Our mission with the Vertical Academy is beyond providing people with the skills and experience to forge a data career. It is to help make them great, rounded professionals, who have a passion for solving problems, are excited about using data to add value wherever they can and have a great attitude towards work, relationships and the challenges they will face.
Our Vertical Academy is a new approach to training that focuses on teaching students to be specialists in specific industries. This is done by using technology that provides simulated environments where students can experience what it’s like to work on projects in a realistic corporate setting. The Vertical Academy ensures that students have real practical knowledge and experience, as well as a comprehensive understanding of an industry. We believe this will make them more work ready and more attractive to potential employers.
The digital and data skills gap is a global issue – there aren’t enough skilled people to fulfil demand. And this is only due to get worse as more businesses look to become data-driven.
At Intuita we see first-hand the demand our clients have for high-quality, experienced resources, and as a data consultancy we also have seen a substantial increase in salary expectations and a lack of supply of good data people. There’s an obvious need for more people to be trained as data practitioners.
But we also think there’s a better approach to training people. Training courses tend to be very generic and don’t provide the students with any deep understanding of what it’s like to actually work within an organisation. This lack of context means that even when they find employment, the employer still has a lot of work to do to teach the student the ins and outs of the company.
We believe that the Vertical Academy can help address the skills gap, creating better, more work-ready data professionals by providing students with comprehensive industry experience in a low risk but realistic environment. Our novel approach provides a more practical approach to training that will help to make students more employable.
We think that most people going through training courses, whether it’s universities, academies or career accelerators, come out the other end with a lot of theoretical knowledge, but nearly no ability to grasp the context within which they have to apply their newly acquired skills. They have not been exposed to the realities of a real work environment, with real systems and real, messy data. We believe this breeds a naivety which is making it harder to find people who appreciate that the world doesn’t fit in the theoretical bubble they want it to.
We strongly believe that by giving students the ability to authentically experience the sort of work and challenges they will face in the real work environment, within a training setting, we can help to solve this problem. By helping budding data professionals to grasp the context of the environment they will be working in, we can help them to have a more successful, fulfilling and exciting start to their career.
The digital skills gap is continuing to grow. As the world becomes more digital and data-driven, we need the skills to continue to build, maintain and evolve all the technologies, systems, applications, algorithms, models and products that we rely upon to operate as a society.
The world desperately needs smart, driven and passionate people who have relevant tech skills. We hope our Vertical Academy will help to close this gap, providing a way for people who have never been engaged with data before to learn the required skills and gain the relevant experience to start a career in data.
The new approach to learning also fits in with our own view of the world – we see and experience the world as it is, not in the neat, consolidated and siloed way that many other professionals, consultancies and institutions may portray. It’s messy, it’s error-ridden and it’s uncertain.
We have an ambition to nurture the next generation of data practitioners who appreciate this reality and who embody the ethos Intuita (authenticity, accountability, relationships etc.). We want the Vertical Academy to be more than just helping people to become a data practitioner, but also helping them to become a great team member and a conscious professional. We want the Vertical Academy to help them:
- Become a great team member
- Learn to be accountable and own mistakes
- Always look for better ways to solve problems
- Push for quality in everything they do
- Be empathetic to the context they’re operating in
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