Data Skills 
The use of data to make better informed decisions. A 2021 UK Government report defined data skills as "any skill that involves the gathering, interpretation and communication of data, often as part of a team". ... "These skills cover a range of technical (hard) skills and generalist (softer) skills relating to good work practices in the context of data."
With the constant changing nature of the working environment, job roles, working processes and technology applications in the workplace, the need to maintain and enhance an individual's data skills is an important part of their continuous professional development as well as employability skills.
A large range of skills were included in the survey to reflect an holistic approach to the application of data skills, and “While not every worker needs to become a data scientist, everyone will need a basic level of data literacy to operate and thrive in increasingly ‘data-rich’ environments.” The skills included are:
• Subject matter expertise.
• Industry/sector expertise.
• Collaboration (e.g. collaboration and teamwork).
• Project management.
• Critical thinking.
• Creativity (generating unexpected and novel solutions).
• Curiosity.
• Storytelling (developing a narrative using findings from data to provide actionable recommendations to business problems).
• Adaptability.
• Analytical mindset (being able to formulate complex questions as analytical tasks).
• Professionalism.
• Leadership.
• Communication.
• Basic IT skills.
• Information management (finding information, quality assurance, storing and sharing information).
• Analysis skills (drawing conclusions/forecasts for the future by acquiring relevant information from different sources).
• Data ethics (knowing the right way to handle data, i.e. generation, recording, curation, procession, dissemination, sharing and use).
• Programming (R, Python, Java, SQL, etc.).
• Database management (the organisation, storing and retrieval of data).
• Data processing (the ability to process raw data using Excel or specialist software into a readable format, which can then be used to analyse the data).
• Data literacy (ability to draw information out of data and turn it into actionable knowledge).
• Data visualisation.
• Advanced statistics.
• Machine learning.
• Data communication skills (ability to communicate data outputs in lay terms).
• Knowledge of emerging technologies and solutions.
• Problem solving.
(Source: ‘Quantifying the UK Data Skills Gap - Full report (18th May 2021)’, accessed 21st June 2021)