DCPDS approach - Databricks Certified Professional Data Scientist Updated: 2023

Based in the Midwest, Shelley Frost has been writing parenting and education articles since 2007. Her experience comes from teaching, tutoring and managing educational after school programs. Frost worked in insurance and software testing before becoming a writer. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in elementary education with a reading endorsement.

The role of education as a pathway to opportunity in our country has never been more critical, or more scrutinized. The evidence is clear: Poverty, and the chaos it often brings to a family’s daily life, severely constricts a child’s ability to engage and succeed in school. How can we make sure our schools are up to the challenge of providing a 21st-century education for all our children — not just some? And what will it take to get there?

Everyone is looking for policy solutions that work.

City Connects works.

In an era of scarce resources and rising need, it’s essential to ensure that existing programs and services are fully utilized and well deployed. City Connects delivers that assurance, creating a systematic approach to addressing the needs of all students.

Even in high-need districts, resources and enrichment opportunities for children are present, both in schools and in the larger community. The challenge is accessing them, amid what can be a cacophonous maze for overtaxed teachers, administrators, or families. At City Connects schools, the City Connects Coordinator is the connecting point, navigating the maze to identify and target the right student to the right service, creating an optimized system of student support.

In 2019-20, City Connects has linked more than 25,000 students to 220,000 services and enrichment opportunities across its sites, ranging from tutoring to athletic programs.

And what’s more, we have the evidence to show that these interventions are working — for students, teachers, schools, and families.

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

get the most out of your development through regular planning, recording and reflection.

Turnover is costly, in terms of both money and culture. Research estimates show that losing an employee costs a company approximately 33% of that employee’s yearly salary. Additionally, turnover creates gaps in knowledge and rapid change in team and company dynamics. For these reasons, many companies will pull out all the stops to Boost retention, such as delivering complex, expensive initiatives to drive engagement.

That’s why I’m impressed by the simple-in-concept approach taken by Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) of SugarCRM Shana Sweeney. By individualizing the company’s recognition and treatment of employees both at work and in their personal lives, she observed a massive decrease in attrition (from 23% to 9%). This kind of simplification and execution is present in all of Sweeney’s work—whether she’s breaking down leadership development into bite-size chunks to prevent overwhelm, creating project boards that allow people to jump teams and devote 10% of their time to something new, or building out manager panels to bring critical skills to life for her leaders.

With 400 employees, SugarCRM provides a full suite of customer relationship management solutions: marketing automation, salesforce automation, and customer service tools.

SugarCRM Culture Is a “Vibrant Tapestry of Empathy, Collaboration, and Passion for Problem-Solving”

Highly authentic cultures have a way of pushing through the noise and sounding as unique as they are. “Our culture is a vibrant tapestry of empathy, collaboration, and a shared passion for problem-solving,” Sweeney shared. “We have core values behind our culture, such as:

• stronger together
• just fix it
• embrace change
• believe in ‘Yes, if.’”

Initially, Sweeney shared that she was very skeptical of “Yes, if” as a human resources (HR) professional. “But when we analyze problems, we try to push each other to look for the ‘yes, if.’ This frame of thinking leads to a lot of creative problem-solving. It's a very positive, creative way of approaching problems and considering all the possible solutions rather than giving a hard no.”

A Thoughtful Approach to Developing Overwhelmed Leaders

Sweeney noticed that post-pandemic, many leaders at SugarCRM were overwhelmed. With this in mind, she focused on bite-size, highly consumable learning in 2022.

2022: A Weekly Bite-Size Newsletter—“In 2022, we created a weekly newsletter that we named Manager Minute,” Sweeney explained. “The newsletter provided a short bit of information on a course so that super busy leaders could still take one minute to read it and learn something. Alongside our newsletter, we provided tools, resources, books, and podcast links, where managers could obtain additional information if the course was especially timely or relevant.”

2023: Quarterly Manager Panels—This year, Sweeney and her team are taking a more hands-on approach. Each quarter, they train leaders on key development subjects as identified by the executive team. “The HR team provides a short introduction to the topic. Then, we've selected a panel of managers for each course who are unofficial leaders of that skill. HR facilitates the panel discussion, but all the managers in the room can chime in with questions.” The panel-style approach fosters collaboration and mentorship. It’s also a nice way to recognize people on the panel for their great work. In addition to the panels, managers have a collaboration channel and access to a portal full of tools, tips, and relevant information. Sweeney and her team use a hands-on approach, providing one-on-one coaching to managers.

The last panel Sweeney and her team conducted focused on managing up. They had received feedback from the executive team that first-line managers could use help managing up for their own benefit as well as their team's benefit. “We ended up creating profiles of several of the senior leaders in the organization from a style standpoint, and then we gave some recommendations on how to work with those different styles to achieve the desired results,” Sweeney explained.

A Personalized and Humanistic Approach Drives Retention

Since Sweeney became CPO, the company decreased its attrition rate by 14% (from 23% to 9%). She attributes this improvement to her team’s highly personalized approach. “We treat people as humans first and employees second. We try to show appreciation and support throughout their employee journey and in their personal life. We do things like send flowers, baby gifts, and handwritten notes to new hires,” Sweeney remarked. “We take a very personal approach. For example, we've hired a personal chef for an employee whose spouse was frustrated because they were on the road a lot, and for an employee with a serious medical condition, we made sure that their pets were cared for.”

New Undertakings in 2024: Cross-Functional Project Opportunities

Moving into 2024, Sweeney is trying out a project concept where employees can examine projects other teams are working on and potentially devote 10% of their time to that project. “We're exploring the option of creating a project board and allowing people to apply for projects on which they can allocate 10% of their time to help broaden their skill set outside of their current functional area,” Sweeney said.

Kevin Kruse is the Founder + CEO of LEADx, scaling and sustaining leadership behaviors with behavioral nudges, micro-learning, and live cohort-based workshops. Kevin is also a New York Times bestselling author of Great Leaders Have No Rules, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, and Employee Engagement 2.0.

A University of Queensland-led research team says the key to a more sustainable food future may be a better understanding of ancient Indigenous food production systems.

Their ARC Discovery project "Testing the Dark Emu hypothesis" combines bioarchaeology, archaeobotany, palynology, ethnobotany and plant genetics in partnership with Indigenous communities to challenge existing perspectives. The research is published in Archaeology of Food and Foodways.

UQ bioarchaeologist Associate Professor Michael Westaway said transdisciplinary research was needed to confirm whether Aboriginal communities were farmers rather than foragers, with evidence of early aquaculture and possibly cultivation.

"We're working closely with Indigenous communities, because Aboriginal people are increasingly hurry to gain insights into how their people cared for Country and developed these types of sustainable food production systems," Dr. Westaway said.

"We've found extensive evidence the largest forager quarries in the world were in western Queensland, where the Mithaka people extracted stone slabs to make grinding stones for processing seeds.

"We've also excavated the fireplaces of gunyahs, traditional Aboriginal huts, and found remnants of burned carbonized seeds, which archaeobotanists are now examining to identify the species."

Dr. Westaway said pollen cores taken from ancient lake beds also allowed the team to reconstruct how the surrounding vegetation had changed over time.

"The ethnohistory shows us that Aboriginal people would prepare for a big flood by burning the surrounding riverine plains, to increase the productivity of the landscape," he said. "By identifying carbon peaks in the cores from the lake beds, we can learn about the timing of the burnings.

"We believe we're seeing records that indicate domestication of landscapes, which is an exciting element."

The research team has also looked at plant genetics, including drought resistance.

UQ Professor of Innovation in Agriculture Robert Henry said a methodical, transdisciplinary approach was necessary to reveal the complete story of ancient Indigenous food production.

"I'm looking at the contemporary flora and how the plants there now might have been changed by humans over time," Professor Henry said. "These can include changes in seed size or whether the plant would have been edible and trying to link that with the archaeological findings.

"This is significant from an agricultural point of view, as there may have been practices in the past that are useful to know about for the future. Climate change means we will have to adapt agriculture to new climates, as they did in the past."

Dr. Westaway said the research had the potential to open new ways of thinking about using native flora in a more sustainable way, that would support new industry.

Our small classes put students face-to-face with leading faculty, where they can ask questions, delve deep, iterate, postulate, and collaborate. Through intensive project-based learning and research, students gain hands-on experience that can be put to use as soon as they graduate. Our students don’t just explore challenging problems—they prototype innovative solutions. And through internship opportunities across New York City, they get real-world experience, as well as the chance to expand their professional networks.

The integrated curriculum that is a hallmark of our university means students can immerse themselves in multiple disciplines. This approach puts rigorous intellectual and creative exploration at our core, and allows students to develop tools to solve problems creatively in a changing and complex world. 

The courageous intellectual spirit of The New School’s founders remains present in the academic rigor, creative exploration, and multidimensional study that define our university.