A group of education and workforce leaders from Guam and the CNMI is fresh off an intensive training aimed at strengthening both the technical skills and mindset needed to work with big data. Dr. Sam Mabini Young, who led the group known as the “Hafa Data Team,” talked about how this training could help drive smarter decisions across Guam and the region.

Data plays a critical role in shaping public policy and improving social outcomes—and a government agency’s ability to analyze that data is essential. That’s why a group of local education and workforce professionals took part in a four-month research training program with the Coleridge Initiative in applied data analytics.  The training focused on understanding long-term student outcomes, from K-12 education through entry into the workforce.

Leading the team is Dr. Mabini Young, co-chair of the Guam Chamber of Commerce's Education and Workforce Committee. She told KUAM News, “The goal is to develop individuals in the public sector to do what we see happening out in the private sector as far as using modern tools and technologies to do analysis of data in order to make efficient, in this case, data-driven decisions for the public good.”

Throughout the training, participants worked with real-world data—specifically datasets from New Jersey that included student grade levels, attendance, performance, and post-high school trends. The purpose wasn’t just to review the information, but to practice mining, analyzing, and inte

 

rpreting the data in ways that could be applied to Guam and the CNMI—offering valuable insight into tracking student outcomes across education and career transitions.

Conducted in a secure virtual laboratory, the training equipped participants with proven data-analytics approaches, including record linkage, measurement creation, and data-visualization techniques.  “The goal is for the team members to go off to their various agencies, so we had people from UOG, DOE, and we even had partner participants from the CNMI. Now, they’re going back to the table and using the tools from some of the coding that we learned from the algorithm and then using that and tapping into their data–mining their local data, to start answering our local questions," she said.

With this training now complete, Mabini Young says it creates new opportunities for participants to peer-train other data staff across GovGuam agencies, while also opening the door for Guam and the region to take part in more relevant and impactful training and research focused on workforce development.