being called a data scientist.”

“For a while these data scientists will help educate us, just as the IT people did in the 90’s, but in the end more and more people will be able to query, analyze and understand their own data. Data analysis will be a significant component of every job just as computers have become.”

In other words, what Fowler believes is that data literacy is rapidly becoming an essential skill that everyone will possess – we won’t need data scientists to assume full responsibility for our Big Data strategies.

But isn’t Big Data like, really complicated? Isn’t that why we always leave it to the experts?

Fowler says that it doesn’t have to be, and indeed in most cases it isn’t. Organizations need to free themselves from this mindset, this overwhelming ‘hype’ about Big Data, which in reality isn’t nearly as ‘big’ as it’s made out to be.

“Big data is a much-exploited term. It really refers only to the very few companies that have terabytes of data to be analyzed,” he insists.

“The down side is that due to all the hype, too many people assume they have a ‘big data’ problem and buy expensive solutions that only end up overcomplicating their stack. Its like renting a barge to deliver a small package. Its overkill and only serves to make the problem much harder.”

DIY Data Skills Anyone Can Learn

Fowler believes that organizations can avoid over-complicating things by empowering themselves with basic data literacy skills, which could start with something as simple as becoming more familiar with excel, or for the slightly more advanced, learning an SQL Syntax.

“I’ve often said that a vast majority of data analysis headaches could be solved by those decision makers just sitting down for a day and learning SQL,” he relates.

“It really doesn’t matter which one as they’re all quite similar. If you learn one, its fairly straight forward to learn another. For beginners I’d recommend MySQL as its quite common and there’s a lot of community support. Udemy writes on their blog how this changed their whole marketing team and marketing perspective. It helps the user learn how to navigate a database, and also understand how to ask a database questions.”

One of the great things about SQL is that it’s actually really not that difficult. So long as you possess basic maths skills and know your way around a laptop, the basics can be picked up in a day or two at the most. There are dozens of great online resources for teaching yourself SQL. Here’s a few that Fowler recommends:

• Udemy’s MySQL Database For Beginners
• Zed Shaw’s Learn SQL The Hard Way
• W3Schools SQL Tutorial

Once armed with some basic SQL skills, all that’s needed is study the schema of your data to find out where and how its stored, and then identify the language it’s stored in (which also tells you the language you need to query it in). With that out of the way, you’re ready to start digging deeper into your data. Fowler suggests asking the simplest of questions to begin with, such as “how many users do we have?”, and building up from there.

“Repeat with harder and harder questions. You’ll learn new things with each question and have a knack for it in no time,” he promises.

Playing with and understanding your data is an essential part of doing business today.  Everyone on a team has a tremendous amount to gain from having a deeper understanding of what they’re doing and how it is affecting the business.  Often, that data is already being stored somewhere.  Don’t wait for someone else to hand you the info you need.  Dig in and get it yourself!  If you do, you’ll reap huge rewards :)