I’ve been thinking a bit about training recently. Not just my own training needs, but those of my profession and as my blogs have often been prompted by something I’ve heard, here is something I hear a lot about analyst training:

Analysts need training in soft skills

Do we need soft skills training?

I find it fascinating that, for a professional body, the first thing that comes to people’s minds (those with the budgets that is) are soft skills training when thinking of analyst development. This may come about because of the sentiment that coders are introverted and that too, erroneously I’ll add, suggests a lacking in such skills. However, if we thought about other professions like finance and IT, for example, would we immediately think they need more soft skills training over the technical sides of their jobs? Probably not.

Do we even agree what soft skills are?

My thoughts are really on the outputs of these “skills” like blogging, presenting and training others and so what are the actual “skills” required to do these things? Thankfully Wikipedia has something on this:

These include critical thinking, problem solving, public speaking, professional writing, teamwork, digital literacy, leadership, professional attitude, work ethic, career management and intercultural fluency. This is in contrast to hard skills, which are specific to individual professions.

Soft skills versus technical

When I started writing this blog I started from the position of “technical skills are better than soft skills and analysts need more technical courses!” However, thanks to the constant encouragement of Chris Beeley to write things down I came to realise that that’s not quite right. Any profession requires both soft and technical training and that we, as analysts in the NHS, are simply lacking both. I was just bristling at the focus of soft skills training because it comes, it seems, at the expense of technical training.

It’s not by chance that the Better, Broader and Safer Review (Goldacre) says this in the section on NHS data analysts:

18. Create an Open College for NHS Analysts: this should devise (and coordinate delivery of) a curriculum for initial training and ‘continuing professional development’, tied to job descriptions; all training content should be shared openly online to all; and cover a range of skills and roles from deep data science to data communication.

This sounds exciting and, in a sense, is something that has already been started via volunteers in the NHS-R Community where we have: introduction to R and R Studio, Shiny and RMarkdown training. But we need more, we need technical courses in SQL, Git/GitHub and Python as well as those soft skills training often talked about in reference to analysts. Such a solution as College also requires immense investment, something that has paid off with the Data Science Campus but whilst I see lots of head nodding to this suggestion in the Better, Broader and Safer review I’m not so sure we will see anything realised in the coming months or even years. The Public Sector is the focus for a lot of cost efficiencies at the moment and I’d be surprised if the NHS analytical professional development will see any extra funding where it is being cut elsewhere.

I could be wrong though and I hope I’m wrong.

Who is the NHS Analyst Service?

A key element in this vision of a national training programme for NHS analysts is this reference to “the NHS Analyst Service” in the Better, Broader and Safer Review:

NHSA 11. Devise the content of a national training programme for NHS analysts: initial and CPD Clear job descriptions and pathways must be tied to training and, where appropriate and non-onerous, proof of competencies. Health data is complex, as are health services: working as an analyst in this setting requires a range of specific knowledge around practical health data analytics, alongside more general technical skills in data management, analysis, and visualisation. The NHS Analyst Service should be tasked with devising a curriculum and training requirements for the key competencies associated with job roles, with clear recognition of existing experience or training in and outside of health, and so on. This should be facilitative rather than restrictive, and be focused on informing high quality training, rather than imposing onerous requirements to gather paperwork as proof of skills.

And, of course, the same review outlines who this NHS Analyst Service is (spoiler: it doesn’t yet):

16. Create an NHS Analyst Service modelled on the Government Economic Service and Statistical Service, with: a head of profession; clear job descriptions tied to technical skills; progression opportunities to become a senior analyst rather than a manager; and realistic salaries where expensive specific skills are needed.

These are bold visions that are laudable but I’m disheartened that they rely upon funding and very senior management support, National Bodies and perhaps even political support.

What can we do?

I don’t think we can wait for these things to be started for us to make changes. Whilst it’s annoying to suggest that we can do this without funding and are essentially doing work free, possibly on top of our day jobs, I’ve seen the potential of analysts working for analysts through the NHS-R Community. The community is indeed mentioned in the review on this basis of volunteer work:

By contrast, the NHS analysts community has an array of small-scale grass roots organisations, typically run on modest subscriptions for a small number of participants, or with small amounts of intermittent charitable funding from organisations such as the Health Foundation. Strong examples of this include the NHS-R community, the NHS-python community, and the Association of Professional Health Analysts. These organisations do an excellent job of championing the work of NHS analysts, and providing them with opportunities to exchange ideas, but they need dedicated support to scale, and cannot begin to match the strategic and structural role of the organisations serving other similar technical and analytic professions.

No neat conclusion

I got to this point in this blog and realised that we’ve already worked hard to show that we can do this, that we can train each other, that we don’t necessarily need external companies to do this for us, but that it’s not enough. If we want our estimated 10,000 analysts to be trained up in the tools of our profession then we need to see some investment and commitment to it from those who hold the budgets. In a sense we need the same funding as was shown to our Civil Service colleagues when the Government Data Campus was set up in 2017. Whether we need an NHS Campus or an add-on to the existing, very succesful, Government Data Campus is up for discussion but we need something if we are ever to move on in the world of data science and analytics in the NHS.

Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay