Job shadowing

I don’t talk about work very often, but I thought that sharing this recent experience may be useful to some of you.

My team leader believes that the only way to learn statistics is to sit behind someone else doing statistics. This is what I did for the past two days. In a nutshell, I sat behind my co-worker and asked a billion questions as she analyzed her data. My team leader was right. It’s unbelievable the stuff you learn just by observing. I went back to my desk and replicated the analysis with my own dataset. Having taken multiple statistics courses in the past, I can testify that shadowing is more effective.

So this entry is for all managers out there. Job shadowing works! Of course, it helps that my co-worker and team leader are passionate, hard-working, motivated, and intelligent women (no, they don’t read this blog so I am not sucking up). Observing them do their work is a pleasure, shadowing an arrogant twit may not be as fun.

Companies often invest in external training which is awesome. However, they should really look into implementing mentoring and job shadowing programs as well. It’s a great source of learning at a small cost.