Industry
Women's clothing
Number of Employees
500+
Who Attended Training
Planning
Recalc Courses
SQL for Excel Users
At a Glance
The Customer
Sustainable women’s brand headquartered in Los Angeles, California
Why Training
To better understand SQL queries to faciliate faster, more robust analysis for the planning team
Why Recalc
Interactive teaching style and openness to questions, ongoing support, and flexible, custom curriculum
Key takeaways:
- Technical tools, whether spreadsheets or SQL, can be very daunting to use if you don’t know how. Creating an easy-to-understand, step-by-step tailored curriculum helps people overcome this initial barrier
- Creating an open, welcoming learning environment and connection with the audience is critical to driving impact
- Polling your team to understand top learning needs helps prioritize action and gain leadership buy-in
Caitlin White
Senior Director of Planning
[After the training,] I’ve just seen more openness to SQL. I think with SQL in particular, or any code, it’s kind of like this brick wall that unless you break through that and realize oh this is something I can understand, people just turn off from it. And what I think this [training] did was break through that wall.
The Customer:
Reformation is a sustainable women’s brand headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with domestic and international manufacturing operations. The planning team, who engaged in SQL for Excel Users training, plans the sales forecast and the relevant finished good inventories.
Why Training?
When Caitlin White, Senior Director of Planning, polled her team about learning needs, SQL training was the top request. As part of their ongoing analysis, the planning team needs to access SQL, and while the team had access to a reporting platform that would generate SQL code, many team members had very limited knowledge of what the code meant and how to manipulate it. The team grapples with large datasets to make decisions every day that directly affect the inventory availability in stores – so it is critical for them to be able to access and analyze the right data when they need it.
Why Recalc?
A previous team at Reformation had partnered with Recalc for spreadsheet training, and were very pleased with the product. During team meetings, they were sharing tips and tricks they had learned and everybody was really excited and “jazzed about it.” So when it came time to fulfill the planning team’s desire for SQL training, the team immediately thought of Recalc. The team partnered with Recalc to develop a brand new SQL for Excel Users course that would enable the planning team to leverage SQL more effectively and efficiently to drive their analysis.
Caitlin White
Senior Director of Planning
We knew that Recalc provided a really, really good product. So working with Recalc again was a no-brainer
Interactive teaching style that encourages participation
One of the most consistent pieces of feedback from the training was the connection the Recalc team built with the audience and how open Recalc was to questions from the Reformation team.
A connection with the audience is critical to creating a conducive learning environment and Recalc’s intent is to enable fun, interactive sessions where participants feel comfortable asking questions and working through problems together.
Flexible, custom curriculum
Another successful aspect of the training was the flexible, tailored curriculum. The training started at the very basics of how to understand SQL and built quickly to cover much more advanced topics to ensure the team walked away with the knowledge they needed.
Throughout the training, the Recalc team worked to understand the different levels of comprehension and where to spend more time vs. less, which allowed the team to cover such a wide range of material – from foundational to advanced.
Ongoing support
The Reformation team found the ongoing support that Recalc provides outside of class sessions, including answering query questions via slack on-demand, 1:1 office hours, and class recordings, critical to digesting the material and applying it directly to SQL queries they were working on.
Office hours are included in all of Recalc’s courses as an opportunity for participants to ask questions and apply the material to their work in a 1:1 environment with the instructor.
Julie Oberman
Supply Chain Analyst
I enjoyed the course’s degree of hands-on help. I was able to use the learnings in my work setting and get help when I got stuck… I feel a lot more confident with knowing where to go or even who to go to when I get stuck with the code.
SQL for Excel Users: Preview
Recalc developed the SQL for Spreadsheet users course in partnership with the Reformation team as we realized that many teams face this same obstacle – being able to easily access and analyze data when their datasets are too large to easily fit in Excel. As with all of our training, we believe learning the hard skills is easier than you think, and learning SQL doesn’t need to be just for data science people alone. The course is designed to make it as easy as possible to make the transition from spreadsheets to SQL – and specifically builds off of that spreadsheet knowledge to introduce and build upon SQL queries. Throughout the course, the practice examples mirror many of the same examples we’d cover in a spreadsheet course to enable that connection. From the very basics of what SQL is to more advanced query knowledge, the course covers what you need to know to be able to access and manipulate SQL data.
Learn more about the course here.