When I started The Data School, I wasn’t hiring analysts. I was hiring people who had never worked in data a day in their lives.

My job was to take them from zero and turn them into Tableau experts in four months. No shortcuts. No skipping the hard parts. Just intensive, deliberate teaching, repeated until it clicked.

Ten of those students became Tableau Visionaries. More than twenty-five became Tableau Ambassadors.

I tell you this not to brag. I tell you this because it changed how I think about what teaching actually does to the person doing it.

Every time I explained a concept, I understood it more deeply myself. Every time a student asked a question I hadn’t anticipated, I had to think harder about why Tableau works the way it does. Every time I had to make something clear to someone starting from scratch, I stripped away the assumptions I had been carrying for years.

Teaching made me better. Not marginally. Significantly.

Here’s what most analysts miss. They think their job is to build dashboards. It isn’t. Their job is to help people make better decisions. And the fastest way to do that is not to build more dashboards. It’s to raise the baseline understanding of the people around them.

When a stakeholder understands how Tableau works, they stop asking questions you have to answer. They start asking questions you want to answer. They come to you with a direction instead of a blank stare. They interpret your work correctly instead of misreading it in a meeting and drawing the wrong conclusion.

The analyst who teaches becomes indispensable. Not because they are the only person who knows things, but because they are the reason the whole team got better.

That is a different kind of value. And it is visible in a way that a well-built dashboard rarely is.

I have seen it play out the same way every time. An analyst runs an informal session for their team. One hour. Basics of how Tableau reads data, why filters work the way they do, what a calculated field is. Nothing advanced. Nothing time-consuming to prepare.

Within weeks, the whole dynamic shifts. Requests get cleaner. Feedback gets sharper. The analyst gets pulled into conversations they were never part of before.

That is not a coincidence. That is what happens when you stop being a service desk and start being a teacher.

If you are reading this and thinking about how to make a stronger case for your role at work, this is it. Not another certification. Not another impressive dashboard. A single session where you sit down with your colleagues and show them how to think about data.

Bring that idea to your manager. Frame it as an investment in team capability, not a training exercise. The organisations that build a culture of data literacy around a skilled analyst do not just get better dashboards. They get faster decisions, fewer bottlenecks, and a data practice that actually sticks.

That is exactly what NLT for Teams is built around. Not a one-time training event, but an ongoing investment in the capability of the whole team, anchored by analysts who know how to teach, share, and lead.

If that sounds like something your organisation needs, it is worth a conversation.

​Hit this link and let’s hop on a call.

-Andy

P.S. Forward this to your manager. Seriously. Sometimes the best case for something is just the right paragraph landing in front of the right person at the right time.