815 ELEVATE * DATA ANALYTICS BOOTCAMP

One question. One dashboard. Then test AI on the same data. Turn your decisions into the evidence you can trust.

One Morning, One Question, One Complete Cycle

The Data Analytics Bootcamp is the newest offering in 815 Elevate, Rockford University's leadership series for emerging and experienced leaders across the region. It builds on the full-day bootcamp the University hosted in February 2025 and reshapes it around a single idea: data is not a report you produce once a year; it is a feedback loop that lets an organization sense what is happening and adjust.

That loop has five stages: ask a question, gather the data, analyze it, display it, and act on it. The bootcamp moves through each stage in order, and participants work with one realistic case from start to finish. By noon, every participant will have drafted a survey, cleaned and analyzed a dataset in Excel, built a one-page dashboard, and tested an AI assistant against their own results.

This is a hands-on workshop rather than a lecture series. Participants bring a laptop, and each receives a practice workbook to use during the session and to keep afterward as a reference.

Who Should Attend The bootcamp is designed for professionals who make or support decisions and want a practical method for grounding them in evidence: managers and team leads, nonprofit directors and program staff, small business owners, HR and operations professionals, and anyone who has been handed a spreadsheet and asked to "find the story." No prior analytics experience is required; basic familiarity with Excel is helpful.

Participants should bring a laptop with Microsoft Excel 2021 or Microsoft 365 installed, since several exercises use features unavailable in older versions. For the AI segment, free versions of ChatGPT, Claude, or Microsoft Copilot are sufficient. All exercises use a fictional dataset, so no one needs to upload their organization's own data.

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