The First Report of the EU Data Market Study estimates that the number of data users will reach more than 1.3 million in 2020 while the overall data market will likely reach € 111 billion under high growth conditions. The last decade was marked by the digitalisation of virtually all aspects of our daily lives. Today, public and private organisations in all sectors face an avalanche of digital data on a daily basis. While at first glance this appears to be favourable for our knowledge-based society, in many ways it is a burden. Data is neither information nor knowledge. Instead, data is of great value once it has been refined and analysed, in order to address well-formulated questions, concerning problems of interest. It is only then through data-driven innovation that the economic and social benefit can be fully realised. The Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree Programme in Big Data Management and Analytics (BDMA) is a unique programme that fully covers all of the data management and analytics aspects of Big Data (BD), built on top of Business Intelligence (BI) foundations, and complemented with horizontal skills. It has been jointly designed and adheres to international studies, being structured to cover all the skills BI and BD specialists require.