Hi Everyone! 👋

It’s been quite some time since our last post and a lot has happened since then but I’m happy to announce that Tableau Tea Break, Tableau Jobs and Tableau Academy are now back with a few changes that I wanted to let you know about.

The main change that the eagle eyed amongst you may have spotted is that we’re now under one banner! Tableau Jobs and Tableau Academy were both originally spun out of Tableau Tea Break and as they were offering different content we kept them as separate publications, I’ve now decided to bring them all together under the Tableau Academy and going forward we’ll look to publish the following:

• Tableau Tea Break will be published every other week and will incorporate Tableau Jobs within it, this will look to bring you relevant news, updates and jobs from the world of BI, data visualisation and Tableau.

• Tableau Academy will be published on the weeks that Tableau Tea Break isn’t published, this will look to bring you lessons, courses and projects to help you learn and develop your data and BI skills. Our in depth premium lessons will be available to paid subscribers with our mini lessons and tips free to everyone.

I also made the decision to move away from the bespoke Tableau Academy platform I’d been building as creating and maintaining this was taking up a lot of time and I found I was spending more time on web development activities than data and analytics!

My original plan was to look for a platform that was simpler to use but then I came to the realisation that my interest is in sharing my knowledge and expertise and (hopefully) creating great content for you. Substack is the platform I originally used and it’s primarily designed for publishing newsletter type content which is all I really need so I made the decision to stick with it and focus on creating new content.

I still have the tableau academy domain so I may eventually link it to Substack but for now we’re going to stick with tableauacademy.substack.com.

A challenging year for the Tableau community

Something else I wanted to talk about was how 2022/2023 have been some of the most challenging years for the Tableau community. Everyone will have seen the continued layoffs over the past 12 months or so, primarily in the tech industry and this has had a significant impact on the Tableau community.

It felt like the layoffs at Salesforce disproportionally affected Tableau employees with a raft of people leaving the company, we’ve also seen other organisations start to down size their Tableau resources and even this week we’ve seen a pretty well respected Tableau Centre of Excellence within one company disband.

On top of this there’s a general feeling that the level and pace of innovation in development of the Tableau product itself has significantly slowed in the last couple of years and while it’s not really talked about I do personally get the feeling that Tableau has plateaued and doesn’t really have a clear roadmap for where it’s going as a product.

From running the Tableau Jobs platform I’ve also noticed a pretty significant drop in the number of Tableau related roles being posted and recruited for, especially in the last 6 months or so.

I’ve always been a Tableau user, more by default than specific choice. It happened to be the tool the company I was working for picked up many years ago when I still spent my days wrestling with Excel and is something I’ve generally stuck with throughout my career.

With all of this in mind I’ve also decided that I’m going to start to include some content, jobs and courses around other tools and platforms rather than sticking rigidly to Tableau. A bit weird, I know, given it’s called Tableau Academy but that’s ok!

What’s coming up?

I’m currently reviewing and updating the existing Tableau Academy courses, these updates as well as some new courses will be coming out over the next few weeks.

I’ve also compiled all of our premium courses into a Tableau learning pathway, whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro these hands on projects will help you go from beginner to expert in no time or help you improve your data visualisation and analysis skills.

You can read more about the learning pathway here:

Your Complete Tableau Learning Pathway

Alan Murray · Feb 15

Here you can find a complete list of all our premium Tableau courses which we’ve compiled into a complete learning pathway for Tableau and data visualisation. Each lesson is a hands on exercise based on a real life scenario and will give you a complete project to walk through.

Read full story

And, if you’re a beginner we’d highly recommend checking out the first course which takes you step by step through creating your first interactive Tableau dashboard:

Course: Creating an interactive sales dashboard in Tableau

Alan Murray · November 1, 2022

For information on how Tableau Academy works please refer to our Welcome To Tableau Academy Guide. The Project This section sets out the information about the project you’ll be undertaking in this lesson. Your Role: You’re working as a Sales Operations Analyst for a global retail chain, part of your role is to produce reports and dashboards for the sales leadership team globally to help them manage the business and identify reasons why sales are growing or falling.

Read full story

As well as updating existing courses and releasing new ones I’m also going to be looking into learning (whisper it!) Power BI, taking a deeper dive into data science and predictive analytics as well as looking at some of the (not so new anymore) new technologies that have emerged in the last few years and we’re starting to see in use more and more.

I’ll be writing these up as I go and sharing them with you as part of the Tableau Academy.

Tableau Tea Break

I’ll be honest, I haven’t really thought about how this is going to look going forward. When I first started this it was because there was no real round up of the excellent Tableau content that was being produced regularly. With Tableau releasing their own community round up it felt like this was no longer needed but it seems like the community content direct from Tableau has dried up again so I’m going to start this up again and see how it goes.

The new first edition will come out next week and while I haven’t planned what to include some of my thoughts are:

• Looking at what’s new in Tableau recently, what have they released and how are the community using it.

• Showcasing some interesting projects from Tableau Public and showing you how they’re created.

• A look at who’s still actively producing and sharing Tableau content and sharing some of the best bits with you.

• A review of the Tableau community projects, again it seems like a lot of these have gone quiet or stopped so it’ll be interesting to see what’s happening.

• Anything else I come across that looks interesting!

Tableau Jobs

I’ll be including these within the regular Tableau Tea Break content every other week, however as it’s been a while since I’ve looked at what’s out there let’s have a look at what roles are currently advertised right now!

1. Data Analyst (3 month contract) - Agency - London, UK

2. Analytics Engineer - Simply Business - London, UK

3. Data Strategy Senior Manager - Jazz Pharmaceuticals - Flexible, US

4. Financial Analytics Senior Manager - Jazz Pharmaceuticals - Oxford, UK

5. Demand Planning Analytics Manager - Beam - Glasgow, UK

6. Junior Data Scientist - Cromwell Group - Leicester, UK

7. Lead BI Developer - BAE Systems - Portsmouth, UK

8. Senior Project Manager - Manchester United Football Club - Manchester, UK

9. Data Governance Manager - N Brown Group - Manchester, UK

10. Data Analytics & BI Visualisation Manager - Pets at Home - Manchester, UK

That’s all for now, we’ll be back later this week with the first Tableau Academy post and keep an eye out for next weeks Tableau Tea Break and Tableau Jobs.

If you have any ideas or suggestions for content, jobs or courses then please drop us an email!

If you’ve found the content useful then please do help us to grow by sharing Tableau Academy with your friends, colleagues and social networks.

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Thanks,

Alan.