Data Literacy Training for Non-Technical Teams

Learning objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Read and interpret dashboards and reports confidently
• Understand basic data terminology
• Ask better questions of data and avoid misinterpretation

What it covers

Building confidence reading, questioning, and using data in everyday decisions.

Course modules

1. 1Core data terminology, demystified
2. 2Reading dashboards and reports critically
3. 3Asking better questions of the data you're given
4. 4Avoiding common misinterpretation traps

What you'll walk away with

The confidence to engage with data-driven conversations without needing a technical background.

What you practise during data literacy training

The session is built around hands-on exercises using the kinds of reports your team already sees. The examples below are typical ones, and we adapt them to your sector and your own reports.

• Reading a sample sales or operations dashboard and explaining, in plain language, what it does and doesn't show
• Spotting a misleading chart, such as a truncated axis or a cherry-picked time period, and redrawing the conclusion
• Telling the difference between an average and a typical result, and why it matters for a decision
• Writing three sharper questions to ask before acting on a set of numbers

Who this course is for — and what it does not cover

This course is for non-technical staff in any department who read reports, dashboards or spreadsheets as part of their job and want to use them with more confidence.

It is not a coding, statistics or data science course. Participants don't need technical skills, and they won't be asked to write formulas, build databases or learn programming languages. The focus is on understanding and questioning data, not producing it.

A practical data literacy course for your team

The course runs as a half-day live online session led by a specialist facilitator. There are no prerequisites beyond everyday familiarity with reports at work.

Content is tailored to your team: we can use anonymised or sample versions of the reports your people actually work with, so the exercises reflect real decisions rather than generic examples. Participants leave with a short checklist for questioning any report they're given.

How participants apply the learning at work

Here's how these skills typically show up once people are back at work:

• A team leader reviewing a monthly performance report asks whether a drop is a real trend or normal variation before raising it with the team
• A marketing coordinator checks how a campaign figure was calculated before including it in an update
• An operations manager questions a dashboard that compares sites of very different sizes on raw totals rather than rates