#DataYou: Laura Bradbury

We all use data every day, although we often don’t realise it – whether that’s deciding on the best Netflix subscription or comparing prices to order your shopping online.

It’s also easy to miss how powerful, and useful, data can be. I moved into a Data Analyst role at The Prince’s Trust in Scotland at the end of 2021, and it’s fascinating to see how a charity can make use of data.

For example, you might input specific information based on one approach and get result A, then do things differently and get result B – and result B shows that young people are getting much greater benefit. It allows you to make informed decisions based on real information.

I’d worked for The Prince’s Trust in an admin role for a few years, but last year I read about the National Progression Award (NPA) in Data Science. I’d always been interested in numbers and I was enjoying doing some data work and using spreadsheets in my admin job – and my manager is a data person. I thought the NPA sounded interesting, so I went for it..

It was a ‘self-learning’ course run by Edinburgh College. Your work would be posted online once a week, with YouTube videos, labs and a Teams Q&A – it would maybe take 5 hours a week and you could fit it in when it suited you, which was great. There were a couple of tutorials during the three-month course but most of it was online.

I was in the first group to do the NPA in Data Science and despite being online, there was real camaraderie – lots of online chat and people very willing to encourage and support each other.

It was a great course; I learned loads about using data, about who uses data and why, how to store data and keep it safe – and what to do with it. There was a bit of programming, too – creating graphs using programs and working with massive sets of data that you couldn’t do by hand but the programs enabled you to.

Soon after I finished the course in June 2021, a data analyst role came up at The Prince’s Trust and I was encouraged to go for it – and I got it. I started in late 2021, and it’s been great to see how data is used.

While I don’t work directly with young people, being able to see the difference that the charity makes to young people by helping them into jobs and training was a big thing for me.

It was so rewarding to find that this programme – done this way – gives us a much better outcome for the young people than when we do it this way. It’s about using the data for good, not just looking at a sheet of numbers.

Back at school, we would use data to make graphs and charts in subjects like biology, but it went no further. Now I’m using data in a real-life, practical way that can make a difference.

I don’t use everything I learned on the course at work every day, but it’s been hugely helpful having that broader data knowledge and I’m always willing to learn more.

In February 2022, I started on the Professional Development Award in Data Science. It’s about expanding your knowledge in areas like data management, plus more programming – building on what we learned in the NPA quite rapidly! It’s taking about 6-7 hours a week and The Prince’s Trust has been very supportive in giving me some of that time to study.

There is flexibility again to fit in around your own work and interests. It’s a year-long course and it’s early days, but I’m really looking forward to learning much more.

It’s great that I’m learning through the course and also learning practically in my Data Analyst job with The Prince’s Trust. I’m using Tableau, a visualization software, a lot and that’s really interesting and useful. I take data from our  database and clean it up and sort out any errors, then produce graphs and charts to help people understand the data and how we can use it.

That’s what really interests me – and in the future, I want to continue in some kind of analyst role to really bring the data to people and make it useful. I think that’s so important. You can make all the fancy graphs you want to, but it has to be about using the data to make a real difference to people’s lives.

• To find out more about the National Progression Award (NPA) in Data Science and the Professional Development Award in Data Science, click here.