The application for the Data School is a Tableau Public visualisation. For this reason, applicants will learn Tableau to apply for the job. However, the job title is actually a ‘Trainee Consulting Analyst’ using Tableau and Alteryx. Alteryx is not included in the application process because there is not a free version for everyone to use like Tableau Public.

Many people may not know that there is a free version for students called Alteryx for Good. As a student I did download a free version of Alteryx Designer, however due to my inexperience with data preparation I found Alteryx daunting and did not know where to get started and therefore never started to learn Alteryx before I started the job at the Data School.

This is now a big regret of mine, as I really wish I had a head-start on Alteryx before I joined. Data preparation is a key part of the learning and time at the Data School!

I want to therefore alert students to this, so that students wanting to join the Data School can feel more confident about Alteryx when they start the Data School than myself.

In terms of resources to use, the training in the Data School has used the Weekly Challenges as a good way of learning and practicing Alteryx. The weekly challenges currently contain 180 challenges with 3 different levels of difficulty: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Along with different subjects such as Data Preparation, Data Parsing and Macros.

There are also Interactive Lessons in the Alteryx Academy which are good at showing the different functions and tools in Alteryx.

Doing these will be a great way of learning Alteryx, if I was fully aware of these learning resources a few months ago I would be very grateful for this knowledge now!