Hello all!
My name is Alex Smith. I'm starting a career change from a design and marketing role of 15+ years into a product manager role on the Innovation and Data Management team here at a large nonprofit in Houston, TX.
I've enjoyed art and design quite a bit, but I'm interested in shifting direction to a data visualization role. Feels like drinking from a firehose to learn all about the data architecture within the organization before I can start being self-sufficient in both user requests as well as anything I'd like to build myself from scratch.
Some things I'm doing to try to make up ground as fast as possible:
• Self-paced learning - going through the tutorials to get familiar with the environment
• Attending live trainings and workshops - currently going through the New Power User Orientation as well as attending webinars (signing up even with scheduling conflicts in order to get access to the recording), and hands-on trainings (found the sandbox workshop a little tough to keep up with)
• Going through existing ETLs to understand in-context use cases for my organization by renaming icons to be more explanatory and filling in the notes in order to articulate what's happening. Plan to review those later with my supervisor to ensure accurate understanding.
On a lighter note (per the introduction suggestions), one of my hobbies is one of naturalist studies. Going out and making photographic observations via apps like iNaturalist, where I can make species lists relative to particular areas, is pretty exciting. I would love to be able to use that data to tell interesting stories or share reports with fellow hobbyists. There are also related websites like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility which could also provide data to play with.
Thanks for reading!
