Skip main navigation

New offer! Get 30% off your first 2 months of Unlimited Monthly. Start your subscription for just £35.99 £24.99. New subscribers only T&Cs apply

Find out more

A course for leaders

Hear The Data Lab's CEO, Gillian Docherty, introduce this Data for Business Leaders on-line course.
4.5
Hello and welcome to The Data lab’s, executive education online course. It’s a real pleasure to welcome you joining this course and participating with the community and the network over the coming weeks to learn more about Data and AI. I’m Gillian Docherty, and I’m the chief executive of the Data Lab and I’m really delighted you decided to join this course. Data’s being used ever more across the world by businesses, by public sector by organizations to innovate and actually the need for data talent is increasing exponentially.
39.5
But we don’t just need data scientists and engineers and practitioners, we need data leaders, we need leaders who understand the value that they can drive in their organizations from data and we hope that you will learn a little bit more about leading and taking your steps to help your organisation lead in this data driven environment. I’d like to thank all the practitioners and leaders who have participated in driving the content for this course. I would like to encourage you to get involved, join the network get engaged with the dialogue that is happening during the coming weeks, and to get really the most out of the course you’re about to embark on, I’m sure you find it super valuable.
84.4
My team are really excited about sharing some of the things they’ve learned some of the content that they’ve built by delivering this executive education to over 100 organisations and 1200 people over the last 18 months. So there’s a real value and depth there in terms of their knowledge and they wanna share it with you. So enjoy, really immerse yourself and we hope to see you on the other side, ready to lead your organisation and driving data innovation to lead and build new products and services for you. Thank you, enjoy and we’ll see at the end of the course.

Now that you have heard from Gillian, The Data Lab’s CEO, I’d like to quickly acknowledge two other members of The Data Lab team who have shaped this course, Brian Hills (Head of Data) and Vicky Fraser (Business Development Executive).

Have a quick look on our “deep dive” website if you want to hear the core team’s views on “Why data and AI are important?” and “What we are looking forward to in the future?”.

At The Data Lab we are lucky enough to have had conversations with organisations at various points on their data journeys. One theme that emerges from these conversations is that it is often difficult to know where to start. This course is primarily designed to help you with this.

This is a course for leaders, for those of you setting up data capabilities for the 1st time, or those of you taking steps to the next level of data maturity. This is for you if you are the one leading the change to make your organisation more data savvy. The main goal of this course is to give you the confidence to start adding value through better use of data.

To do this we have created a course based upon the experiences of leading industry practitioners. We worked with them to ensure that the content was meaningful, but more importantly, that it was practical.

And remember, at one point these practitioners were just like you, starting on their own journeys. So, I would look at them like a future version of yourself, sharing with you the tips and techniques for success.

To get the most out of the course please contribute. As a group of peers, you will learn as much from each other as you will from us. Commenting and posting also helps you articulate your insights and observations which in itself reinforces learning. So, please share your views, experiences and insights. With your permission I may even take your contributions and factor them into future versions of the courses, where you will of course be credited as appropriate.

Introduce yourself

Please use the comments below this video to introduce yourself to your fellow learners. Tell us who you are and why you are taking this course.

This article is from the free online

Introduction to Data for Business Leaders

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now