By Nenad Zaric, Co-founder and CEO at Trickest

Every industry generates massive amounts of data, which is now being used for better decision-making — tech giants understand this. For example, streaming powerhouse Netflix implements data analytics to study viewers’ visual preferences and adjusts content thumbnails to similar content its users have liked to increase viewership.

The rise of AI is further influencing this trend, helping companies make sense of their datasets to uncover weaknesses and predict outcomes.

However, these advancements are no longer exclusive to engineers, managers, and IT teams who grapple with data daily. This information is increasingly climbing the ladder and knocking on executive’s doors. In fact, one of today’s most pressing challenges for executives is data privacy concerns and cybersecurity.

It has never been more important to make key decisions toward better data governance, and data skills are necessary to understand the specific risks and demands a company faces.

So, reading reports an engineer crafted with dedicated software programs is no longer enough. A concerning report revealed that only half of C-suite executives were confident in their data literacy, and 45% made decisions based on their gut feeling instead of data-backed facts.

Modern executives must have data skills to understand the flow of valuable data in their company and know how to make it work for them, not the other way around. From crucial decision-making to infusing data culture and enabling democratization, positive company changes stemming from data analysis must start at the top.

Spot pain points in minutes, not days

When a company decides to change directions, these choices begin at the executive level and trickle down to managers and workers — nothing new there. But, while an exceptional leader has always been crucial in driving change, it’s how they do it that is shifting. C-suite directors are in charge of crafting better strategy, financial performance, risk management, and corporate governance, and data is becoming increasingly connected to all of these activities.

Imagine you’re meeting with the Head of Sales to discuss the sudden performance drop of a fan-favorite item in your online store. You can’t seem to connect the dots from the sales report you’ve received, and it becomes a hurdle to decode the issue. One skill that can help executives and department heads easily uncover patterns for weak performance is data visualization.

Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Looker Studio are some of the most prominent data visualization tools. They are easily accessible from popular corporate programs (Salesforce, Office 365, and Google Studio) and help analyze massive amounts of data in visually appealing ways.

While you don’t need to be a data scientist to use them, setting up and building charts requires certain data skills and tech acumen, or at least prior training. Whether from a data science and visualization course at Harvard, or self-taught online classes, a few hours and hands-on practice will be time well spent to hone your data visualization skills.

With this newfound talent, you can aid and guide department leaders to the answers to their performance questions. In this case, you would pivot to the online sales data in the company database using visualization to track downtime and realize the fan-favorite item’s link has been down, leading to that drop in sales.

Expertise in data visualization tools allows executives to stay ahead of the curve in every business vertical by quickly analyzing pain points and understanding what their verticals need. This leads to improved strategies and more accurate decision-making at a fraction of the time it takes to crunch vital datasets.

KYC: Know Your Cybersecurity

While data management isn’t an executive’s role in itself, knowing its ins and outs allows them to understand the company's successes and areas for improvement. When data increasingly plays a vital role in a business, ensuring that it is being properly managed and secured can save leaders major headaches in the future.

Does your company practice master data management? Does it have an outdated data lake that’s slowing down processes? How is sensitive data access managed? These are governance questions investors, stakeholders, and partners might ask, and you must be ready to understand and navigate these concepts.

Moreover, adopting good cybersecurity practices starts at the top — especially when 63% of security professionals say users with access to critical business data are their biggest data risk. Knowing the basics of cybersecurity and current trends not only allows top-level roles to mitigate risks from their end but also helps them foresee their IT teams’ needs, like allocating a budget for better endpoint security and enforcing staff training.

Beyond courses and academic work, data governance and cybersecurity at a C-suite level are more easily learned through conversations with experts. You can resort to networking and approaching other industry leaders and even your own staff to gauge these concepts and what they mean for your company.

As a result, instead of wrestling to understand the demands of security professionals, data-savvy executives will know when needs are pressing or if they can wait, making wiser and more objective business choices alongside their team leaders.

Make data work for you — not the other way around

There was a time when data was only one of many business assets, something you generate but store for audits or other compliance purposes. Those days are gone, especially as we move toward data-driven solutions that thrive primarily on how a company can implement data for other use cases.

Data is no longer a stagnant asset — it can make you money if you derive the right value from it.

Knowing the value of your data is only possible if you’re well-informed about it and know its potential. Executives with data skills will be able to take the lead and inject their data into better risk management strategies, extract customer data to improve marketing, and further implement it into AI tools to speed up business processes.

Grasping these concepts also impacts the way you communicate with stakeholders. Expressing the importance of data security, governance, and even democratization for your company must come across as more than numbers and graphs — they wish to know the real value of these practices. By clearly explaining the importance of safeguarding data and placing it front and center of your operations, stakeholders will be on the same page about business decisions.

Simply put, skipping the data-related courses will do nothing for future executives. In fact, nowadays, being able to run a successful company is directly linked to your data knowledge. So, prioritize these skills if you don’t have them, and make sure to pitch them as a worthwhile talent when climbing the ladder; they will be key to your success.