In the evening of 14th June, hundreds of people gathered in one of the palaces in Prague, to conclude and cheer for the effort that some 30 girls and ladies have put in the past weeks into their final Digital Academy projects. Projects that were their final course work for the Czechitas digital academy program. For the second time in a row, Colours of Data is has been a proud partner of this 12-week-long IT and data-centric course. Here is, how do our consultants perceive their involvement.

Mentors, lecturers and shoulders to cry on

Czechitas design their courses with the aim to create junior data analysts that are such a scarce resource in the current job market. By helping girls and young women to switch to a different career, the outcome of the program is much more than pure requalification. Most of the time, girls that enroll in the course have a full-time job, are young mothers, or still study university. This journey is no bed of roses on its own and combined with other duties, it steals every minute of their free time they don’t have.

We at CoD enjoy helping others to grow and share our experience. That’s why we decided to help in two ways: as lectors of a two full day workshops and as mentors helping ladies to build their projects.

• Lecturing - Girls attend number of courses for various topics during their 12-week journey - programming, analytics, SQL, visualization, soft skills, data modelling, etc. To help the girls understand each of those in the context and see how they fit together into a comprehensive solution delivery, we decided to build an end-to-end case study - sort of a mini project - which the girls tried to build themselves, with our guidance and help. On each of the Saturdays, they were given a business topic, set of related data and had their hands free to use the technology of their choice build the solution. For them to see how a consultancy project looks, we started with a hypotheses building for the use-case and continued with data exploration, transformation and building business insights using visualizations in tools like Tableau or Power BI. At the end of the day, we did not aim to deliver any new knowledge about available tools, but to help the participants to comprehend the whole process. And the feedback we got shows that the participants appreciated that.

• Mentoring - ust like during the previous Digital Academy runs, also this time we spend time helping students with their projects. While one pair was working on an optimization study for transportation service call center, the other focused on assessment of a marketing campaign in the context of shared economy startup. Our value add to the teams was to help defining the most impactful business outcome possible, navigating through the complexities of advanced analytics and visualization and sometimes also offering a shoulder to cry on, when the times got tough and nights too short.

Why do we do all this?

Because we enjoy seeing others to grow, and because it was so much fun and reward for us to see the pace of the improvements the students showed thanks to their efforts and enthusiasm. Also, we take it as a playground of its' kind, where we can improve in explaining the technologies we use to a novice and semi-technical audience, in creating the logical story behind what we do and at looking at our work from more of a conceptual level in general. We love to be a part of this community, that - having gone through this uneasy experience - tends to stick together and keep sharing and inspiring one another even after all the diplomas were hung on the walls.

So big Thank You girls and ladies for what you enabled us to go through!