Accommodation website Airbnb has setup its own internal university at its San Francisco headquarters to provide data education to all of its employees, not just its technically savvy ones.

The Data University curriculum consists of over 30 classes. Its 100-level classes are designed to be accessible to everyone at Airbnb, focusing on an introduction to stats and data resources and data-informed decision making. The second tier of classes is said to equip employees with applied skills for accessing data using SQL, or analysing and visualising data using Superset, Tableau and ERF. The most intensive of the classes, 300-level, are targeted toward engineers and data scientists predominantly. These classes cover advanced data techniques, such as machine learning, and popular languages for analysing and manipulating data, including R, Python and Hive.

“Our approach is unique since organizations offering data education typically focus just on their technical employees,” said Jeff Feng, product manager at Airbnb, in a Medium post. “Our approach is also intentional because we believe that every person at Airbnb should and can utilize data in his/her role to make better decisions. Thus, we designed the program to make it accessible and relevant to anyone at Airbnb.

“Creating ‘citizen data scientists’ is powerful?—?not only does it help ensure that decisions are grounded in data, but it enables people to make decisions autonomously. This is important because the person asking the question always has the best context on the question they are trying to answer, and it reduces the feedback loop to answering questions. This also has the side benefit of freeing up some of the Data Science Team’s time.”

Airbnb’s Data University has seen 500 employees take part in at least one class – about 13 per cent of its workforce – in the first six months of running it. Initially, most classes were developed and taught by the company’s economic policy data scientist Erin Coffman but there are now more than 30 volunteers helping out.

The internal university seems to be proving a success with 45 per cent of Airbnb now using its data platform weekly – despite the company only recently beginning to scale the program to its other offices.