For many professionals today, working with data is simply part of the job. Whether you’re in operations, marketing, customer service, or strategy, you’re expected to analyse performance metrics, spot trends, and present insights that drive business decisions. Yet most of us never received formal training in how to do this effectively.
This creates a common scenario: you’re competent in your role, but you spend hours wrestling with spreadsheets, manually preparing reports, and wondering if there’s a better way to work with data. You get the job done, but you know the process could be more efficient.
We recently spoke with Sam Lewin, the Operational Excellence Lead at ClickTravel, to understand his journey with Code Institute’s Professional Certificate in Data Analytics & AI.
Time Saved and New Capabilities Unlocked
The programme focuses on providing practical, no-code / low-code data and AI proficiency, leading to tangible operational improvements for organisations and career advancement for professionals.
From 10 Hours of Manual work to Automated Dashboards
Creating the Monthly Business Review for his department previously consumed 10 hours each month, manually downloading and analysing data in spreadsheets.
“With the help of this course and some outside reading, I’ve managed to get 60% of this automatically created in the form of a few dashboards, saving me a huge amount of time in preparing the data,” Sam explains.
That’s approximately 6 hours recovered every single month, or 72 hours per year. But the real story isn’t just about working faster, it’s about what Sam can now do with that reclaimed time and his new skillset.
New Analytical Toolkit
The efficiency gains were impressive, but Sam emphasises something more significant. He gained the skills that transformed the depth of his work that are applicable immediately to solve real business problems.
“I have used many of the skills already. For example, I have prepared a python script for analysing and cleaning our Handling Time for contacts, as well as prepared some bridge analyses (waterfall charts) for explaining MoM / YoY decreases in metrics, which I have not previously been able to do.” “I am also better able to analyse this data with the python skills we have learnt,” Sam adds.
Beyond Python and visualisation, Sam gained a crucial analytical skill that many professionals lack: statistical inference. This ability transforms how decisions are made. Instead of reporting that a metric changed and hoping it’s meaningful, Sam can now prove whether changes are statistically significant or just random variation. This adds credibility to his analysis and confidence to business decisions.
He even took his new skills further, “using AI and Streamlit to create a hosted page for creating Waterfall analyses on our Contact Ratio data, month on month.” This level of sophisticated analysis and automation simply wasn’t in his toolkit before.
You Don’t Need a Technical Background
Sam’s journey demonstrates that data analytics training for non-technical professionals works precisely because it doesn’t assume a technical starting point.
“I am a Philosophy graduate from the University of Birmingham, currently working in the Customer Care strategy team as the Operational Excellence Lead,” Sam explains. “In my day-to-day role, I analyse our Customer Care centre metrics and data in order to spot trends, areas for improvement, and in order to prepare MBRs concerning department performance. Having never had formal data training before, I opted to join up through the Birmingham council scheme and ClickTravel kindly enrolled me.”
His goal was clear: “I wanted a better overview of data terminology, and the do’s and don’ts of data preparation, cleaning, ethics and some introduction to Python scripts for deep data analysis.”
The course delivered exactly that.
What the Course Delivers
Code Institute’s Professional Certificate in Data Analytics & A is a 12-week course designed for professionals from all backgrounds. It focuses on “no-code / low-code approaches” and is ideal for professionals looking to gain practical data skills that are immediately applicable to their day to day activities.
- Understand Data Ethics
- Visualise and Summarise Data
- Clean, organise, and get data ready for analysis
- Build Interactive Dashboards
- Code with Python & SQL
- Machine Learning Basics
The ROI for Employers
Sam’s results demonstrate clear organisational value. ClickTravel invested in his development and gained an employee who:
- Saves 6 hours monthly on routine reporting (72 hours annually)
- Performs sophisticated analyses that weren’t possible before
- Makes data-driven recommendations backed by statistical proof
- Reduces reliance on external technical teams
This is the definition of strong ROI: immediate time savings plus expanded analytical capabilities that deliver ongoing value.
Take the Next Step
If you’re spending hours on manual data work or know there are analyses you should be doing but don’t have the skills for, this programme offers a clear path forward.
Sam’s experience proves that data analytics training for non-technical professionals delivers two powerful benefits: you work more efficiently while gaining capabilities you simply didn’t have before.
Visit our course page to learn more about the Professional Certificate in Data Analytics & AI, or contact us to discuss how the programme could work for you or your organisation.
