Building insights, building careers

As part of a professional development program, Sudeshna created an impressive end‑to‑end dashboard and application designed to help individuals estimate construction costs with clarity and confidence. Leveraging the City of Calgary’s Building Permit dataset from the Open Data Portal, she transformed raw information into meaningful insights tailored for stakeholders ranging from executives and planners to analysts and community decision‑makers. 

Her dashboard didn’t just display numbers; it told a story. It highlighted trends in permit activity, broke down construction categories, revealed geographic patterns, and surfaced cost indicators that would otherwise remain buried in spreadsheets. The tools she built empowered users to explore data intuitively, compare scenarios, and make informed decisions grounded in evidence rather than guesswork. 

This project became more than a learning experience. It opened the door. The skills she demonstrated, from data modeling and visualization to real‑world problem‑solving, led her to a new role where she now applies to her education daily, continuing to grow and contribute through the very expertise she showcased in this work. 

“The Open Data Portal has been a valuable and user-friendly resource for accessing reliable and well-organized datasets. The clear structure, comprehensive metadata, and ease of navigation make it efficient to explore, analyze, and derive insights for data-driven decision-making. In particular, the availability of well-documented building permit data significantly supported my analytics and machine learning project by enabling quick access to high-quality open data.”

- Sudeshna