Have summaries of our latest blogs delivered to your inbox, so you can stay up to date on the topics and current events that matter to your business.
For nonprofits across the US, building a prospecting list for outreach and donation campaigns is critical to a successful fundraising strategy. However, crafting an effective list can be time-consuming...
Generative AI is predicted to transform almost every industry, so it is hardly surprising that companies spent more than $20 billion on the technology last year. But the technology alone is not enough...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integral to business intelligence (BI), sparking the question: Will AI replace business intelligence as we know it? As AI tools become more advanced, they are...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is redefining how organisations approach business intelligence (BI). Today, professionals need to extract actionable insights from an ever-growing volume of data faster than...
Securing large donors can be a game-changer for nonprofits, providing substantial financial support and potentially opening doors to broader networks of philanthropy. As the end-of-year giving season approaches...
As industries across the globe increasingly rely on data to fuel decision-making, drive innovation, and steer strategic planning, there's an escalating demand for professionals equipped with robust data skills. These skills aren't just optional add-ons for recent graduates entering the workforce; they're essential competencies that can significantly enhance their employability and professional versatility.
From marketing to finance, public policy to healthcare, data literacy has become a universally valued attribute that can pave the way for exciting opportunities and career growth, especially in jobs for recent college graduates.
This blog post delves into the important data skills recent grads should have before joining the workforce and explores how mastering them can open doors to a diverse range of roles in our increasingly data-driven world.
In the ever-evolving world of AI, machine learning, and social media, it is important for recent grads to understand what data is and how it can be used and manipulated. To differentiate themselves among a highly technical, competitive workforce, recent grads need to understand how to find, pull, and communicate insights from data that can exist in many formats.
Data skills are much more than interpreting numbers. It is a marketing team trying to segment their audiences using the right form fields. It is a nonprofit trying to find how much money a prospect makes to request a big donation. It is a finance team creating a graph to present quarterly revenue to executives. Really, data skills are used everywhere, and honing those skills now will only make new grads more successful.
MORE: AI in academia
At some point it will not only be an advantage, but a requirement to have those data skills when they meet the moment. To be prepared for these moments, recent grads should focus on mastering the following data skills to be successful in roles across global industries.
MORE: What is workflow and why does it matter?
In the rapidly evolving professional landscape, these analytics skills have permeated a diverse spectrum of roles, making them a highly sought-after set of competencies in the job market. On one end of the spectrum, there are roles that demand direct interaction with data, where professionals are expected to extract, clean, analyze, and interpret data to draw actionable insights.
These roles necessitate a deep understanding of statistical methodologies, data manipulation tools, and often, machine learning techniques. However, the scope of data skills extends far beyond these data-centric roles.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are positions that involve a more indirect usage of data skills. These roles might not require crunching numbers daily, but they still necessitate an understanding of data to drive decision-making, assess performance, understand customer behavior, or inform strategic planning.
These professionals need to be comfortable working with data, even if it's not their primary responsibility. As such, possessing data analyst skills can open doors to a wide variety of careers, underscoring their relevance and importance in the modern job market. Here are some examples of jobs that require data skills and why:
MORE: What is unstructured data?
To practice data skills, college students will need access to data, and no source provides more access to diverse datasets than Nexis Uni. Nexis Uni features more than 15,000 news, business, and legal sources--including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790--and serves as a training ground for students to hone their data skills while attending college or university.
With Nexis Uni, a student can start by practicing data discovery, where they can navigate the vast library of information available to identify relevant and valid resources for their research project. During this process, they would also engage in data scrutiny, assessing the quality, relevance, and potential biases of the data they discover to determine if they should include it in their project.
For data visualization and interpretation, students could extract pertinent data from a variety of resources, such as company profiles through or news copy and use software like Excel or Tableau to present and interpret the data visually. Finally, conducting a literature review by exploring the over 100 Springer Nature Academic Journals available on Nexis Uni will refine students' abilities to critically evaluate and synthesize information from various data sources.
By using Nexis Uni for research and projects while in school, students can enrich their data skillset while gaining familiarity with the look and feel of Nexis Solutions platforms, something they will encounter in the future as lawyers (Lexis+), media analysts (Nexis Newsdesk), or nonprofit leaders (Nexis for Development Professionals).
If you want to prepare your students with the skills and practice environment they need to succeed in a data-driven world, start by exploring Nexis Uni for your campus today.