How We Got a Week of Free Data Consulting (And How You Can Too!)

Does it seem strange for one data consultancy to get free work from another? No doubt!  But when you dig a little deeper, it makes perfect sense.

Dub Dub’s ethos is to pull together the right people for the right roles.  Sometimes less experienced people can deliver what’s needed, and what makes The Data School Down Under special is they offer free consulting weeks, while their students are learning.

Having worked with The Data School in previous roles, we were already familiar with how their model worked. They bring in cohorts of students (often graduates or career changers) who undergo an intensive four-month training program, in learning platforms like Tableau, Power BI, and Alteryx, along with soft skills for consulting. As they progress, they take on client projects, where businesses provide real-world data challenges for them to solve over the course of a week.

When Dub Dub Data partnered with The Data School, we approached it with a slightly different mindset. We know we’ll partner with The Data School for paid client work (when students graduate). We wanted to structure a collaboration as both a learning experience for the students and a way for us to teach potential consultants on our ways of working.

Designing a Win-Win Collaboration

In the past having guided The Data School students through visualisation makeovers  - I knew that the more effort we put into the setup, the better the outcomes would be.

This time, we reached out to JJ Phillips (Director Corporate Partnerships at The Data School) to explore the idea of Dub Dub Data teaching the students about data visualisation, UX, and design. 

The goal? To have them redesign dashboards for our upcoming Glow Up program. This would not only help the students learn great UX and design, but also give us results at scale, saving us time in the process.  The bonus was we’d learn about the capabilities of the current students, so we would understand who would be a great fit when we need to call on them.

How It Came Together

The week started with a full day of training and briefing from me: BEWARE! this isn’t their standard but we wanted to give them some training. We did a fun Menti hosted workshop, walking through our design principles.  Once finished, I briefed each of the students on their challenge for the week answering initial questions. The Data Schoolers were given a whatsapp contact, to reach out if they had any questions.

Mid week we gave independent direct feedback, similar to what they would get within client projects from different stakeholders. This gave them an opportunity to take on subjective critiques that may differ. They had an opportunity to update their work based on the feedback and iterate on what they had built. 

The Results: Insights, Innovation, and Energy

On Friday, the students presented their final dashboards back to us in a 10 minute presentation. As expected for a school, the results were varied - 

• The top performers delivered truly impressive work, smashing it out of the park.
• The middle group mostly got there, though there will be a few additional changes.
• A few found it more difficult, but not because they weren’t talented - rather, their strengths lay in data engineering – not a key focus of our week.

One of the unexpected benefits was the fresh perspective these students brought. Because they’re still learning, they often experiment in ways that more experienced analysts might not, which sometimes led to surprising and innovative solutions.

 Before & After - 

Why You Should Consider The Data School

Beyond the deliverables and getting some outstanding consulting, what makes working with The Data School so valuable is the opportunity to understand your own shortcomings! I learnt where I could adapt my training, and also realised it would be better to have more regular check-ins scheduled, rather than leaving it over to the students to reach out. Seeing where students found things trickier gave us insight into how to better articulate concepts and improve our own internal processes.  We got some great insight and a way forward for our Glow Ups! – Stay tuned.

So if you’ve got a data problem that could use a fresh set of eyes - and you’re happy to invest some time in guiding the process - I highly recommend reaching out to The Data School. You’ll be surprised at what you get in return.

We look forward to working with their consultants more in the future!

Want to get a free client week? Register here.

Stay tuned, next week we are releasing our vlogcast series, Glow Ups. Where you'll see the Before and Afters in detail. You can also read the detailed blog here

Disclaimer: This blog is not sponsored, and we have not been paid to write it. Our experience with The Data School Down Under was based on a free consulting engagement as part of their training program. We’re sharing our insights purely because we found the collaboration valuable and think others might benefit from it too.