Teaching beyond the curriculum
In the courses that I teach, there is a strong bias towards building technical skills. Specifically, skills related to Data Engineering, Cloud Technologies, and Artificial Intelligence.
(disclosure: I’m currently seconded as an AI Project Lead – so my in-classroom work has been reduced to night classes)
These are in-demand skills, and many students find great employment opportunities because of them.
However, in the specific Program that I’ve developed and taught for the past 14 years, those technical skills have seen a drastic evolution. We moved from building Servers for Data, creating on-premise Reporting Servers and Data Warehouses, to adapting to technologies in Cloud Services, Data Lake, and now FABRIC models.
The One Constant
All this time, though, there has been one consistant and constant skill that separates our students: The ability to connect their technical skills to serve business needs.
To support the development of these skills, we have always looked at getting students to work in groups to move though a business analysis cycle.
Creating even more depth
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to update this process to make it even more relevant. Fortunately, I have a solution that I think is perfect (although it needs some work to fit into the time available).
(here is the link to the boxed set on Amazon US)
The Strategyzer Book series.
Excellent guidance on business skills
This series of books is one of the best “walk-through” resources I’ve seen on how to envision and execute a business strategy.
(note: these link to Amazon Canada)
- Business Model Generation
- Value Proposition Design
- Testing Business Ideas
- The Invincible Company
- High Impact Tools for Teams
My idea for my class on Business Analysis is to use these books across the Program (initial stages) to get students aware of the context of why and where they are applying their technical skills.
Building Data Solutions that support strategic goals in an organization means that you need to understand what strategic goals are.
