Data Visualization Training for Veterans

Are you a veteran returning to civilian life or a member of a veteran’s family aiming to avail yourself of entitlements and benefits? This article is designed to help you navigate your options for using these services to enter a professional skills training program and acquire the data visualization skills you’ve always wanted to learn. Data visualization is an excellent skill set for veterans to acquire because it’s in demand across professional roles and industries. The ability to visualize data provides you with the skills to extract meaningful insights from large volumes of data and communicate these discoveries with others. This contributes to your organization as a whole and can lead to a high-paying career working with data.

What is Data Visualization?

Data visualization uses graphics like plots, charts, or animations to represent data findings. These visual depictions communicate complicated data relationships in an accessible and engaging format to an organization’s internal and external stakeholders, even for those who don’t come from a technical background.

Data visualization has applications across industries and professions, from data analytics to business intelligence. The data visualization process is typically broken into four goals: to generate ideas, to illustrate concepts, to provide avenues into visual discovery, and to convey data in the form of visualizations.

Read more about what data visualization is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Data Visualization Skills?

Data visualization provides a concise and interactive way to depict data trends. Visualizations incorporate design techniques like color and contrast so audience members can access information that may otherwise be difficult to comprehend. Data visualization can provide a better understanding of a business’s operations and how activities connect. It offers insights into important business metrics that can lead to smoother daily operations and successful project execution. Data visualization conveys specific insights into customers’ preferences, demographics, and shopping patterns. The information is presented in an easy-to-understand format, and the audience is taken on a journey that leads to a data-driven conclusion. 

Support for Veterans

If you’re a veteran who wants to learn how to analyze and visualize data, you may wish to look into the support that’s available from different organizations. The VET TEC program provides educational assistance for veterans and their dependents. This pilot program allows veterans to sign up for high-tech educational programs, such as coding bootcamps, so that they can begin a tech career. Participants in the VET TEC program are eligible for training in a range of fields, such as computer software, information sciences, data processing, media applications, and computer programming. Although the programs currently available from Noble Desktop don’t qualify for VET TEC funding, content from other top educators may be eligible.

Another program veterans may wish to explore is the G.I Bill. Also known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt put this bill into law as a means to help veterans of World War Two have access to a variety of educational benefits. The G.I. Bill is currently available to active-duty servicemen and servicewomen, veterans, and their dependents. It provides an assortment of benefits through the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. Those who qualify can receive educational grants or stipends to cover a range of training options. Some veterans use finding for bachelor’s or associate degree study or apply it toward advanced degrees in their field. Funding can also be used for non-college degree programs, such as vocational or technical training. In addition, veterans and dependents can also pursue educational opportunities like certifications, work-study programs, on-the-job training, licensing, tutorial assistance, and apprenticeships. 

The Forever G.I. Bill is also available to veterans. Also referred to as the Harry W. Colmery Veterans Educational Assistance Act, this bill gets rid of the prior 15-year limit that had been imposed on veterans for accessing their G.I. benefits. Veterans will now have indefinite access to various educational benefits through this bill. 

A great way to learn more about the available VA-support programs is through Noble Desktop’s Veterans Support Page. There, you will find a range of data visualization classes for veterans, including the Data Analytics Certificate and Data Science Certificate. The VA-supported programs that Noble offers are available for those looking to study in the in-person classroom environment in New York City. The VA typically supports full-time study options. 

Why Learn Data Visualization

Regardless of the career path you’ve selected, data visualization is a powerful tool you can use to deliver data insights as efficiently as possible to those who can use this information. This skill set allows you to convey pertinent insights in a universally understandable manner. The information contained in a data visualization can communicate to stakeholders within an organization findings about any areas in the company that could be improved, the factors that contribute to customer satisfaction, as well as how to distribute various products and services. Visualized data also provides stakeholders with a tool to predict future sales volumes and potential avenues for business growth.

Those who know how to visualize data can apply their skills in a range of disciplines. After performing complex data analysis, Data Scientists work with data visualization tools like Tableau and Python to illustrate data patterns and provide a more robust understanding of the information contained in datasets. Financial professionals visualize data to indicate how stocks, bonds, and other commodities perform over time. Politicians and campaign workers visualize data to convey how many people within specific regions voted for a particular candidate. Healthcare professionals use data visualization to track health hazards, such as pandemics or diseases. Researchers rely on data visualization to find new insights into experimental data.

Interactive data visualizations can help business owners and other decision-makers within an organization quickly locate patterns in data that may otherwise go unnoticed. Seeing information in the pictorial or graphical form provides a range of benefits for audience members:

• Trends over time can be illustrated using data visualization. Drawing from historical data, as well as that from the present, companies can gain insights into how they performed in the past and how they may perform in the future.
• Data visualization can highlight correlations in relationships between independent variables. This information helps audience members make more informed business decisions.
• By providing information from various markets, data visualization can convey information pertaining to which audiences you should devote your efforts toward. Seeing this information conveyed visually in charts or graphs can help you spot opportunities within a specific market.
• Data visualizations communicate frequency, or trends over time. Visual depictions of how often customers buy a specific product, as well as when they do so, can help you devise ways to market to potential customers.
• Value and risk metrics can also be depicted using data visualization. This allows audience members to pinpoint areas within the organization that may require action.

Why Choose a Skills Bootcamp?

Once you decide to study data visualization, you may wonder which type of coursework is most suited for your learning needs. Although data visualization isn’t commonly offered as a college major, some schools do provide coursework in this field. However, most college or university programs take at least four years to complete. Cost-wise, they are also often the most expensive way to learn to visualize data; some schools cost tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend. Additionally, those who attend college to learn how to analyze and visualize data must also complete general education requirements. This means that only a portion of study time will be devoted to acquiring data-related training. This is why college and university study is prohibitive for some veterans who prefer to focus their efforts on working with data.

Certificate programs are one alternative to college study. Instead of taking years to complete, most certificate programs in data analytics or visualization can be finished in weeks or months. Certificate study often focuses on one data visualization tool or a range of skills needed when working with data, such as training in data analytics, Excel, Power BI, Python, SQL, or Tableau. This makes them an excellent learning option for veterans who wish to learn core data analytics skills to pursue a career. These programs are often much less expensive than university study, costing several thousand dollars to complete. 

Bootcamps are also available in data visualization. These short courses generally require just a few days or weeks of coursework and offer veterans a much more focused course of study. Bootcamps are available in a range of data analytics and visualization skills and topics, such as Tableau, Excel, or data analytics. Cost is another incentive for enrolling in a bootcamp. These courses generally are a much more cost-effective study option than college or certificate programs and are available for several hundred to several thousand dollars. Bootcamps provide job-specific skills training to prepare you to pursue a career as a Data Analyst without requiring you to spend tens of thousands of dollars or several years on your studies.

Learn Data Visualization at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop has in-person and live online data visualization training. Tableau for Data Visualization Bootcamp instructs students on how to use Tableau Public’s visualization tools. Noble’s Data Analytics Certificate teaches core business intelligence, statistics, data analysis, and data visualization concepts. 

Aspiring Data Scientists can enroll in Noble’s Data Science Certificate to study machine learning, automation, SQL, and Python. The Python for Data Science Bootcamp provides instruction on how to use statistics to make machine learning models. Noble’s Excel Bootcamp teaches fundamental spreadsheet functions, including macros, formulas, and PivotTables. Those interested in working with SQL can enroll in Noble’s SQL Bootcamp.

Key Takeaways 

• If you’re a veteran interested in learning to visualize data, this in-demand skill set has a range of professional applications. Not only can it help you pursue a range of high-paying careers that focus on data, but it can also help you contribute in meaningful ways to your organization.
• Veterans wanting to learn to visualize data can select from several learning formats. Four-year study options like college and university coursework are the longest in duration and the most expensive; certificate programs that focus on data analytics or visualization can generally be completed in several weeks or months and typically cost less than four-year study; bootcamps provide skill-specific instruction that usually focuses on one data visualization tool, such as Tableau, and can be completed in a few days or weeks.
• Several excellent funding options are available to support qualifying veterans and their dependents interested in data visualization. You may wish to explore how the VET TEC program, G.I. Bill, and Forever G.I. Bill can provide funding and resources to help you along your educational path.
• Noble Desktop offers comprehensive data visualization training options to help you master this in-demand skill set.