Here at Data Literacy, we’re about to launch our first course in what will become a series aimed at empowering leaders to make a difference with data. The course is called “Working with Data Professionals (Even if You Aren’t One!),” and it was created by Anna-Maria Steverson, Analytics Enablement Manager at Netflix.

The ebook that accompanies the course is effective as a stand-alone guide, and you can now pre-order it for your Kindle app or device on Amazon. The ebook is scheduled to release on June 14th, 2023.

The ebook is all about helping managers and team leaders understand the nature of data work and how to effectively leverage the talents of data professionals in order to drive organizational change.

It contains the following five chapters:

1. What Do Data Professionals Do?: A brief overview of different types of data work and the data skills needed to perform them.
2. How to Hire a Data Professional: Advice on how to hire someone who has the data skills needed to do the types of data work your organization needs. 
3. Managing a Team of Data Professionals: High-level methods and approaches for leading a team of data professionals.
4. Measuring the Performance of Data Professionals: How to track whether or not your data professionals are performing well.
5. Up-Leveling Your Partnership with Data Professionals: Best practices for getting the most out of your partnership with the data professionals in your organization.

In order to capture and convey the flow of these five chapters, our Sr. Data Literacy Advocate, the immensely talented Alli Torban, created the following image which distills the five chapters into the sequence, DO-HIRE-MANAGE-MEASURE-PARTNER:

Alli designed the book cover, too, which you have to admit is nothing short of gorgeous!

As Co-Founder and CEO of Data Literacy, I find this ebook and upcoming course launch significant for a number of reasons. First of all, the content itself is so important. With this content, we make the emphatic declaration that being highly data literate doesn’t just mean you can work with data and technology. It also means you can partner with others to leverage data to make a difference. The people skills, soft skills, and business acumen are just as important as the technical skills, or “hard skills.” Sometimes, depending on your role, they’re more important.

There’s another reason why this one is big for us. All of our offerings are full team efforts, but this is the first book and course from our company that was written by someone other than me. Another book and course by a third author is already in the works, so it certainly won’t be the last. I couldn’t be happier, and I couldn’t be more proud to work with Anna. This content was all Anna’s idea.

It started out as a blog post series. After we published it here on our blog, I looked at it again and realized that it should really be a short book and course. I proposed that to Anna, and she agreed, took the reigns, fleshed out the content, added another chapter, and then flew out here to the Seattle area to record the videos that will be embedded in the course.

Working with Anna throughout the writing and course creation process as been an absolute delight. On behalf of Becky, Megan, and Alli, I’d like to thank Anna for her hard work and brilliant ideas on this project. I’d also like to say a special thanks to Dina Teilab, David Pires, Paul Reiman, and Kevin Ford for reviewing the draft manuscript and providing helpful feedback. I’d also like to thank Amy Handy for copy editing the book as we commonly ask her to do.

I have a feeling it won’t be the last such project we do with Anna. We believe that the Data Literacy Movement has found a new standard-bearer. I’ll proclaim from the rooftops that Anna will do amazing things to help people learn the language of data. If you get a chance to spend time with Anna, you know she’d probably react something like this: