What Is Data Literacy? – Data 101

In this series of Data 101 blogs, we explain what a particular concept in the data world actually means each time. This time, we're talking about 'data literacy'. Data literacy is a skill that's becoming increasingly important in a world full of data. Yet many organizations struggle to work successfully in a data-driven way. In this blog, we'll explain what data literacy is, why it's important, and how you can improve your data literacy within your organization.

What is data literacy?

Data literacy is the ability to effectively understand, analyze, and communicate data, giving individuals and organizations the ability to work in a data-driven way and make informed decisions. Think of the following skills:

• Critical thinking: analyze data, ask questions, and draw logical conclusions.
• Doing research: find, evaluate, and use relevant data for specific purposes.
• Data analysis: apply methods to transform and interpret data.
• Data visualization: create and use charts, diagrams, and other ways to visually present data as clearly as possible.
• Data storytelling: use data, visuals, and stories to persuade or inform others.

It's not just about technical skills, but also about the culture of using data. Data-literate people are curious, seek answers, share insights with others, and enjoy collaborating. Data doesn't scare them off; instead, they embrace it as a source for learning and making decisions. Data literacy is also essential for the emergence of a data democracy. Data democracy stands for making all primary data available to everyone in the organization. This is only possible if everyone in the organization can also interpret and analyze the data. The considerable advantage of a data democracy is that the entire organization can contribute to innovation and growth based on facts and data.

Why is data literacy important?

Data literacy is important both at the individual level and for organizations, offering many benefits:

• Better decision-making: organizations are better able to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on intuition/gut feeling.
• Better view of ROI: with data literacy you can accurately measure the impact of your actions, projects, and investments and link them to the right causes.
• Employee satisfaction: working with data creates more trust, transparency, and a sense of responsibility among employees. It also lets them make the results of their work visible and learn from them.
• Better customer experience and satisfaction: data literacy can help you better understand your customers, for example by offering personalized and relevant solutions based on data. It can also help you gather customer feedback and improve customer loyalty by acting on it.
• More innovation: Data literacy helps you identify and seize new opportunities, solve problems creatively, and generate new ideas and insights. You also stay up to date on the latest trends and technologies, allowing you to respond to them faster than the competition.

Concrete examples for organizations

Data literacy can have a positive effect in every part of an organization:

• Marketing: by analyzing customer data and purchasing behavior, a marketing team can create targeted marketing campaigns. This results in improved ROI and more focused decisions.
• Operations: by using data analysis, organizations can identify which processes run inefficiently, for example in the supply chain. This often costs time and money. By optimizing these processes, you can reduce operational costs.
• Customer Service: a customer service team analyzes customer feedback and recognizes patterns. This gives them better insight into the issues so they can address them faster. This in turn leads to greater customer satisfaction.
• R&D/Innovation: organizations use data to spot market trends and identify new opportunities or improve their product. This helps them maintain their competitive advantage or launch new innovations faster.
• HR: an HR department can use data to measure employee performance. This allows them to make evaluations measurable and better support employees.

How can you improve your data literacy skills?

Improving your data literacy skills isn't as difficult as it seems. There are many resources and tools available to help you learn and practice data literacy, such as:

• Online courses and platforms: there are many online courses and platforms that offer data literacy training, such as DataCamp, Coursera, edX, and Udemy. These can help you learn the basics of data literacy at your own pace and convenience.
• E-mergo Academy: at the E-mergo Academy, we offer several trainings in the field of data analytics: Data & Analytics Basics, Dashboard Design, SQL, KPI Masterclass, and Dimensional Modeling. These let you take your first steps toward working with data and improving your data literacy. We also offer learning paths that bundle a number of these trainings together.
• Data tools and software: there are many data tools and software that can help you work with data, such as Power BI, Qlik, and TimeXtender. These help you access data, analyze and visualize it, and then communicate with it in a simple and interactive way. At the E-mergo Academy, we also offer a wide range of workshops where you can get acquainted with these tools.

Want to improve your data literacy skills? Then it's good to start with the basics, be curious, and gradually dive deeper into topics you find interesting. There's no single way to improve your data literacy, but there are endless ways to deepen your knowledge in this area. This way, you're never done learning. The more you work with data, the more data-literate you'll become. And the more data-literate you are, the more value you can get out of data.

Conclusion

Data literacy is a skill that's becoming increasingly important in a world where organizations are working in an increasingly data-driven way. To work in a data-driven way, it's essential for an organization that everyone within it recognizes the importance of working with data. Data literacy is key to success here, because it creates ownership for data-driven working. Employees who have a critical eye, can do research, can analyze/visualize data, and can draw conclusions from it will embrace working with data faster and feel more responsible for it. Data literacy gives organizations the ability to effectively deploy data, regardless of department or industry. The (competitive) advantages of data literacy are, after all, countless. So get started and make yourself or your organization more data-literate.