It was during my career as a reporter, in search of objective information, that I had my first contact with spreadsheets and data. Little by little, I started to explore more. I started with basic Excel commands: a VLOOKUP here, a 'sort' there, a percentage somewhere. Then, I delved into SQL, to explore large databases, and RegEx, to clean them. I studied data scraping, to create south africa mobile phone number list my own spreadsheets. I created visualizations in Tableau and DataStudio, until I got to R and Python.
Early on in this process, I remember hearing from a great journalist and mentor: “This is going to completely change the way you work and understand the world.” He was absolutely right.
If developing these skills seems completely out of place, read below five reasons why learning and developing Data Science skills can be useful for your career (even for a content and marketing professional, like me):
1) Data is everywhere
Look around you: everything is information, and almost everything can be transformed into data. The number of times you check your emails per day; the number of coffees you drink vs. the number of hours you work; the intensity of traffic on your street; the payment method your customers use the most; the opening rate of a newsletter; the promotion that generated the highest average ticket. You can find an arsenal of data in everyday events, whether or not related to your work or business, and extract valuable information from them.
2) Data tells stories
This is where the ability to talk to data comes in. What do these numbers indicate? Are they higher or lower than the market average? What is the conversion rate since the last change in the product? Is the number of coffees directly proportional to the work I do? (in my case: yes) Did the newsletter open rate improve with the new editorial line? Ask questions, in the best journalistic style. Interview your data like an insatiable curiosity, and I'm sure they'll tell you good stories – the ones that go unnoticed by common sense.
3) Data helps you make more assertive decisions
Based on the stories and insights gathered from the 'conversation' with the data, the decisions to be made become much more conscious and assertive. "I do this because I know it works"; or "I'm going to try something else because this solution didn't work"; or even "I tried this and it worked; now, I'm going to do the same with this other product and see the results". The burden of making decisions becomes lighter, and any result is a discovery that only improves the next decision.
4) Data helps predict the next steps for your business
Here we enter what, for many, is the heart of Data Science: machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, linear regression, neural networks, predictive models. All of these 'tactics' have the same goal: today's data helps identify patterns and predict future behaviors – of customers, the business, readers, users. More than that, it can point out the most appropriate paths for business growth and even identify bottlenecks that are hindering its development.
5) Data changes the way you see the world
Finally, I would like to add here the advice that was given to me almost ten years ago. Since I invested in my intimacy with data, I have developed a much more analytical and questioning mind. No assumption goes unpunished: why do you think this is true? Are there numbers? Are there data? How can we gather this information? This is scientific thinking in its raw form, applied to everyday life.
I applied this 'scientific mind', shaped by hypotheses and observations, even to motherhood: why did my daughter sleep through the night today and not yesterday? Does the amount of milk in the bottle influence the quality of sleep? How many hours of naps did she take during the day?
Unfortunately, as I’ve gradually discovered, motherhood isn’t as exact as data science. But for everything else, it works—and opens doors and possibilities.
