S03E06 - Reimagining data analytics training - with James Cotton

Half Stack Data Science

First of all, David's book Solve Any Data Analysis Problem is available in Manning's Early Access Program!

You can read more about it here: https://www.manning.com/books/solve-any-data-analysis-problem (if it's not on offer when you're there, you can get 35% off with the code au35asb).

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In this episode, we talked to James Cotton, co-founder of iO-Sphere.

Canadian originally, James has been working in the UK for the last 10 years, always in analytics, pricing, and data science. After a short stint in insurance he was at hotels.com for 3.5 years always working in customer analytics and marketing analytics. He then went to worldremit – a large uk fintech company that’s sort of like a digital western union. There he built out a team, growing it significantly. Over the past 7 or 8 years he’s hired dozens and dozens of data professionals of all levels – clearly seeing the gap between existing data training programmes and courses and the real need in industry.

James is one of the founders of iO-Sphere, which was created in order to close that gap with actually useful, practical, training. They also fund all the training of everyone that comes onto the programme – helping to lower financial barriers to accessing high quality training and these careers.

We talked to James about the skill gap between training and the real world, why no one has thought to close that gap in the way io-Sphere have, whether standardisation makes sense for the analytics industry, and of course where AI fits into all this.

Find out more about iO-Sphere here: https://io-sphere.io

You can find James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jccotton