MIT Sloan School – “Data literacy — the ability of a company’s employees to understand and work with data to the appropriate degree — can be a stepping stone or a stumbling block when it comes to building a data-driven company. A recent Gartner survey of chief data officers found that poor data literacy is one of the top three barriers in building strong data and analytics teams, while a data literacy survey by Accenture of more than 9,000 employees in a variety of roles found that only 21% were confident in their data literacy skills. While there is work to do, data training is worth it. “In a world of more data, the companies with more data-literate people are the ones that are going to win,” said MIT Sloan senior lecturer who teaches courses on communicating and persuading with data.“Data literacy has always been a requirement in successful organizations. It’s just that data illiteracy is more obvious now — or data illiteracy just causes more damage now than it used to,” Kazakoff said. “In a world of more data, the companies with more data-literate people are the ones that are going to win,” said MIT Sloan senior lecturer who teaches courses on communicating and persuading with data. “Data literacy has always been a requirement in successful organizations. It’s just that data illiteracy is more obvious now — or data illiteracy just causes more damage now than it used to,” Kazakoff said. “Everybody needs data literacy, because data is everywhere,” said Piyanka Jain, a data science expert and author of “Behind Every Good Decision: How Anyone Can Use Business Analytics to Turn Data into Profitable Insight.” “Data is the new currency, it’s the language of the business. We need to be able to speak that.” Companies will need to find a path to data literacy for their workforce, which includes knowing why data literacy matters, what data literacy looks like for every employee (hint: it’s not one size fits all), and how to establish a baseline of employee skills and common data language. Experts offered these tips for building a data-literate company…”