This report describes the efforts of four community colleges, Bunker Hill CC (MA), Johnson County CC (KS), Normandale CC (MN) and Sinclair CC (OH), who partnered with EDC on Creating Pathways to Big Data Careers, a project funded by the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education Program (DUE-1501927) to design and implement programs leading to middle skills data careers. Middle skilled data workers who collect and analyze data to inform decision-making make up the data teams commonly found in companies across all industry sectors from health and hospitals to manufacturing and travel/tourism to transportation. Representing the nation’s workforce development engine, community college partners aimed to propose a stackable credentials model that would illustrate ways individuals might access data education/training, with on and off ramps providing ample opportunities for employment and learning.
In May 2018, partners met in a working session to develop a stackable credentials model for Data Science and Analytics 1 that might be used by other community colleges to help design data/big data programs. The resulting model draws upon previous project work and is informed by the ongoing experience of the partner colleges. It joins previous materials created by the project- namely, the occupational Profile of a Data Practitioner and performance based rubrics aligned to that profile- as resources for colleges seeking to design their own big data career pathways.