One of the oldest jokes in the business world goes like this: The CFO asked the CEO, “What happens if we invest in developing people and they leave us?” The CEO answered, “What happens if we don’t and they stay?” If you’re like the CEO and want to help your employees grow, this article will explain how you can do so with Vertabelo Academy.

Vertabelo Academy has been around since 2015. To date, we’ve managed to teach more than 60,000 users how to use SQL, Python, and R for database management, advanced reporting, data science, and business intelligence. Recently, we’ve also introduced a special offer for businesses.

If you’re a boss or manager who’s wondering what courses you should recommend to your employees, read this article. Below, I’ll describe six key IT competencies that any modern company should consider and explain how your employees can use Vertabelo Academy to grow in these areas.

Work with databases and create reports

Typically, companies store data in relational databases such as SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, or PostgreSQL. If your employees want to know how to communicate with these databases, they need to learn SQL. It’s a universal query language that helps retrieve data from single or multiple tables and combine them to create reports.

Your employees should definitely start with SQL Basics. It’s our best-selling course with over 40,000 students worldwide. This course will help your employees gain an intimate understanding of how to retrieve data from relational databases, and it’s an excellent place for SQL beginners to start.

From there, there are multiple options to choose from. If you’re looking for more practice or knowledge consolidation after SQL Basics, we recommend the SQL Practice Set or SQL JOINs courses. If your employees want to learn more advanced SQL concepts, we have some other great courses as well:

Standard SQL Functions will make life easier for those who query databases more frequently. It introduces you to common SQL functions.

Window Functions will explain how to create more advanced SQL reports.

Recursive Queries is recommend for advanced SQL users. Users will learn how to process trees and graphs in SQL and organize long SQL queries.

Manage relational databases

If you want to train someone to manage your relational databases (i.e., create database structures and insert data into them), we have two interesting courses:

Creating Tables in SQL will teach your employees how to create databases that are easy to maintain.

Operating on Data in SQL will explain how to insert, update, and delete data from databases. It’s a natural follow-up to the first course above.

Derive meaningful insights from data (data science)

If you run a company or department, you surely know that data is now everywhere—in sales figures, market research, transportation cost, logistics, and more.

The good news is that you can teach your employees how to use data for planning, decision-making, and optimizing internal processes. Deriving meaningful insights from data—or data science for short—is now a very hot career path. Help your employees grow in this field, and you’ll quickly find your company ahead of its competition.

There are tons of data science programming languages and tools to choose from. At Vertabelo Academy, we have courses that describe two popular (and free!) programming tools, Python and R.

Introduction to Python for Data Science teaches you how to start using Python, a powerful general-purpose programming language. You’ll learn how to process, analyze, and visualize data.

Both Python and R are great tools for data scientists. If you’re struggling to choose one of them for your employees, keep in mind that Python will be a more natural choice for those interested in software development, while R tends to attract an audience with a statistical background.

Visualize data on charts

Data visualization helps describe complicated data in simple ways. Choosing the right type of data visualization is a skill acquired through practice.

Work with geographical data

Need someone capable of working with geographical data stored in a database? We have a special course named PostGIS that teaches users to write queries that answer questions such as:

• How many banks are there in a specific geographic area?
• What is the distance to the nearest store from point X?
• How many ATMs can be found within 500 meters of point X?

We hope this article shed some light on our course offering. Still not sure where to start or looking to discuss the possibility of tailor-made courses adapted for your company? Drop us a line at academy@vertabelo.com. We’re eager to help.