Lighthouse Labs Intro to Data Analytics

Learn about how you can transform messy, jumbled data into streamlined visuals to make better data-driven decisions.

Intro to Data Analytics is a six-week part-time course that mixes lectures, assignments, group work, and data analysis. The course covers Microsoft Excel and Tableau in depth, and teaches students to collect, clean, analyze, and visualize data including to:

  • Use various built in functions to organize and query data (IF, nested IF, and VLOOKUP)
  • Set filters in data to selectively access it (Filters)
  • Create basic charts and visualizations in Excel
  • Aggregate and summarize data using Pivot Tables
  • Identify patterns and relationships that will help answer business questions and problems
  • Perform basic analysis, anomaly detection, optimization modeling, correlations and linear regression

During the inaugural cohort, nine students graduated out of our west coast class and 11 students graduated from the east coast class with an Intro to Data Analytics certificate.

Students used a mixture of open data, and their own internal company data to uncover meaningful insights and to empower them to make better informed decisions. As you can see, data applies to all industries, and students presented projects on sports, leisure, global economies, company pay gaps, animal registries, regional sales, e-commerce, and many more.

Get a glimpse of some of the projects and students’ Tableau dashboards (which pulls data from Excel) below:

Cannabis prices, decriminalization, and associated crime rates across Canada including by province and territory, by Tanya.

Lighthouse Labs Intro to Data Analytics

Tanya charted cannabis prices across Canada with the ability to filter by year, crime, and territory/province to determine trends before and after decriminalization.

Potential gender pay audit at a company that investigates whether there are potential gender barriers in recruitment, hiring, pay, and promotion, by Dilek.

Lighthouse Labs Intro to Data Analytics Dilek, a PhD candidate in Economics at Concordia University, used open data available through GlassDoor to determine pay gaps and gender barriers that exist within a sample organization.

"Since my current research in very theoretical, and although my Master’s research was on empirical analysis, I was very happy to freshen and deepen my Data Analytics skills with this course. Data Analytics will be crucial for me in the job market."

Trends of the animal control registry in Vancouver between 1999-2020, by Bradley.

Lighthouse Labs Intro to Data Analytics

Bradley graphed out trends of the city of Vancouver's animal control registry by year, for the past 21 years including by breed, colour, pet type, and gender.

Link to interactive dashboard

An analysis between performance and the number of clients one has in his/her portfolio, by Allen.

Lighthouse Labs Intro to Data Analytics

Allen established a link between performance and amount of clients one person has for her/his portfolio - noting that the more accounts a person had, the more efficient that person became, which goes against natural intuition.

A churn analysis for a telecom company, identifying population segments with a high risk of leaving their subscription, by Fahreen.

Lighthouse Labs Intro to Data Analytics

Fahreen used Excel instead of Tableau to present her findings, showing the a churn analysis for a telecom company. Based on the findings, Fahreen was able to provide data-driven recommendations to reduce churn rate, and to retain customers.

An analysis of Facebook post engagement by type, by Jay.

Lighthouse Labs Intro to Data Analytics

Jay used prior experience as a marketer to graph and analyze the performance of Facebook posts depending on the medium (photo, video, link), as well as by engagement.

Link to interactive dashboard

Bike Share Toronto September 2018 ridership in relation to average daily temperature, and average daily precipitation, by Tim.

Lighthouse Labs Intro to Data Analytics

Tim used the city of Toronto's open source data on its Bike Share program to determine any trends associated with ridership, average daily temperature, and max precipitation on a daily basis for the month of September 2018.

Meet the instructors for the April 20, 2020 cohort

  • Marie, data analyst, Cirque du Soleil
  • Sol, data science manager, Borrowell
  • Julia, digital analytics solutions architect, Best Buy
  • Alvin, scientist in the health sector

New courses start every six weeks.

Ready for a future in data?
Visit our course pages to learn more and download a curriculum package.