Meet Joy David, Manager of Business Analytics for Boundless Learning. In a role that allows her to make full use of her background in statistics, she uses data, collaboration, and a passion for problem-solving to drive impact across the organization.

Throughout her 30-year career, which includes 17 years with Boundless Learning, Joy has helped integrate new technologies and improve our usage and implementation of existing platforms. Today, she works cross-functionally to help us make data-informed decisions and provide better support to empower learners across the globe.

“It’s always an adventure,” she says.

See how a love of math and a fascination with analytics have inspired her three-decade journey and helped her impact countless lives with Boundless Learning.

I majored in math in college, and the course that resonated the most with me was statistics, so I went to graduate school for statistics and earned my master’s degree. Analytics, as we know it today, was truly in its infancy when I was in college, but I appreciated how statistics used math for decision-making. I’ve been working in analytics roles since 1996, but my longest tenure by far has been with Embanet/POLS/Boundless Learning.

I act as the liaison between the business’s data, analytics, and reporting needs and the DA/DS team (Data Analytics/Data Science); I have built the data and the visualizations behind many of our Tableau reports; and I act as a Tableau administrator. I'm lucky to have wickedly smart colleagues to partner with on everything we are building, testing, documenting, socializing, researching, and managing from an analytics perspective.

I work with stakeholders to understand how they seek to use data in their strategizing and decision-making. The business analyst team has made that process run much more smoothly with their stellar talents in gathering requirements and making sure all are aligned on the details that determine a project’s success.

We built a Maryville Interventions dashboard using Tableau Pulse that provides a clear view of how key metrics are performing post-intervention vs. the same time period last year, which was pre-intervention. Seeing how their hard work put a real dent in melt was evidence of their impact.

Google BigQuery, Dataplex, and Tableau Cloud are the main tools in my arsenal.

What people want in reporting evolves, so remaining open to feedback and enhancing reporting is key to supporting tools that will provide value. Also, we spend a lot of time checking data and comparing it against Salesforce to make sure reporting reflects what is in our source of truth. That really is the most important part of this work. I prioritize being as responsive as possible when people have feedback on reporting; their input is invaluable.

The biggest challenge is understanding the vast amount of code that has been written to create and maintain multiple data pipelines, and how to investigate when an issue comes up. The issue can be in Tableau, in the reporting code, in part of one of the data pipelines, in the data warehouse, or in Salesforce. It’s always an adventure.

We are lucky to have data from the inquiry through the graduation cycle, and the learnings within that are vast. The business prioritizes making data-driven decisions, and DA/DS is very excited to support that mission. The Partner Dashboard that launched at the end of 2025 was the first report that can be used across partners. It allows Boundless Learning and our partners to see the same data together and inform strategy and decisions. I hope we can enhance this report over time as partners get acclimated to having this tool available to them.

Improving our knowledge of GCP, Tableau, and AI functionality within both has been a main priority within DA/DS. We have biweekly share-and-learn sessions where we take turns presenting cool things we find, and usually it involves how this can help our way of working.

Making AI as much a part of our work as SQL or Tableau is something I strive for. We have seen how AI can examine our tables and identify outliers or missing fields and alert us when something looks unusual. Tableau Pulse is our first foray into having AI within a dashboard. It’s another tool in our DA/DS toolbox, and Tableau Next is on the docket for 2026.

About Joy David: Joy has worked with Boundless Learning for 17 years. When she started, she had a one-year-old daughter and another on the way, and she worked solo for years before other analytics professionals were added to the team. Today, her oldest daughter is preparing for college, where she will play Division 1 tennis at Lehigh University, and her younger daughter is excited to get the car to herself and finally play singles on the high school tennis team. “The years fly frighteningly fast when you realize your littles aren’t so little anymore,” she says. Joy has two rescue pit bulls who serve as lovely officemates. “I have zero problem embarrassing my teenagers or my husband with my ‘questionable’ taste in music, and I never say no to a good theme party,” she says.