Don’t get me wrong, there is some mind-bending educational content on YouTube. It’s a great place to learn.
But, if you are counting on your employees to use YouTube (or really any autodidactic medium) for their data upskilling, you are setting up your company for failure. Here’s why.
It’s inefficient
If you want efficient workers, you will give them efficient learning resources. And YouTube is not one of them.
It sounds like a great idea to hop on and off YouTube when you need to learn how to do something. But we’ve all fallen down the YouTube rabbit hole.
Many of the best YouTube instructors use their channel as adversiting for their paid courses. Sure, you can get a lot of good content off the channel for free — but when you pay, you get efficiency: everything you need is packaged in one straight path.
It’s of inconsistent quality
Related to the inefficiency, the quality of YouTube tutorials is all over the place. There’s no content QA process for what lands on your feed: it’s all up to the whims of the algorithm.
Wouldn’t you rather incorporate a strategy with some eye toward your organization’s specific needs and circumstances? And use content that’s been vetted by experts for its instructional rather than entertainment value?
Your best and brightest will leave
Employers want “self-starters,” which is understandable. But there’s a fine line between “be a self-starter” and “figure it out yourself, because I can’t/won’t/don’t care.”
Often, management has failed to build sound data workflows and processes in the organization, and employees need to figure it out themselves, usually without the resources or power to actually fix the system.
Access to learning and training is one needed resource to fix the system. With no plan in place here, organizations are implicitly asking their employees to figure it out on YouTube. This isn’t going to end well and looks something like this:
- The data analytics process is broken, due to poor data definitions, storage methods, or (but most likely and) unclear business objectives.
- A digitally-savvy junior-level analyst is hired to figure out these problems.
- Over time, the analyst begins to watch more and more YouTube videos and can frame the organization’s data problems clearly. They can see what apparently no one else can or will see: that the status quo is not going to work.
- Without the resources or culture to enact the desperately needed changes, the analyst gets frustrated and seeks greener pastures.
What’s the alternative?
YouTube is but one of many low-cost ways to learn data analytics. With all these choices, it may seem absurd to pay for white-label data education. However, a “do-it-yourself” upskilling initiative is bound to fail: not just for the inconsistent quality of the content, but for the rift it creates in your organization’s data culture.
Leave your best and brightest to figure out your organization’s data woes themselves, and they will: they’ll figure out that they should go somewhere “that gets” data.
That means that the alternative is to build an in-house data training academy. This will upskill your workforce the right way: evenly distributed. You control the quality of the content. You have the chance to directly audit your current practices against industry standards.
If you are interested in learning more about what a data academy can do for your organization, sign up below for exclusive access to my resource library. You will find workshop outlines, demo guides and more. Consider this my attempt to “open source” what your organization’s data academy will look like.
You can also drop me a line or schedule a free call on Microsoft Bookings.
I look forward to seeing what solutions you deliver for data education.
Leave a Reply