Marks & Spencer has teamed up with technology education specialist Decoded to create the world’s first retail data academy. Marks & Spencer will offer over 1,000 staff members from every function of retail from store managers to finance the opportunity to develop their digital skills.
The leadership team will also embark on a Data Leadership programme enabling the opportunity to get hands-on with technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to become the most data-literate leadership team in retail.
Employees will be encouraged to enroll in The Data Fellowship, an 18-month data science skills programme, where they will learn to harness cutting-edge data analytics tools such as R and Python and adopt technologies such as machine learning. Learners who finish this programme will get a data analytics qualification accredited by the British Computing Society.
Steve Rowe, Chief Executive stated this is our biggest digital investment in people to date and the creation of the M&S Data Academy will upskill colleagues and provide them with an in-depth level of digital literacy as well as a Data Analytics qualification.
