Author Archives: Sarah Nell-Rodriquez

Throughout recent months, there has been a switch to a gatekeeping, elitist attitude toward education and subsequent skills. This type of thinking is harmful and should not continue.

So often, we talk about Intel when it comes to Microchips, and in Data Literacy, we don’t talk about the WHY enough and how microchips contributed to where we are. Lynn is the reason microchips are as efficient as they are, yet all we hear about is Moore and the other inventors. Our technology rate of change is exponential because of contributions like Lynns.

For a long time, I didn’t share my story about poverty and thought talking about it would diminish who I am today. Somewhere in the past five years, I learned to embrace my background and let it empower me and hopefully inspire someone struggling today. There’s always hope, even when it’s dark.

Data literacy is simply the data skills required to thrive in a digital society. It exists because the cost of education has increased, along with the velocity of technology change, and our adaptation as humans to keep up with it has not kept pace.

It feels appropriate that I waited to start writing this until Valentine’s Day – a day often about unrequited love. Or, in this case, the unrequited love of data literacy initiatives and the frequently uttered phrase “what the hell did I get myself into?”

On January 26th, 2021, I posted our first blog post and announced our existence to the world. We are formally toddlers and act as such. We have learned to walk, run, and have had some crying jags and emotional outbursts, but we’re growing.

We haven’t had many posts lately, and there’s a reason for that. We’ve been launching a podcast!

Keep in mind that Data Literacy is not binary but rather is on a continuum. Everyone has some basic data skills, and others are pretty adept at viewing and understanding, and incorporating data into their daily practices. But as the business data world evolves, these basic data literacy skills also continue to grow.

As an Internal Auditor, despite everyone talking about the need to use more data, I noticed that in reality, few auditors did. It was evident that simply repeating ‘you need to use data’ was not leading to change.

Again, here’s the long-term problem we’re going to continue to encounter if we don’t create a sense of urgency around data literacy – our talent pipeline will be smaller and less diverse with time.