Where are your consultants based?

Our in-house team of full-time consultants are all based in the UK, with our offices and training centre based in Wokingham, just outside Reading. The vast majority of our delivery work takes place remotely, taking full advantage of cloud based technologies to provide the most flexible service possible. We do also love to get out and meet people in person though, and are very happy to join you onsite at your own premises as requirements suit.

Where will my course be run?

Wherever works for you! We can come to a venue of your choice, or we'd love to welcome you to our training centre in Wokingham, just outside Reading. Alternatively, all of our courses can be delivered remotely via Teams, Zoom, etc. and make use of our virtual classroom environment. Talk to our team to discuss what would be the best delivery option for you.

How many people can attend a closed course?

Typically, our closed courses are suited for groups of up to 8. If you have larger groups than this, please give us a call to discuss your requirements and the best options for you.

When will I receive joining instructions

Joining instructions are typically sent out to each course attendee 2 weeks prior to the course start date, or immediately if booking within this time.

How does the virtual classroom work?

Our virtual classroom provides delegates with access to a browser based virtual lab environment through which our instructors can interact with and provide support for all course participants. The classroom also provides access to guided learning materials, shared whiteboards, and code snippets that may be worked on throughout the class, and students are able to take away their work files from the course for further study after the course ends.

Learning Path for BI Solutions

What do I need to know?

The world of data and business intelligence is a wide, varied and exciting one. Figuring out what skills you and your team need to add to your repertoire can be challenging as there are so many different paths that you can follow when designing and implementing business intelligence and data analytics solutions.So where do we start? We could approach the learning journey by job role, or we could approach it by looking at the data journey behind a business intelligence solution. The data journey consists of many phases and each requires a specific set of skills that may be required to ensure you achieve the full potential of your data management and business intelligence requirement.

Speak with one of our data specialists

Every client requirement and starting point is different. We can help you work out what your training, mentoring and deployment support needs might be far more effectively if we speak to you.Our data specialists are here to assist you with not only planning, designing and implementing your business intelligence projects, but also to work with you to identify the needs of your team in terms of developing their current skill sets to be able to particpate effectively in the implementation and support of your solutions.If you would prefer to have expert BI consultants at your side on your data journey the why not find out more about our Business Intelligence Consultancy services.Call us on 0118 979 4000 or email info@ptr.co.uk for an informal chat about how we might be able to help you.If for now you just want to get a better idea of what training, consultancy and support you may need then keep reading. We have listed some of the job roles and skillsets that are behind successful business intelligence and data analytics projects.

A Look at Your Data Journey

If we look at the data journey we can see that there are a number of clearly defined phases or stages of a business intelligence solution.

Gather Data
ELT
Data Lake
Data Warehouse
Business Model
Report

Typical Business Intelligence Job Roles

The following table list typical job roles involved in this data journey along with the data journey stage they might be involved in and the skill sets they may require.

Job Role	Description	Data Journey Stage	Skills Required
BI Project Manager	Ensures the overall success of the project delivery by coordinating the teams who build, develop, deploy, train and maintain.	Whole Journey	Project Management, Communication, BI & Business Requirement Awareness
BI Solution Architect	Possesses in depth experience across all areas of business intelligence from data sources, ETL/ELT, data lakes, data warehouses, semantic models, cloud platforms and infrastructure, reporting and dashboard solutions. Collaborates with business stakeholder and IT teams to gather full requirements and plans and designs the overall solution architecture from end to end (data sources to dashboards).	Whole Journey	All aspects of data platforms, cloud platforms, networking, security, ETL/ELT, data warehouses, SQL, data lakes, data modelling, reporting & dashboard platforms, data science understanding, communication, business understanding
BI Manager	Oversee the development of effective management information systems and associated reports and dashboards.	Reports & Dashboards	SQL, Power BI
BI Architect	Designs the BI platform infrastructure such as data modelling, report and dashboard design, but does not generally get involved with the Data Warehouse, ETL/ELT side of things.	Business Model	Azure Analysis Services, PowerApps, Power BI, PowerQuery, DataFlows, Shared Datasets, Tabular Modelling, BI and Cloud Architecture Design
BI Analyst / Business Analyst	Collaborates with business stakeholders to understand reporting and dashboard issues, challenges and requirements and liaises with BI developers to specify and develop dashboards and reports to satisfy stakeholder requirements.	Dashboards & Reports	Communication, Stakeholder Collaboration, BI Project Manager & BI Solution Architect Collaboration, Business Engagement, Understanding of Business Requirements
BI Developer	Interprets business reporting requirements, develops ETL/ELT processes to gather and integrate all required datasets, develops and maintains data models and data structures, supports development of reports and dashboards.	ELT, Data Lake, Data Warehouse, Business Model	SQL, Data Warehouse Design, SSIS, Data Factory, Data Lake, Azure SSAS, PowerApps, Power BI, PowerQuery, DataFlows, Shared Datasets, Tabular Modelling
BI Administrator	Manages the systems that support and host the business intelligence solution such as databases, ETL/ELT platforms, reporting platforms.	Whole Journey	ELT, Storage, Business Model, Reporting Platforms Administration
BI Consultant	Supports the architects, analysts, developers, administrators and engineers from a wealth of experience that spans the whole BI spectrum and can provide a top view to assist with implementing best practice, optimum performance, trustworthy and secure solutions that are fit for purpose, futureproof and fit with an organisation's overall data strategy.	Whole Journey	All or any of data platforms, cloud platforms, networking, ETL/ELT, data warehouses, data lakes, data modeilling, reporting & dashboard platforms, data science understanding
Data Strategist	Possesses an in-depth analytical and technical knowledge combined with an ability to understand business requirements. Has excellent communication skills as well as technical skills and interacts with people from across the business. Gains a full understanding of an organisation's data storage & business intelligence needs, data estate, data compliance and business goals, and translates these into data-driven initiatives and in turn designs a future-proof data strategy and roadmap for an organisation.	Whole Journey	Data Compliance, Data Management, Data Governance, Data Quality, Data Drriven Decision Making, BI & Data Science, Data Architecture
Data Architect	Provides technical expertise in analysis, design, development, rollout and maintenance of data integration (ETL/ELT), data warehouse and business intelligence solutions to architect, design and develop data analytics solutions with the best fit infrastructure, tools and processes.	ELT, Data Lake, Data Warehouse	Data Lake, Data Warehouse, SQL, Tabular Modelling, DevOps, Data Architecture & Design.
Data Engineer	Possesses expertise in areas such as data warehouses, data modelling, ETL/ELT, Big data, data lakes and is responsible for identifying trends in data sets and developing algorithms to make raw data more accessible and translated into useful formats for analysis.	ELT, Data Lake, Data Warehouse, Business Model, Machine Learning.	Data Lake, Data Warehouse, SQL, Tabular Modelling, DevOps, ML, AI, Python, R, Mathematics.
Data Analyst	Analyses datasets to identify trends and insights that can be used to drive business decisions.	Dashboards & Reports	Power BI, SQL
Data Scientist	Solving complex business problems and spotting trends, often from large "big data" sources, with data driven techniques and using their mathematical expertise and programming language skills (such as R and Python) combined with an ability to understand and interpret business functions and requirements.	Machine Learning	ML, AI, Python, R, Mathematics, Communication, Understanding of Business Requirements.
Data Mentor / Educator	Educates, coaches, mentors and trains team members and business users to get the best out of the business intelligence solutions.	Whole Journey	All skills across the data journey, teaching, coaching and instructing skills, Communication, Understanding of Business Requirements, Interact with all staff levels from stakeholder engagement, management overview, users and administrators.
Data Warehouse Designer / Developer	Plans, designs and builds a data warehouse. Works with Data Engineers to extract data from the data warehouse as part of ETL/ELT operations. Builds views and stored procedure to extract data from the data warehouse to pass on to business intelligence tiers.	Data Warehouse	SSIS, Data Factory, SQL, TSQL, Data Warehouse Design, Data Warehouse Query Performance Monitoring & Optimisation.
Database Administrator (DBA)	Manages the day to day security, performance, backups of database platforms. Monitors performance and tunes database instances to ensure optimum response times. Manages scalability.	Data Warehouse	SQL, Azure SQL Administration, Azure Data Warehouse Administration, Azure Portal Usage.