Hello! I’m Mark Horseman, and welcome to The Cool Kids Corner. This is my monthly check-in to share with you the people and ideas I encounter as a data evangelist with DATAVERSITY. This month we’re driving data projects. Have you ever been on the precipice of starting a major data project and wondered, “Where do I begin? What the heck are we doing? Who’s doing what, when, where, why, and how!?” This month we’re going to dive straight in and, ultimately, we’ll see what the Cool Kids are saying.
Early in my career I was tasked with constructing an spain whatsapp number data operational data store to help manage reporting out of a brand-new enterprise system. I worked closely with an individual who, later on, transitioned from a data professional to become a teacher. Together, we aimed to align the reporting requirements of our environment with the data collected in the new system. We quickly learned the deficiencies between what was needed for decision-making and how the actual data was structured within the new enterprise system. This experience left me with valuable “battle scars” – lessons learned about the intricacies of data management.
It was years later when transitioning jobs that a close friend of mine gave me some words of advice: “People don’t hire you for the skills you have, but your experience wielding those skills. They are paying for the things you’ve learned by the mistakes you’ve made over your decades of experience.” This isn’t just true of data, but in any set of skills over a career.