IN DEPTH
Knowing your R’s from your elbow: an upskilling journey
In a profession that is so closely linked to technological advances, it is worth keeping your skills, knowledge and awareness up to date. Here, Dave Nicholls and Tom Hudson from NICE Information Services look at their own “upskilling journey”.
TWO years ago, coding was not high on our professional development horizons but the swift pace of digital and technological transformation has meant that has all changed. A certain professional nervousness can occur when presented with a whole new area of working. However, like when l anguage students spend a year living abroad to immerse themselves in the nuances and culture of a country, sometimes it pays to just get stuck in. This article is our postcard from the highlands of the R programming language, reflecting on our upskilling journey. We, along with our Information Services (IS) colleagues Amy Finnegan, Andrea Heath, Ceri Williams and Daniel Tuvey, gratefully took advantage of spaces being made for learning within our team and have used the last year to develop a computation- al way of thinking whilst using automation to bring efficiencies to the way we work. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) current strategic plan1 is largely focused on harnessing the digital, data and real-world evidence revolution to expedite its processes in disseminating guideline recommendations and apprais- ing medical interventions. The IS team are certainly aligned with this and have been investigating new possibilities for the way in which we feed into NICE’s guidance products.
20 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Dave Nicholls, is an
Information Specialist with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
Tom Hudson, is an Information Specialist with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
Around the same time that our organisational strategic plan was published, CILIP released their report The impact of AI, machine learning, automation and robotics on the information professions (
www.cilip.org.uk/researchreport). This also fed into our thinking when it stated that “Leaders … need to create organisational structures within which experiment is possible and within which
September 2023
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