Every government entity collects and stores millions of data points to perform administrative and legislative duties, allocate resources, and make decisions. Professionals in the public sector need the necessary skills to accurately interpret and inform administrators and policymakers about the meaning behind these data.

This Specialization will equip you with fundamental technical skills using the R programming language to gather, manipulate, analyze, visualize, and interpret data to inform public policy and public administrative functions. Throughout four courses, you will gain new skills using the popular tidyverse packages, such as dplyr for data manipulation and ggplot for visualization. You will identify and address common political and ethical challenges in data analysis, and better understand public administration and public policy concepts using hands-on activities with real-world data sets.

This course series is ideal for current or early-career professionals in the public sector looking to gain skills in analyzing public data effectively.

There are no prerequisites, though programming experience, ideally with the R language, and basic applied statistics knowledge are recommended. The Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate offers such foundational skills. You will earn a dual badge when you complete the Google Career Certificate and this Specialization. All coursework is completed in RStudio in Coursera without the need to install additional software

There is an opportunity to practice all of your R skills within hands-on exercises for each course. In the capstone exercise of course 4, learners will analyze data as part of policy options analysis, create a visualization of the results of the analysis, and make a recommendation based on the results.