OPINION30 October 2023

Bethan Blakeley: Learning on the job

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Bethan Blakeley

Data analytics Innovations Opinion

The Impact columnist shares the excitement she feels when she gets to pick something from her shiny list.

Yellow lightbulb made from scrunched up paper, surrounded by other coloured scrunched up paper

In 2019, I wrote about the data lake, and in between my usual rants about unnecessary jargon (I hate the term ‘data lake’), I gave some advice on how to navigate big datasets. One of those pieces of advice was to ‘paddle with a purpose’ – that is, know what you’re doing and what
your objectives are, and stay true to them.

Now, I’m not a big fan of contradicting myself, and I will argue that what I’m about to say here isn’t contradictory, but I can see why some people might think that. Bear with me. What I’m talking about here is the importance of not knowing what you’re doing; how much you can learn from being lost and, arguably, a bit overwhelmed if you just allow yourself to lean into it.

I’m still not talking about blindly poking about in a dataset, hoping something interesting will catch your eye. I’m not talking about ...