Data Literacy

With a data-literate workforce, your organization and culture will thrive.

 

What is data literacy?

Data literacy is an ability to explore, understand, and communicate with data. It includes critical thinking skills to use, interpret, and make decisions with data, then convey its significance and value to others.

The impact of data literacy for organizations

To explore enterprise data literacy, upskilling, and related organizational issues, challenges, and benefits, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct surveys with over 2,000 decision makers and employees in 10 countries. The survey found that organizations that invest in data literacy and upskilling at scale—especially those with more mature initiatives—experience powerful benefits like improved decision making, innovation, productivity, customer and employee experience, and more.

Both decision makers and employees in various departments all consider basic data literacy as the most important skill for success. While everyone agrees that data skills are important for workforce success, there is disagreement on whether or not employees are being adequately trained. Forrester found a gap between the need for data skills training and implementation—which is harming organizations’ competitiveness.

82 percent

of leaders expect all employees to have basic data literacy

70 percent

of employees are expected to heavily use data by 2025, up from 40% in 2018

79 percent

of leaders say departments equip employees with needed data skills, but only...

40 percent

of employees say they’re provided the data skills they're expected to have

Learn from Tableau customers investing in data literacy

Swiss Life emphasizes community events, trainings, and written resources to support decision making, learning, and anchor its business growth strategy in data.

JLL invests in end-to-end skills trainings and programs that drive data literacy and company-wide innovation.

Bank Mandiri matures its data culture and employees’ data skills through analytics courses, part of Mandiri University, so all decisions are rooted in reliable data.

 


What you want to do is help your people: to show them how technology, data, all these different elements can help them do their job better and help them almost fall in love with what they’re doing.

Data Skills 10 million

Pledge to close the data skills gap

Learn how we’ve committed to help close the data skills gap by enabling 10 million people with resources and education over the next 5 years.

Join the movement

Learn more about Data Literacy at TC22

Join us May 17–19, 2022 for the data event of the year, in person in Las Vegas or virtually from anywhere in the world. Learn from peers and product experts. Discover how data-driven decision making can take your business to entirely new heights. This year we'll have several dedicated data literacy sessions led by customers and industry experts.

Register Now