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0:02
By the end of this video, I’m going to have enabled you to set yourself on a path to learn Tableau in a way that I think is honest and upfront with you about how much work you’ll have to put in. My approach makes it clear how to take the skills you have today to give you a head start to achieve your goal this year! I’m going to do that by highlighting why learning Tableau is different today compared to what it used to be?
0:22
Then cover some learning paths so whoever you are, and whatever you want to do with Tableau you’ll get value from this video. As such there are timestamps in the description and we also have YouTube chapters so you can skip ahead or come back and watch something again if you need to. Let’s get stuck in! So how should you learn Tableau? It’s one of the most asked questions I get in the comments. Unlike other videos, I’m not about to ask you to spend hours in front of a screen whilst
0:40
I show you how to use Tableau because even if I did that, it would still leave you woefully unprepared to achieve your goal. Let me explain why learning Tableau today is different from just a few years ago. Now bear with me because it requires a very brief history lesson. You see if rewind back just 5 years, Tableau was a simple set of tools and you wouldn’t often hear Tableau refer to themselves as a platform.
0:51
As such if you wanted to learn Tableau, You only really had to learn Tableau Desktop or Tableau Server and given that Server mainly was a way to browse desktop content and lacked many of the social features it has today, if you wanted to learn Tableau you only really had to learn tableau desktop and from there you could enhance your journey along the way learning about related concepts such as data prep, data warehousing, deployment methodologies and a fair few hacks along the way.
1:17
Equally the community around Tableau was by no means young but compared to today’s scale it was relatively small, the majority of the community today became active members of the community in the last five years and so getting back on point, most guides back then and to be fair most guides today sill primarily focus around the authoring experience with a view of enabling you to build dashboards with a big nudge to the free version, Tableau Public.
1:40
Now that’s all fine and I can’t take anything away from the massive popularity of that approach except for one thing. Tableau is now a platform! Let me repeat that again. Tableau is now a Platform. What does that mean? Let me show you. Here’s a diagram of the Tableau Platform created by Tableau in September 2021. If all you did in 2022 was learn how to build dashboards in Tableau, the reality would be that you’d only really be able to serve these parts of the Tableau platform and that’s
2:07
before you take into account the new way Tableau is planning to expand its platform in the years ahead with the Tableau Economy, more on that in this video here. So with the platform getting so large where should you start if you want to learn Tableau? Where should you focus your attention? More importantly, you’re probably doing this with a professional goal or a personal development challenge in mind, and you want to get there as quickly and as effectively as possible.
2:31
What skills are your prospective employers really looking for? To explain all that, let me introduce you to the Tableau Blueprint The Tableau Blueprint maps out how successful Tableau deployments are typically deployed. As part of that assessment, there’s a set of roles that Tableau have identified that keep coming up in Tableau deployments. I’ll show them on screen now. If you look at the list of roles, they’re the ones that companies usually look to fill
2:56
when it comes to available roles but you’ll never see it broken down in this way, You’ll just get a title tableau developer then when you look at the detail its typical filled with a JD that covers multiple roles mentioned in this list. And here’s the kicker…. only a handful of them really focus on Dashboarding. And for the record… This is by no means an exhaustive list of Tableau-related roles, but what becomes clear
3:18
here is that if you want to learn Tableau, you’ll have to learn alot more than just building dashboards. You’re going to have to develop a range of skills, including your **technical skills, soft skills, analytical skills and lastly contextual or domain knowledge as an underlying theme across all your skills. In an enterprise context, domain knowledge test mixed in with business context, that’s context unique to your company and culture.
3:40
I’ll be referencing those skills during the rest of this video so to make sure you know when I’m referring to these skills, I’ll put them up on the screen as you’ve already seen me do. So, where do you start? The first thing to do is to figure out what skills you have today and where they belong in the Tableau ecosystem. I tend to break this down into four high-level roles depending on what you’d like to do. You either Use?, Build?, Develop or Deploy Tableau.
4:07
There is one more area which is Championing Tableau, but that’s more for the leadership and culture folk, and I’m still learning that so I won’t pretend to have an answer of that although, the Tableau Blueprint, the resource I just mentioned is pretty much he play book for that so as usual grab the link int he description. Now, I’ll break these down shortly, but before I do, if you don’t know what you’d like to do or not sure where you want to start, I highly encourage you to think about that
4:30
before you even pick up Tableau and also ask yourself why. Focus is such a key element to becoming an analyst. The industry already has too many generalists, so you’ll need to pick a focus to stand out and understanding why you’ve chosen that focus will be the reason you’ll persist through what is at times a tough journey whilst others give up or get frustrated. The other thing to bear in mind is that these skills aren’t distinct, that is to say you’ll
4:51
need to have skills in at least two of these in any realistic context for example If I use tableau I might have to up-skill and also understand how to build something basic. If I build tableau I might also need to know some basics when it comes to deployment and you can’t avoid becoming passionate about how people use your dashboards. So let’s go through each one and break down some suggested learning paths in fact Tableau
4:56
actually have a set of learning paths (link in the description) already mapped out that solely focus on it’s platform but in my breakdown, I’ll throw in some additional technologies and skills that are vital, and towards the end, I’ll also highlight some approaches to learning that you should start today. So first up, People who just want to learn how to use Tableau. Most Tableau users don’t need to know how to build anything in Tableau, they just need to use it.
5:17
However, if you search how to use Tableau, nearly every result is about building dashboards which is rather frustrating, it’s what I made this video last year about how to use a dashboard. That video was entirely technical, but at a deeper level, what should you learn if you just need to consume something made in Tableau? Half the challenge is just understanding how Tableau works at a very basic level. That includes understanding the interface and how it works, tableaus an analytical tool
5:42
rather than a snazzy modern day web application so there are few quirks to get used to and whilst you’re there its also good to understand how to navigate the Server or Online environment. Following that it helps if you understand how to use the social features to both save you time but also enable you to share and take part in the data culture in your organisation. Lastly, at an even higher level, it helps to be aware of what Tableau is too, I have
6:06
a video approaching 400,000 views at the time of recording so if you’re one of the few who hasn’t already seen it, check it out. On a more generally note, there is an assumption that your own data literacy levels are reasonably high. People usually self certify this so don’t worry if you’re in that camp too, but, you see sometimes the more significant challenge as an analyst is understanding what you’re being asked to do with a dashboard and then consequently evaluate whether the dashboard
6:31
enables you to do this. If it doesn’t, you need the language and skills to be able to define why it’s not working, so you’ll want to spend a bit of time understanding what data literacy means in your organisation, what types of data your business uses and what quirks you might need to be aware of, for example a non-standard way of collecting data that your organisation uses, or a treatment to your data that can be done differently by different teams to match the way they work.
6:57
Lastly, you’ll also need the skills to interpret charts. While that seems blindingly obvious, check out this Info Viz paper that digs into whether people really understand what they’re looking at when it comes to charts and data storytelling. The findings might surprise you. Link in the description below. This kind of knowledge is often assumed so spend some time building up your lingo and in conversation with others don’t assume that its common knowledge so also play a role
7:20
in educating others where you can. You can then pair that activity with your soft skills to talk about data in social settings from meetings to simply discussing a data Viz you’ve seen out in society. A typical example is election based data visualisations or maybe the annual report for a charity or cause you follow passionately. When you dig a little deeper you might start to find that interpreting data is the biggest
7:42
and probably most challenging skill you’ll need to develop and you’ll also get really good at finding issues in the way that data is presented. Master all this and your well on your way to being a boss when using tableau dashboards… but you don’t have to stop there. What if you want to build something? For those who want to build things in Tableau, I couldn’t think of a better time to start learning Tableau. Not only are the features starting to reach enterprise maturity requiring less hacks,
8:07
we also have the prospect of the Tableau Economy on the horizon to welcome a range of new tools that should enable you to build some of the most engaging work in the analytics space. The power of Tableau is also being synthesised and crafted for all skill ranges so you can start by simply typing a question to get your first chart using a feature called Ask data or you can invest some time and skill up all the way to being able to build complex dashboards
8:31
and data vizzes you thought were hand built in design tools. As such you’ll first want to figure out if you wish to build solutions for yourself or build solutions for others. Lets start with building stuff for your own use. In the Tableau world this is known as the Explorer or the Creator, if we stick to license types and you’ll be building in Tableau Desktop, or through Web authoring, the web version of the desktop experience.
8:53
If you’re building for yourself the most important thing is getting up and running. As you’ll be the primary audience for your own work, with the occasional need to share your work, your key focus should be honing your technical skills so the tool becomes an extension of your thoughts. As such you’ll need to learn Desktop or web authoring as quickly as you can so you you become familiar with the tool and how to get around, then once your journey has
9:15
started, immediately apply it in your every day work. The approach I tend to recommend is, find a use case for Tableau, Build in Tableau, and then iterate that process until you start saving yourself time. Once you start saving time, invest that saved time into learning more Tableau and start honing your analytical skills, that’s essentially the ability to ask better questions and find better answers. You essentially just repeat that process and keep iterating.
9:39
You’ll very quickly get up to speed and simultaneously start to understand good and bad use cases for Tableau, alongside the analytical skills to quickly know what you can and can’t do with the data infant of you. The key thing you’re doing here is tool familiarity, so that the time between a question you’d like answered and finding a great answer in Tableau is measured in seconds and minutes rather than hours or days.
10:03
As you start to get more competent, start considering the area of Visual analytics and Visual best practice. You’ll quickly start to understand what types of visualisations work well, and come across better ways of visualising data. As you do, you can revise your techniques and apply some of that best practice, which will help reinforce the learning. You’ll also want to invest some time into soft skills to better communicate your work
10:25
and know the best way to bring people on board with the insights you’re discovering. Soft skills might include presenting your findings, communicating issues, requesting better quality data or collaborating with others to make all of those happen. In my experience, there’s definitely a good way and bad way to go about this. Maybe a topic for another video, hit the comments if you’d like to see that. One technical skill I’m deliberately omitting is data prep.
10:49
If you’re building your own work, data prep is usually taken care of for you or it’s lightweight enough that you already have ways of handling it or can Google your way through it when you need it to. Still, if you’d like to get deeper into data prep or more common, you have, to because there’s no-one to do it for you then you my friend have just been upgraded to someone who will be building for others. Like building for yourself your initial aims should be getting tool familiarity under your
11:15
belt, but the path to greatness bears a heavy on us data heroes and here’s why. You see if you build for others then you actually wear several hats. Your an author when you’re prototyping and working with the data, A designer when it comes to converting those prototypes into a working analytical product for others to use, an Analyst when looking at previous iterations of work or understanding the requirements of your end users or the business and lastly a data scientist if what you’re building
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requires you to not only build the final product but also find, cleanse and then prepare the data required to do this. I did say I’d be upfront about the challenge ahead. To do all of that, you’re going to have to think carefully about the skills you have today and the skills you need to pick up. So let’s break these down. As a consultant who’s been using Tableau for just over 8 years, one thing I can absolutely
12:04
promise you is that you can’t get away with just learning Tableau as the only tool you know even if you decide to learn everything in the platform, you’ll often have to reach out into the ecosystem of competing or complimentary tools to enhance, enrich or improve the quality of your data. At the same time I’m also the person who told you that focus was a really important aspect of learning. So where are you supposed to start?
12:25
Let me start with the non Tableau Skills first because I think there’s a ton of great videos and resources already out there to cover these, you just need to hit a search engine and understand your own learning style to choose what works for you. You can’t avoid Excel and as a tableau user, as much as I hate opening excel to work with my data, that’s where so much enterprise data lives and not knowing your basics here is almost criminal.
12:47
You don’t need to be an excel genius, you just need to know your way around the tool so you’re comfortable with how named ranges work, how pivot tables set out data, how to find the source sheet for a particular chart or how to decipher a function so you can understand what its doing and then replicate in Tableau. Again I’m not saying you need to learn these off by heart, you just need to know how to use the features and how to help yourself help yourself. The next is SQL.
13:13
Whilst you might think Tableau Prep will save you from needing this, the reality is having a basic understanding SQL gives you the technical skills to browse a database with confidence, understand how an organisation is storing data and in some cases doing some data prep in SQL can save you some tedious work in other tools or even improve performance in Tableau. A great channel I’m following has just started a SQL course so be sure to check it out.
13:38
It will also expose you a little more to the world of Data warehousing which becomes much more important if your keen to help deploy Tableau or be a solution architect in this space. Pair these two tools with Tableau and you’re more or less on the right path. Other tools you might often hear about are Alteryx, Snowflake, AWS, Matillion, Databricks and the list gets longer with every year that passes. In terms of Tableau, The best curriculum to follow here is actually an exam guide for
14:04
the Tableau certified data analyst exam. I like this because it breaks down the learning objectives by domain and I think gives an appropriate percentage focus to each domain. You can also reinforce your understanding of building content in Tableau desktop with the curriculum laid out in the Desktop certified Associate as well, it covers many of the same topics and both these guides lay out some great order and direction to learn the topics
14:27
but hold fire on the how to learn, I’ll cover that as the final section of this video. I’ll also do some detailed exam guide walk through soon so stay subscribed for that. I would also spend a decent amount of time getting to know Tableau Server and Tableau Online. For this you just need to focus on the front end capabilities, that is understanding how to manage, create and govern content on the platform. Every quarter, Tableau keeps adding new features, so this is an ongoing activity.
14:52
It can be hard to get your hands on a server to practise or even shadow someone. If you’re absolutely stuck, Join the Tableau developer program where you get access to a single site on Tableau Online. This is all you need to learn. You get full access to the front end controls of a server and it takes away the complexity of infrastructure that in and of itself is a whole separate technical skill I’ll cover when it comes to Deploying Tableau.
15:15
The main goal here is to reach the skill level to manage a site, troubleshoot permissions, have oversight of ownership, do basic monitoring and maintenance and understand how content interacts with each other so all in all you’re skilling up to become a Site administrator. Also pay particular attention to Tableau prep and data preparation in general. You might have access to a tool such as Alteryx or you might have no tool, so you’ll have to learn how to do it in SQL.
15:40
Whatever you do, learning the art of data prep will teach you alot about the shape of your data and this informs your approach when it comes to building content and making sure you understand what data you need to answer key analytical questions. More on that shortly. Before that though let’s touch on Soft skills. Soft skills will help you get the most out people you interact with and ensure you’re building something people will actually use.
16:04
Now I hate the term soft skills because its never clear what they actually are and in many cases they’re really hard to acquire. The easiest way is to work in a culture that cultivates the opportunities but I appreciate not everyone has that opportunity so you’ll have to work a little harder to acquire them. The soft skills I tend to see make a or break careers are the following. Communication, yes the soft skill you’ll see in every resume, job description and role
16:29
ever advertised but what it really means is the ability to communicate your own work either by presenting your findings, preparing your findings in a way that’s easy to digest both in a one to one setting or in a group setting. It also includes your ability to document and explain your own work. Team usually have to collaborate or step in and help when things go wrong so being able to explain your work is more vital than you think.
16:53
It also involves an element of confidence, not the kind where you walk down the street like a boss. Here I’m talking about using good communication as way to help others build trust and confidence in you and your skills. Research is so key and often underrated. Put simply, you need to be humble and realise you can’t possibly carry every bit of information in your head and at least whilst you’re building your career you just have to accept
17:16
that there will always be something new round the corner or someone smarter int he room so get used to finding good accurate information fast, both technical and non technical. It sounds so simple but you’d be amazed how many people simply don’t open Google, type their question into it and check the first 3 results to see if their question can be answered quickly. It’s also about knowing where to look and knowing what to trust.
17:39
A few more obvious ones Problem solving, Team work, attention to detail come up time and again. These are pretty generic soft skills so spend a bit of time making a conscious decision to develop these and if you’re finding it difficult to do that then stick around for the learning section of this video where I explain some approaches to tackle this. The last thing here is making sure to immerse yourself in discourse so you surround yourself
18:03
with a community of people who are doing great things with Tableau. Getting to grips with visual best practise and enhancing your analytical skills only really happens if you venture outside of your day to day audience, mediums and challenges at work. Business data can be some of the most difficult data to learn with because often it comes with history, bureaucracy and even sometimes gate keepers so if you want to enhance yourself
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you might find it easier stepping out of the business world and working with data about a hobby of your own, sport or anything your into. As long as you understand the activity, you’ll naturally start to translate that knowledge and passion into questions, and those questions will start to form the basis for good analytical thinking and processes. One question I get asked alot is whether you need a numerate based degree or a high set of numerate skills in order to work with Tableau.
18:52
It will certainly help, but the short answer is no, you just need to understand basic maths and be familiar with simple concepts. The really complex stuff you can pick up as you go and again, the more useful skill is being able to learn the maths quickly and apply it to your use case rather than being a walking, talking calculator. Domain knowledge is also quite easy to pick up in the Tableau community. You’ll often find Tableau user groups focussed around a particular industry or alternatively,
19:18
you might naturally meet others who work in your industry and use Tableau. Both are a great way to start to building some domain specific knowledge so you can better understand the level of maturity and data literacy competence in your industry. Thankfully the Tableau community exists exactly for this purpose and it has probably one of the most open communities out there so I highly encourage you to signup to the forums, head to Twitter or LinkedIn and just start talking to people.
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If that’s not your style never worry because you’re probably not alone so kick out those research skills and find the places where those questions are being online and find a way to answer them that works with your style of learning. The last group of people who might want to build something are developers. I’m talking about people who want to build applications or tools and integrate Tableau with other systems or build new ways of using the product using the APIs that Tableau have
20:09
made available. There are over over 11 Apis across 7 high level categories and this list will grow over time especially as tableau becomes a more intimate part of Salesforce. I’d say first start with a good understanding of what Tableau is. The most common mistake or misconception that developers who have never worked with Tableau is that it works like most other third party libraries like d3js. Developers are often disappointed that they can’t manipulate a dashboards DOM ( document
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object model) or get raw access to Tableau’s Visual query engine. Starting by understating what Tableau is will immediately ground your approach to understanding what you can and can’t do with Tableau. Once you get going, you can more or less apply the same learning model as someone who uses Tableau as an end user then even delve a little further into building a visualisation for yourself as outlined previously, just so you understand the mechanics of how things work,
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but this is about as far as I would go because the community is already filled with great people who know how to build amazing stories so the next step would be to embed yourself into that community and find people who would be willing to collaborate with you. This way you get to keep doing what you’re best at, that’s developing and focussing on how Tableau have built and implemented their APIS and libraries. To find out about all of these, head over to the Tableau developers page and figure
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out and understand what APIs they have, what programming languages and tools those APIs rely on and what parts of the ecosystem they control or let you interact with. Once you have that, as a developer, you should start piecing together what you need to learn and what skills form past experiences you can bring to your role. You’ll need alot of self-direction and motivation to keep you going and you’ll also need to
21:40
be comfortable asking for help in the tableau forums or the dedicated developer community. A developer I follow closely is a good friend and Colleague Andre, check out his channel here, he breaks down tableau API’s beautifully on his channel. At this point you know a ton more about being a developer than I do so I’ll stop here and you do you! Okay we’ve just covered a ton of content focused around building products in Tableau
22:03
but what if you’re coming from a more technical background and you’ve already had experience managing technology infrastructure or you’re just naturally a more technically minded person who feels completely comfortable in the command line, love getting into technical detail, or just hate to see a computer not being fully optimised. For you I think the best thing to do is to focus on learning how to deploy Tableau.
22:27
Deploying Tableau essentially means you become familiar with the two main approaches around deployment, on premise and cloud deployment. On premise deployment will lead you down the path of Server architecture covering topics such as distributed installations of Tableau, concepts such as high availability, ongoing maintenance of a servers usually serving thousands of people and of course integration with other
22:54
enterprise technologies such as authentication, databases, meta data stores and many more. Mastering these skills will leave you fully confident to plan, build and deploy a Tableau server in any organisation. You don’t necessarily need to be come an expert at building in desktop but it wouldn’t hurt to have a strong awareness of the workflows and how it all works. This is by far one of the most technical aspects of Tableau so I’m not about to go through
23:17
and list all the aspects you’ll need to pick up but if you’d like a rough guide I’l point you to 2 guides. The first being the Tableau Server Certified associate exam guide which is very much the best curriculum I would follow if your getting started with Tableau Server/ online and once you get more comfortable, check out the exam guide for the now retired Tableau server certified professional exam, an exam I call the Beast because of its 7 hour duration and its requirement
23:43
of building environments hands on. Thank god that’s retired but I’ll still put the exam guide so you can see what it was like. Be sure to check the replacement / revised exam once its public and you can or alternatively check out the guide for the architect exam for consultants. The toughest part of learning all this will be getting hands-on, especially on premise. I’ve been really fortunate to be in a company with a culture that allows you to have a go,
24:02
break things and fix them with support of world class professionals around me so trust me, I really do appreciate how fortunate I’ve been and how much harder its going to be for anyone watching this video, but this is where I think you also have to be creative. Explore things like installing a trial on a PC with the absolute minimum requirements. Maybe see if you can get access to a virtual server in the cloud.
24:25
Offer to shadow the resident expert or head to events like the Tableau server user group. This process will take time but each nugget of information you get will get you closer. Many of the core concepts you pick up will be transferable to many other infrastructures and technologies and factor in that this is a long journey, it takes 2 to 3 years to get comfortable around a server assuming you get decent levels of exposure to practise hands on.
24:49
You also need about a year’s worth of experience troubleshooting to really know what you’re doing but again that only refers to Tableau Server. Tableau online doesn’t have such a large overhead. Alot of the same soft skills that apply to building a dashboard apply here, but the particular one I’d like to call out is attention to detail. You’ll quickly realise at least from a technical point of view that there’s never one way to do anything and there’s also never necessarily the best way.
25:16
What you do have instead is context and context doesn’t always reveal itself and that’s often the biggest factor that decides why you do things one way over another. As a result you can’t simply settle once you’ve learnt something. Take authentication as an example, every organisation is different and Tableau has several ways of implementing it and it’s not until you try each one once, see them working, see them
25:38
break and then fix them will you have confidence in the area and that’s just one topic so this also means you’ll need patience alot of time and a very clear idea of what your working towards and what you’ve achieved because if you do make progress, your prospective employers or colleagues will want to see some evidence of your journey before they let you loose on their deployments so take notes as you go, log your achievements and I you come
26:02
across adversity spend time reflecting and capturing your learning points. Often communicating these will be the only way to articulate in an interview that you really know what you’re talking about. Wow okay that’s alot ! We’ve been going for some time it’s now time to cover how to actually learn all this stuff. This advice applies to everything I’ve covered so we can cover it in one section… so what’s the best approach to actually learn stuff, you have some suggested paths
26:24
and technologies to investigate but how do you go about the actual task of learning? I have several points to make here, I’ll probably do a separate video fleshing these out but for now here’s a brief top 5 things to do. This to me is the most important thing in this video so listen up. It’s not about the resources you have access to, it’s more about how resourceful you are… I’ll say it again It’s not about the resources you have access to, it’s more about how resourceful you are.
26:39
Yes this part here has nothing to do with resources, in fact everyone always asks what resources I would recommend to learn topic x and it’s taken me a while to realise that actually that doesn’t matter. What matters more is your ability to use what you have to maximum effect. When you realise a gap in your knowledge, solve that in the most efficient way possible. You can’t possibly ever retain everything you come across either, so make sure you save
27:02
great resources when you come across one or learn hacks and tricks to make sure Google always gives the most practical answers rather than just the best SEO optimised article. You could have access to the best Udemy course, and have done every activity going on a any given day of the week but if when the rubber meats the road you don’t put those skills to use and then reinforce your learning repeatedly, it won’t count for much at all in the long run. Flesh out this bit
27:25
It’s not enough enough to just try things once. Get into the habit of trying things multiple times and in different ways or simply seeing what happens when you click something. If you learn something new, repeat it again, clear the sheet, build it again, and do it faster this time or try and do it another way. The repetition helps play a role in reinforcing your knowledge and doing things in different ways gives you options when you can’t use a particular technique.
27:47
A great example of this is I learnt most of what I know about Tableau when LODs, the data model and so many more features I use today, didn’t exist … so when it came to learning those, I had to break some habits and the only way to do that was repetition but at the same time today when I come across a scenario where I don’t have the ability to use those techniques, I always have a backup solution. It might be a hack it might even involve doing data prep outside of Tableau but it’s a
28:08
solution and that’s ultimately what gets you moving! The last thing here is try and make notes about everything you’re learning, log it and save the work where possible. It will form the framework for your portfolio and also in the future, when you need to recall how you did something it will be ready and available and much faster than having to re-learn how to do something. Do a bit of soul searching and really understand how you learn best.
28:30
For a long time when I started Tableau I spent so much time following other peoples learning style. Invest in finding out what mix of learning styles work for you and for what kind of content. The more technical things are, the more kinaesthetic you might have to be and the more theoretical things get the more you might have to spend time in literature. There’s no right way of doing this but you’d be amazed how many people push ahead with
28:52
their learning journey without really understanding or challenging the way they learn. Don’t let fear get in the way! Over the last couple of years, especially during Covid, mental health has been a huge factor many of us have had to work on and something I noticed was that actually things like fear and anxiety often turn up when were learning, especially when certifications and goals have the opportunity to open up possibilities for you at work or in the near future.
29:15
The thing to realise is whilst you’re learning something new, this should naturally take you out of your comfort zone, that’s what the process of learning should do, it should challenge you and that challenge should be something you rise up to. It’s also important to realise you’re not alone and people like me and many others are here to help whether it’s in a comment, video, blog post, user group or conference session.
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These are all free and readily available you just need to be resourceful about finding them and extracting the value and the support you need, when you need it. Even better than that, form a network or support group around you so its already there when you’re having doubts. Lastly Don’t give up. Persistence is key. If you don’t understand something don’t discount yourself, the chances are the person or resources you’re using hasn’t done a good job of making it clear or simple so
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don’t blame yourself for that, find an even better resource then when you know what you need to, ask yourself how the earlier resources could have been made better to make you understand it and when you figure that out, invoke Karma and write your first blog, video, conference talk or TUG and put some positive energy out there even though you might have started with doubt. How to ask for help Now there is one last thing and that’s Tableau CRM … yeah this is awkward as I haven’t
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mentioned it even once and it’s part of the platform so why no mention? Well Tableau CRM was formally called Einstein Analytics and when Salesforce acquired tableau, the particular product was moved under the Tableau umbrella and rebranded. As such it’s still a part of Tableau I’m not fully familiar with and if you recall, I mentioned focus as being a key part of your skillset so in my case tableau CRM hasn’t been the area where my focus has been.
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That’’s not to say it won’t be in the future, I’m just not there yet so I can’t possibly comment on how best to learn it, I certainly don’t have years of experience to site here and suggest a path for something I’m still working through so as ever Subscribe and let me know in the comments if that’s something you’d be interested to see more content on. Also if you’ve made it this far, firstly thank you, this has been a looooong video
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but I think an important one so your viewership especially on a video like this that’s taken me many days to make, makes it worthwhile. So I know who’s stuck around to the end, drop a comment below and let me know what you’re hoping to learn this year, feel free to ask any question and follow that with your favourite colour and I’ll be sure to reply personally to those comments as a priority as and when they come in. Thanks for watching and I’ll catch you in the next one.
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