Data University: How Airbnb democratized data

Description

Data-driven organizations and data-literate employees perform better and make better decisions. Airbnb believes that data literacy requires tools by which to collect and analyze data, the ability to access both data and tools, and education about the tools and how to work with data. Airbnb has open-sourced many high-leverage data tools, including Airflow, Superset, and the Knowledge Repo, but adoption of these tools across the company was relatively low, especially when benchmarking against other tech companies. As a company, Airbnb was not reaching its potential if its teams were not using data to drive decision making. In other words, it was seeing significant progress in the first two pillars of data literacy but effectively had no data education.

Erin Coffman offers an overview of Data University, launched to make data more accessible and utilized in decision making at Airbnb. Data University (Data U) provides data education that scales by role and team, in order to empower every employee to make data-informed decisions. Four components of Data U distinguish it from other data education programs and drive the program’s success:

• Course offerings for every employee
• Airbnb-tailored curriculum
• In-person classes
• Built to scale globally

Airbnb practices what it teaches. Then company defined metrics of success for Data U using the Kirkpatrick model of evaluation, collects relevant data, and uses that data to make program iterations.