VISUALIZATION CHALLENGE TEAMS PROVIDE DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATION AND WORKFORCE CHALLENGES

New publicly-released data fuels innovation and solution identification among private, public and academic sector teams

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind., — Wednesday morning, 10 teams from around the state competed in the Indy Big Data (IBD) Visualization Challenge for the opportunity to present their findings to a room of more than 1,000 data professionals during the annual IBD conference. The challenge focused on identifying trends, gaps and solutions for education and workforce challenges faced by the State of Indiana.

Organized by the Indiana Management Performance Hub (MPH), the challenge provided this problem statement to guide the teams: “Indiana must build the 21st Century talent required to sustain our prosperity and competitive edge as the world economy changes. The State faces the challenge of filling more than 1 million jobs over the next 10 years. To meet this goal, we need more specially trained and skilled workers meeting the needs of Indiana employers.”

“Traditionally visualization challenges create ‘sparks’ that can hopefully generate new ideas. The visualization challenge at Indy Big Data went substantially farther, as there were a couple of solutions that were close to shovel ready,” said Indiana Chief Data Officer Darshan Shah.

With just two weeks to prepare, teams comprised of professionals, undergraduates and graduate students used never before publicly released data to form the basis of their findings. Datasets provided by the Indiana Department of Workforce Development (DWD), Commission for Higher Education (CHE) and the Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC) provided insight on census information, transportation, industry salaries, state residency and more. These datasets are available to the public on the Indiana Data Hub (data.IN.gov).

Judges from MPH, DWD, CHE, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and IBRC selected the top five teams to present during the conference’s general session. These teams were: the Indiana Department of Corrections with Addressing Employment Needs in Vulnerable Populations; Indiana University Bloomington with Gender Disparities in Industry and Education; Purdue University with Talent Attraction and Retention in Indiana; Transform Consulting Group with Return on Investment in High Demand Jobs; and MicroStrategy and Perficient with Indiana Workforce Insights Fast.

“What amazes me most is that these teams, who all had access to the same datasets, went down such unique paths,” said Shah. “The diverse solutions provided by these teams really speaks to a mission of MPH. We strive to bring partners with different viewpoints together to create a holistic understanding of challenges facing Hoosiers.”
With one release of datasets, one team developed a solution that sought to connect recently released offenders with open positions with the target of decreasing recidivism. Another addressed gender disparities in education and job placement. A third attempted to solve the brain drain by looking at how companies can better target and appeal to job seekers.

###

About MPH: The Indiana Management Performance Hub is a state agency that provides analytics solutions tailored to address complex management and policy questions enabling improved outcomes for Hoosiers. MPH empowers its partners to leverage data in innovative ways, facilitating data-driven decision making and data-informed policy making. MPH also houses the Indiana Data Hub, which features more than 70 publicly available data sets focused on health, demographics, public safety education/workforce and government transparency. Learn more at data.IN.gov.

Media Contact: Ashley Hungate, [email protected], (317) 670-0421