Companies are amassing huge amounts of data and hiring small armies of data scientists and engineers to store and analyze it. However, there’s often a disconnect between technical data professionals and business decision makers. More and more, companies are looking for people who can bridge the gap and unlock the real value of big data by crafting impactful narratives supported by data visualizations. Recent Linkedin research even pointed to data presented as one of the top 10 most in-demand skills. To help people develop these important skills, Udacity is excited to announce the Data Visualization Nanodegree program.
“The ability to communicate effectively with data sets you apart professionally. Plenty of people can do the technical work or put together a fancy presentation. Creating clear data visualizations to support your viewpoints, and using your analyses to tell a narrative or make a recommendation, is a crucial 21st-century data skill” – Sam Nelson, Head of Content Strategy at Udacity.
Collaborating with Top Data Professionals
To develop this program’s world-class curriculum, we collaborated with Tableau, a leading data visualization software provider, along with an excellent group of industry professionals. Each of these instructors has extensive experience in the field, and contributed guidance and feedback to focus the program on the most in-demand skills. Below is a list of instructors on the program.
Instructors
Mat Leonard, Instructional Designer at Kaggle
Josh Bernhard, Data Scientist at NerdWallet
Robert Crocker, Data Visualization Consultant at IBM
Malavica Sridhar, Senior Product Manager at CircleUp
Ben Jones, CEO of DataLiteracy.com
“Data storytelling is a critical skill for people in all industries and all departments, and I’ve seen many examples of effective storytelling in my career. The program not only focuses on relevant data storytelling and visualization skills, but Udacity’s curriculum experts were also amazing at developing a truly engaging and valuable learning experience”-Ben Jones, CEO of DataLiteracy.com.
Be In Demand
Every company is looking for people who can communicate effectively with data to help them make better, data-informed decisions. According to Wanted Analytics, three of the top ten most in-demand skills for analysts relate to data visualization and communication (Powerpoint, Tableau, Data Visualization), all of which are taught in this program. Our goal is to ensure that business leaders and data professionals alike can develop these important data visualization and presentation skills.
The Data Visualization Nanodegree program
Throughout the program, students will build a portfolio of high-quality data visualization and storytelling projects to showcase to hiring managers and recruiters. If you are a business leader with some basic analytics skills, or a data professional looking to communicate more effectively, this program will help you create impactful dashboards and presentations with data. The projects include:
- Build a Data Dashboard: In this project, you’ll apply data visualization fundaments to build interactive dashboards with Tableau. You’ll use a dataset of flight delays in the US to visualize the quality of airlines and airports, find the best times to fly, and more.
- Design a Dashboard: In this project, you’ll design a dashboard for a specific audience which you’ll define by their graphicacy, data literacy, domain expertise, user type, metrics that matter most, and any other attributes that might influence the design. Then you’ll make the dashboard truly insightful by adding design elements that draw the user’s eye to points of interest based on data. You’ll transform your visualizations to emphasize the most important points and add interactivity further facilitating the users’ desired actions.
- Build a Data Story: In this project, you’ll take the role of a data science consultant for a large production company and use the Movies Metadata dataset to provide insights on key takeaways for a specific problem statement. You’ll create a ghost deck with a problem statement, potential analyses, and a set of potential recommendations. You’ll perform various analysis to understand and find insights from the dataset. You’ll then put it all together to provide a well-supported final recommendation.
- Animate a Data Story: In this project, you will use a World Bank Indicators data file to create an interactive data presentation using indicators of your choice. You will choose the fields for various dimensions (e.g. country, year) and identify trends and patterns in the data set. In the final part of the project, you will create an animated data story and add an audio track to create a narrated finished product that you can add to your portfolio.
Supporting You in this Nanodegree Program
The program is designed to be completed in four months at roughly 5-10 hours per week, and we’re excited to support you every step of the way. It’s also self-paced, so students can take as little or as much time as they need. When you enroll in this program, you’ll not only have access to excellent content but also to Udacity’s student support services, which include:
- Project reviews: Each time a student submits a project, a member of Udacity’s reviewer network provides personalized feedback on how to improve the project. If the project does not meet specifications, they have the chance to improve and resubmit it.
- Access to a 1-on-1 technical mentor: Udacity mentors are key to student success. They answer questions, review work, and guide students throughout the program.
- Student community: Students can connect with one another during the program to discuss the courses and projects, chat about job search strategies, or just network and support progress through the program.
- Career services: Through our Career Services, students receive feedback on their LinkedIn profile, Github portfolio, and resume, as well as learn useful tips for interviewing and landing a job.
The Data Visualization Nanodegree program is truly one of a kind. The combination of world-class, cutting-edge content and excellent services is the perfect path to build your data visualization and storytelling skills. You can start the program today!
