Ray McLendon has over 10 years of experience working as a Data Scientists. He has worked in the Renewable Energy, Transportation, and Financial industries. He has presented a number of talks on data science concepts at conferences internal to large financial institutions. Ray has also led several hands-on workshops for aspiring data scientists.
Over the years, Ray and his coworker/friend Leah Simpson realized that there is a serious gap in the skills students learn in school versus what they actually need in the real world. Data Science programs often use perfectly cleaned data sets and focus on machine learning algorithms, while real world data scientists spend around 80% of their time cleaning data. Leah and Ray began making courses on Skillshare to reduce this knowledge gap and help prepare new data scientists for the workforce.