Multi-skilling can be the secret to success

Some years into his career in hospitality and events management, Joel Cardozo decided he needed to acquire further skills.

Joel Cardozo at Deakin University in Melbourne, where he is doing a short course in data analytics. Picture: David Geraghty

Some years into his career in hospitality and events management, Joel Cardozo decided he needed to acquire further skills and took on a bachelor of commerce majoring in accounting at Deakin University’s cloud campus.

“Rather than going to class I was able to work full time, have a family and complete the course all online,” Mr Cardozo said.

For the past few years, while he has been working in Deakin’s finance department, he has been studying chartered accounting, but as he neared the end, Mr Cardozo decided data analytics would be the next big challenge.

“I’ve been curious about data for quite some time now, and over the past few years completed a lot of short courses online,” he said.

“At the start of this year, I did a unit of programming through one of our universities as well. But cost is something that obviously I’ve got to consider, having family commitments.”

It was while he was casting about looking for good but affordable options that the federal ­government’s subsidised short courses were announced. He pounced on one of Deakin’s eight courses — a graduate certificate of data analytics — and also has his eye on a graduate certificate of ­artificial intelligence.

“But one step at a time; I’ll start with data analytics and work my way from there,” he said.

“This is very reasonable for $2500 — heavily subsidised by the government — compared to $14,000. So really, I want to make the most out of it.”

His decision to branch out into data science was reinforced by the rise in unemployment and insecure employment. “There’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment, at the university and across the workforce. So I really want to make myself as skilled as possible, in case something happens.”

He has no idea what he’ll be doing five years from now, but “for the short term, you know, I really want to work in messy data and further enhance my skills by learning through these short courses in data analytics, data science and artificial intelligence because a lot of work that we do at the moment can be automated”.

“I just want to pick up the tools of the trade. The long-term plan is to basically help organisations where I work — or maybe, who knows, run my own gig — to ­create automations and support ­decision-making purely based on data and not human experience and judgment.

“I want to eliminate the mundane processes that any organisation that I work for has so that people can actually use that time to do what really matters.

“It does … create more value than just, you know, going through a process.”

To explain how he became a classic example of a lifelong learner — he came to Australia from Goa as an international student — Mr Cardozo harks back to that first bachelor degree in commerce. “Since then, learning is a bug. I can’t get rid of it. And anything new that pops up, I just want to grab hold of it and learn it,” he said.