DS3W – Data Science Competencies for the Digital Revolution in Science and Business

The worlds of work and education are in the throes of a digital revolution that will make it possible to train people in a wide variety of skills on a lifelong basis. The competencies required for digital working in the future range from digital and social proficiency all the way to leadership skills. And the foundation for many of these competencies is an ability to deal with digital technologies and, especially, digital data.

Data science and data literacy are interdisciplinary fields whose importance for all kinds of careers with an industrial or economic application has increased dramatically. This has given rise to a number of quite versatile perspectives that each comprehend, structure, and evaluate these fields in their own way. The result is a quite muddy situation in which, despite an enormous demand for data science and data literacy competencies, there is no clearly defined and consistent, needs-oriented field of expertise. This shortfall is making it more and more difficult to provide sustainable ongoing training for employees in an increasingly data-driven, digitalized corporate environment.

The goal of this project is to closely examine data science and data literacy competencies in economic applications and academic domains. Working closely with partners from the fields of business and educations, we would like to examine the importance of these two highly topical research areas in business and science, to identify how we should understand and structure the specialist skills (data science and data literacy), what requirements exist for these competencies, and which training opportunities are needed to fill this demand. On this basis, we will be using co-creation workshops, to create an initial needs-oriented taxonomy of skills and develop a suitable skills platform.