The Department of Commerce Data Service (CDS) was created to help make better use of the massive wealth of data generated by the agency and its components, which include some of the government most prolific producers like the Census Bureau and National Weather Service.
The team can give bureaus support developing specific projects but through training, Commerce employees can learn to move projects forward on their own. Teach a fed to code and they can crunch data for a lifetime.
New Site: Commerce Data Academy
That's the idea behind the new Commerce Data Academy, a set of in-person and online courses on coding and data analysis targeted at Commerce employees.
The Data Academy has been in the pilot phase since January but was opened to all Commerce employees and contractors on May 5.
Past courses conducted during the pilot were recorded and archived on GitHub for anyone to take or review. According to CDS, those 14 courses have already had more than 3,500 registrants.
The academy has four new courses rolling out over the next two months, all with a focus on using code to make sense of data.
The site also has three more courses in development: front-end, UX/UI design and back-end coding.
The original 14 courses — which included topics like agile development, HTML and CSS coding and using data for storytelling — were part of an initial pilot in January that also included two two-week boot camps that focused on data analytics and visualizations.
The Data Service team launched the pilot to see if they could find at least 30 people from across Commerce interested in learning how to parse data and code. The team had more than 400 employees register for the first sessions.
And for some, the learning continued after the pilot wrapped.
Fifteen Commerce employees from different bureaus were awarded scholarships to continue their data and coding education. The Data Service team is footing the bill for those scholarships and, in return, the employees are on three-month details with the team, working on data projects for their bureaus.
Aaron Boyd is an awarding-winning journalist currently serving as editor of Federal Times — a Washington, D.C. institution covering federal workforce and contracting for more than 50 years — and Fifth Domain — a news and information hub focused on cybersecurity and cyberwar from a civilian, military and international perspective.
