by Maggie Hurtado

You could say Chadd makes art from data and it is all for a good cause. Chadd Bennett is a Data visualizationist at the Washington Student Achievement Council. His job is to help people make smart choices after high school. He does this by compiling data and presenting it in a friendly way with graphs, maps, charts and other visual aids.

Chadd Bennett has a very interesting back story. He was a tour guide in Turkey and England, a fruit and vegetable seller in Pike Place Market, and a director at a ESL school. Before he became a data visualizationist, he had a job that required a little bit of data visualization, as he kept doing the job, he liked that part of his job more and more until he wanted to become a data visaulizationist. “The job technically chose me,” says Chadd. When he is not working, Chadd likes to read, ride his bike and spend time with his family.

Chadd Bennett has been working as a data visualizationist for ten years. Some of the skills you need to be a data visualizationist are to be creative, open minded, organized and analytical. One of the things that Chadd enjoys most about his job is the creativity. One way his job is creative is that he has to take input from a lot of people and translate it into graphs, maps, and charts. One of his challenge in his job is needing to clean up messy data. Chadd says if he could change one thing about his job it would be to have access to well-organized data.

Chadd Bennett loves his job because he gets to work with help people of all ages understand education and their options. When he makes complex information more accessible, he gets the reward of helping younger people plan for their future.

Chadd worked with Maggie to make a visual tool showing the name lengths of all of the students at Spruce Street School, check it out here:

https://public.tableau.com/profile/chadd.bennett#!/vizhome/SSS-Maggie/MapsandNameLength?publish=yes