Abstract
As part of London Data Week, The Alan Turing Institute's People in Data project and the London Office of Technology & Innovation (LOTI) co-organised an event called Empowering People in Data. This event was hybrid (central London and online) and aimed to draw together a broad range of organisations from across London and beyond that consider using data as critical to their success and realise the need to enable more people to work in data focused careers.
The event was divided into two separate but related workshops:
The morning workshop, run by Sam Nutt from LOTI, focused on sharing and mapping approaches from across London to developing data and AI skills, revealing how and where different organisations or sectors might work together to better create and deliver their skills. We know skills don’t stay within an organisation or a sector, but often move across sectors within a geography like London, so we want to start thinking on that city-wide level. The workshop started with some lightning presentations sharing different work on data and AI skills, before participants then discussed and shared in small groups and together as a collective their work and possible opportunities, challenges and goals for the future.
The afternoon workshop, run by Emma Karoune and the People in Data team from The Alan Turing Institute, focused on the data professionals workforce. The People in Data project aims to convene an open community of data professionals, which promotes a culture that values and prioritises data and recognises people that work in data roles as essential to any organisation. In this workshop, we started with a diverse panel of speakers who talked about their experience of working in data - the highs, the lows and the in-betweens. They touched on the need for capacity building in this community and highlighted some of the current challenges of working in data. The workshop then got the attendees gathered to tell us more about their experiences - we had small group discussions about: Who are the People in Data?, What skills and competency work, or training development have you done in this area or know of?, What are the main challenges of working in a data focused role?
We ended the day with a social networking hour to promote collaboration between this diverse range of attendees.
Webpage here: https://www.turing.ac.uk/events/empowering-people-data