David Keyes

How to Convince Your Teammates to Learn R

If you’re attending an R conference Saturday in the middle of summer, I probably don’t need to convince you that R is great. If you, like me, love R, it can be tempting to try to get everyone you know to use it. It’s painful to watch people struggle to do basic things in other tools that you know can be done easily in R. It’s especially painful if you work in an organization where you’re the only R user. If you could just get others to learn R, you think, imagine all of the things you could accomplish.

How do you convince people to learn R? In running R for the Rest of Us for the last three and a half years, I’ve thought a lot about this question. In this talk, I’ll share some of the lessons I’ve learned for convincing others to learn R. Things like:

1. Strategies for making R feel less intimidating for newcomers.
2. Starting with the end products that people can produce with R rather than the technical steps required to get there.
3. Teaching people what they need to know (and no more) so they can more easily get started with R.

Despite our best intentions, it can be easy for more advanced R users to overwhelm newcomers with the myriad things R can do. If you want others to take up R, it’s important to put yourself in the mindset of other people. This talk with show how to do that and, hopefully, help you convince others to join you in using R.

Pronouns: he/him Portland, OR, USA David Keyes is the CEO and founder of R for the Rest of Us. Through online courses and trainings for organizations, R for the Rest of Us helps people learn to use R. In addition to its education work, R for the Rest of Us does consulting, developing reports, websites, and more to help organizations use R to improve their workflow, and much more.