This week’s lesson: the power of learning by doing
This week I passed the half way mark of my six month Friday project and two pieces of good news made me review my approach: I found out that my secondment at work is being made permanent, and I that I had secured Tableau Desktop licences for my team.
So why does this change things?
Firstly, developing a portfolio was fundamentally a form of insurance for the job not being made permanent, a way to showcase myself to potential employers. Secondly, I have taken a fairly punk approach to getting up to speed with Tableau, learning by doing: is this the best foundation for training other people?
Take my Makeover Monday on automation from earlier this week (I am playing catch-up after a week off). I came up with the robot arm / lollipop chart approach more or less immediately, sketched it out, and found an appropriate icon from the brilliant Noun Project, ending up with the viz below:
But you know what was the best news of all? I had played around with making lollipop charts before, using Andy Kriebel’s excellent step-by-step instructions. And I had remembered how to do it. By doing, I had learned.
So instead of changing things completely, I am just going to tweak my approach. I am going to close a few technical gaps by completing the excellent Tableau 10 for Data Scientists course by Matt Francis, I am going to carry on with Makeover Monday, I am going to carry on developing a portfolio, and I am going to continue with the blog.
After all, when a robot takes my job, I might be looking again…
