GeorgeHanssen Introduction

[GeorgeHanssen]

Hey Alteryx community,

I am a data scientist at a consulting firm that works with several U.S. Federal Agencies.

I've done a variety of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics with tools like Excel, Tableau, and SAS JMP, but I am new to Alteryx.

The first thing I will work on with Alteryx is building a predictive model for the VA Veterans Experience Office (VEO) to help identify and alleviate pain points based on employee identity, interview, and demographic data.  The idea is that if the VA VEO is able to reduce workplace pain points and improve employee experience, the VA will have an improved customer experience for America's Veterans!

[TheOC]

Hey @GeorgeHanssen, excellent to have you join us in the Alteryx Community - your work sounds amazing!

For learning the platform, be sure to look around the Community - it's a fantastic place for learning. A couple of resources I would especially recommend knowing about are:

• Alteryx Designer Discussions - A place where users can ask questions about specific Designer workflows they are working on and receive help from members of the Community. Typical response time (from what I've seen) is under 10 minutes for someone to reply with a potential solution, so it's a speedy resource for bespoke information. Additionally, you can search using the search function at the top right for specific issues if you happen to run into any that may have been faced by other users before.
• Alteryx User Groups - When I first got into Alteryx, I didn't join User Groups because I thought they would be very technical and need plenty of experience before diving in. However, they aren't. User groups are a peaceful environment to discuss workflows and what's going on in the Alteryx world and a great place to network with people in the Community. Even better, with the world still being very much virtual at the moment, most of the User Groups (including the North East UK User Group, which I am currently a leader of) are hosting virtual events, so they are easy to join.
• The Alteryx Academy - This is the easiest the best place to learn about Alteryx and how to use it. I recommend the learning paths, including short snippets of learning specific topics, including Alteryx for Excel users, which helped me translate much of my Excel knowledge into Alteryx. Alteryx also delivers weekly challenges based on real-life situations and community-submitted problems. They are a fantastic way to learn practical uses of Designer. Also, it's fascinating to see the many different approaches to answering the same problem. Once you have understood Alteryx, I recommend the Alteryx Certifications. They are free to do (Core and Advanced) and provide a valuable benchmark for your knowledge. You can also retake them in 7 days if you don't pass, so don't feel any pressure to know everything before giving them a go!

I hope you find Alteryx easy to learn and intuitive to use. Do remember that almost every tool has an example workflow and help documentation if you right-click the tool in the tool palette:

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("Help" for the tool documentation, "Open Example" for the example workflow). 

And be sure to search for/ask for help in the Community if you need help. Alternatively, feel free to drop me a message here on the Community!

Cheers,

TheOC

[IraWatt]

Hey @GeorgeHanssen, that sounds awesome always great to see ML use for good, would make a perfect blog topic for the community once the project is finished! 😄 If you have any issues there is a Machine Learning board you can post questions to here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Machine-Learning-Discussions/bd-p/machine-learning