Congratulations to the 84 professional services staff, academic staff, undergraduate and postgraduate students who have successfully completed the University’s Developing Your Data Skills Programme. The Developing Your Data Skills Programme offers three capability Levels to make it suitable for a variety of staff and students irrespective of their prior level of knowledge and is run over six-months. For each Level, content is divided into three topics: Introduction to Data Skills and Programming (including Excel, R, SQL or Python pathways), Statistics and Data Analysis and Presenting Your Data. The time commitment for the programme tends to be 1-2 hours per week, up to 40 hours total, depending on note-taking and review. The flexibility of the programme makes it possible to work around existing work and study commitments. Image Diverse data projects Since this year’s programme started in September 2019, staff and students from across campus, from all disciplines and with different levels of data skills, have taken part in the programme. They attended face-to-face and recorded workshops, enrolled in the online programme hosted on Learn, worked through many videos and other online learning resources to develop their data skills, and completed data projects covering subjects as diverse as the study of lamb losses in the Highlands to a study of ship models found in Scottish churches. Want to get involved? The programme, which has just completed its second year, has been so popular it is being run for the third time this next academic year. If you are interested in joining a cohort starting between September 2020 and January 2021, running for six months and finishing in July 2021, please email is.skills@ed.ac.uk and we’ll contact you to get you started. Publication date 19 Aug, 2020
