Bring your creativity to data

The ever-present debate on Linkedin among data people is the importance of soft skills vs hard skills.

Should you learn SQL and Spark? Or communication skills, data storytelling, and requirements gathering?

A more interesting question to me is not “which skills are more important”.

But “which skills keep you in the data profession?”

Are you here because you love table partitioning strategies and tuning Spark jobs? Or explaining forecasts and analytical models to executives?

For me, it’s creativity.

Creative expression is what keeps me in the data profession.

Numerous technical and "hard" skills are involved in working with data, but creativity is the lifeblood of innovation and ideation.

Here are a few ways creativity shows up in data work:

• Creativity in data connections. Combining metrics or attributes in unconventional or unique ways leads to insights.

• Creativity in data modeling. Modeling data is an art form and is a canvas where a data modeler gets to represent business concepts in data.

• Creativity in data storytelling. How you communicate data is just as important as what data you communicate.

• Creative in Design. Many technical or design problems don't have correct answers. A bit of creativity, and can generate the ideas necessary to build excellent solutions.

Both business teams and data teams have abundant opportunities to express and explore their creative side when working with data. Don’t get stuck in the “hard skill” vs “soft skill” debate.

It was good to see you today,

Sawyer