Data nerd 🤓
Leadership lessons from digging deep
I wasn’t afraid of math, but I was afraid of taking on a new assignment.
I wasn’t expecting to learn how to develop reports. My boss had been doing those. But it was clear someone had to. And that someone was me.
I didn’t plan for the data life. It found me.
How I got into it
The challenge: learn our enrollment trends. More importantly, master the new student enrollment software. We’d migrated from a home-grown app to a market-leading platform with its own reporting system.
Thankfully, I had a long-time friend to go figure it out with. He and I spent Friday afternoons learning from the person who was quickly becoming an expert.
This was a huge leap. We went from Telnet and green-screen pre-canned reports to an Oracle database with a Cognos engine on top.
For those who don’t speak database, that’s like going from hand-crank windows and manual locks to power everything. I realize some of you are too young to remember cranking windows.
What I learned about data
Know what you have. If what’s in front of you is a mystery and you lack domain expertise, find someone who knows. Fast.
How’s it gathered. What options can users fill out? If you have back-end access, find the look-up tables. They tell you what’s possible.
Domain expertise helps but isn’t critical. Look at what processes feed the data. If you’re analyzing admissions, know the admissions cycle. Know when deadlines hit. This explains why data fluctuates. And it will.
What I learned about myself
I can learn new skills. I went from knowing nothing about database structure to learning joins and figuring out database keys.
I stopped copying my friend and developed my own understanding.
I learned to figure out what I needed, not just build massive queries. Making sure I didn’t pull entire unfiltered tables made reports smaller, tighter, and more useful.
I learned the pain of messy data structures. More importantly, I learned to push back on those who could fix them.
How I prepared for the next opportunity
This knowledge let me build an advisement and recruitment office. I knew our enrollments, admissions data, and course offerings inside out.
I used this data to make recommendations to our associate dean. What we could sustain, what courses we needed, what our student body actually looked like.
I also taught others. My graduate assistant learned data analysis on our actual system, not just in class. He landed an internship where he immediately applied Cognos skills.
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The data life chose me. Turns out, I chose it right back.
Hey you. Yes, you.
I’m on a mission to help busy, mid-career fathers juggle work, family life, and volunteering. I believe several men are lurking, waiting for their opportunity. I know, because I’ve been there. Waiting, hoping.
Let’s step out of the shadows.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably felt overwhelmed by it all.
Don’t stay there. Take my Overwhelm Diagnostic and then let’s take 15 minutes to talk through your challenges.
Reminds me of when I started learning Accreditation and Compliance… I already viewed systems as poems, but that was a different ball game. Now I think in terms of outcomes. Data doesn’t have to be intimidating, and there’s creative people with the right intrinsic motivations who could thrive in it, too.