Eva sent me an interesting, and ironic data set for this week. It's based on a studying done on LinkedIn of jobs that advertise as "entry-level" yet require 3+ years of experience. I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around that.

Today is a pretty big day for me and for Makeover Monday. For me, this blog post is my 800th since I started writing way back in August 2009. You might not care much about that, but for me it feels like a nice sense of accomplishment.

For Makeover Monday, this week is a collaboration with #VizForSocialGood and Inter-American Development Bank. It's always a special day when you can make an impact. Eva and I are also hosting a Brightalk webinar about Makeover Monday at 4pm BST today. Join us if you have a chance.

This week's makeover is a donut chart that shows how many youths in Latin America and the Caribbean are employed in different jobs.

What works?

This week Tableau joins us for a special edition of Makeover Monday. One of their very own, Marissa Michelotti, published this viz on Tableau Public and volunteered it for the Makeover Monday Community to improve upon.

What works well?

• Clear title that tells me what the viz is about
• Can easily find the top 10 job skills in any country (but there are some problems with this too).
• Keyword search in the box & whisker plot
• Overall layout is simple

What could be improved?

Most week's when we're starting the Makeover Monday process, we have a pretty crappy viz to work with. Eva has mixed things up on us this week by picking a viz that is already quite good. This makes the process of making it over even tougher.

This week, she chose this viz from The Guardian about the jobs that are most likely to be replaced by automation:


What works well?

• The overall design is super simple to understand.
• The gaps are evident by using distinct colors for the two categories.
• Including references to the data source
• Clean fonts
• Grey background bars help make the blue lines pop
• Axis labels only include the % sign on zero
• Sorting is easy to understand even though it isn't stated
• Long scrolling view suits this design

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The chart for this week’s Makeover Monday is an excerpt from Women in the Workplace, a study undertaken by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey.

• The chart tells a powerful story of the decreasing representation of women as leadership levels increase.
• Using red for women draws the eye to those portions.
• The table allows you to compare to 2012.
• The pipes are ordered from lowest-level role to the highest-level role.
• Good reference to the source

What could be improved?

• They took the “pipeline” analogy too far by creating a "pipe chart".
• The pipes get smaller as you go left-to-right. I can only guess they are sized by the % of women in each role.
• The pipes are 3D.
• The pipes are filled up on an angle, making it way to difficult to gauge what percentage it represents.
• It’s nearly impossible to compare one role to another.
• The title could be more impactful.
• Do the pipes represent 2012 or 2015? There’s no way to tell.
• The chart doesn’t allow for comparisons between 2012 and 2015.

Basically, I think this chart is horrible. It’s quite possibly one of the worst I’ve seen in a long time. This isn’t about the author the person. Clearly they aren’t educated in data visualisation. I’d bet they working in marketing.

Again this week, I used Tableau’s story points feature to show my step-by-step makeover. This week was pretty quick. I was able to iterate through all of this in under an hour.


As a stand-alone version, I would make the chart slightly taller, like this one below. Click on it for an interactive version.

If you attended the Facebook session at the Tableau Customer Conference in San Diego, you heard that we’re looking for great people to join our BI team.  The job description is listed below or you can view it on Facebook.

This role is on the same team that I work on within IT and I cannot emphasize enough how happy I am that I decided to leave Coke to go to work at Facebook.  I’m privileged to work with the smartest, most creative and most productive people in the world.  I’m pushed every day to be better than I’ve ever been.

We expect every candidate to be #1 or #2 in what they do. We only hire the sharpest and brightest, but you also must fit in culturally. If you think you’d make a great fit, then apply via the link at the bottom and enter my name when asked if you know anyone that works at Facebook.  This alerts me that someone I know applied. 

BI Engineer, Visualization & Reporting

Do you like working with big data? Do you want to use data to influence product decisions for products being used by over one billion people every day? If yes, we want to talk to you. We’re looking for analytics engineering leaders to work on our Business Intelligence Team with a passion for social media to help drive informed business decisions for Facebook.

In this role, you will work with some of the brightest minds in the industry, and you'll get an opportunity to solve some of the most challenging business problems on the web and mobile Internet, at a scale that few companies can match.  You will enjoy working with one of the richest data sets in the world, cutting edge technology, and the ability to see your insights turned into real products on a regular basis.

The perfect candidate will have a background in computer science or a related technical field, will have experience with business intelligence tools (Tableau experience is preferred), will have experience working with large data stores, and will have some experience writing SQL. You must be scrappy, focused on results, a self-starter, and have demonstrated success in using analytics to drive the understanding, progression, and user engagement of a product.

This is a full time position based in our office in Menlo Park.

Responsibilities

• Manage reporting/dashboard plans for a product or a group of products
• Interface with engineers, product managers and product analysts to understand data, reporting and analytical needs
• Drive sessions with business users to translate requirements and needs of various businesses
• Design, develop, test, launch new reports and dashboards into production
• Help analyze, visualize, and provide analytics on massive amounts of data captured daily to build reporting solutions to support various company initiatives
• Work closely with BI and business colleagues to improve operations through the appropriate use of BI platforms and information collected through dashboards and reports
• Explore and recommend emerging technologies and techniques to support/enhance BI landscape components
• Integrate external reporting solutions with internal applications
• Build rich and dynamic dashboards using out-of-box features, customizations, and visualizations
• Automate solutions where appropriate
• Participate in peer design and certification reviews
• Participate in the creation and support of BI development standards and best practices
• Provide support to reports and dashboards running in production
• Conduct training sessions

Requirements

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Mathematics, Business, Business Administration, or closely-related, or foreign equivalent
• 4+ years experience in the reporting and data visualization space
• Expert level skills in building custom reports and dashboards with BI tools, with preference given to candidates with Tableau experience
• Expert level ability to analyze data to identify deliverables, gaps and inconsistencies
• Excellent communication skills including the ability to identify and communicate data driven insights
• Ability to write efficient SQL statements
• Skill in Oracle RDBMS (SQL/PLSQL), MySQL, and OLAP a plus

Apply here

It's very difficult to get a true account of the job situation in America, but one measurement that is often used is job losses. Organizing for America published the chart below today to provide their view of the state of jobs in the US. While statistics can be skewed to suit the author's message, I simply saw this as an example of a well constructed chart. For me, the best part of this chart was that it communicated its story effectively without much need for interpretation.