Data Analyst is the Sexiest Job of the 21st Century
Job market is getting change day by day with the changing time where employees required more skills so that it can add more value to the organization. Data Analyst job is not different in that point of view and needs more skill set to fulfill the needs of industry. Data analyst job came into the picture during 21st century which required expertise in many fields but before that a Data Analyst need to have love with data and finding insights. We’ll discuss the unique skills for data analyst in detail with professional recommendations to improve those.
Table of Contents
Skills for data analyst
There are two types of required skills for data analyst job,
i) Technical Skills
ii) Non-Technical Skills
Technical Skills
Technical skills are most important part of data analyst job though job profile requires to deal with data and numbers in day to day working. So, following are required technical skills for data analyst.
Statistics, Linear Algebra & Calculus
Data science is based on the econometrics which is a combination of economics and statistics. If we take any example of data science methodology like Regression, K-Means Clustering, all those are part of econometrics. So, for data analyst, it is mandatory to have very good understanding of statistics. On the other hand, Linear algebra and calculus is also required so that advanced data science methodology & understanding get clear. Among all other skills, Statistics knowledge and its application is most important as required skills for data analyst.
Recommendation: As a data analyst aspirant, start to learn statistics by purchasing book on basics of statistics/ statistics for data analyst.
Programming Skill
As a data analyst, you need not to be expert in programming, but you should have the knowledge the programming skills and coding. As R and Python is mostly used analytical tools in the industry, you need to have basic coding knowledge to get familiar with the tools. So, if you learn basic coding that will be helpful in long run.
Recommendation: Start learning basic coding or C programming basics to build your foundation of programming.
Data Visualization
Data Visualization is all about to present data in graphical form to explain or to show or visualize the complex data. In other words, data visualization helps for explanatory data analytics. There are many data visualization tools where Tableau and Power BI is leading the market. For a data analyst, is it important to learn at least one data visualization tool and expert to create dashboard.
Recommendation: As Tableau and Power BI is the mostly used data visualization tools, you can pick up anyone to start learning. If you select Tableau, Tableau Public is available for your learning which is free and if you choose Power BI, it is also available with free version.
Data Management
As the job role says, data analysts are working with lots of data where data management and database understanding is required. Also, ETL process needs to understand as a part of data management. There are tools for data management like SQL and NoSQL. As a data analyst, it is required to know the mentioned tools to extract the data from database and for ETL process. So, data management is one of the important skills for data analyst
Recommendation: To understand data and database concept, you can start learning Microsoft Access where we’ll get the knowledge of SQL and database.
Analytics Tools
As we have mentioned earlier that data analysts are dealing with lots of data to get insights out of that. In that case, data analytics tools are required to work with data. When we talk about basic data analytics tool, excel is the starting point to getting hands on with analytics. But when we have large data set, excel cannot perform well and it is taking lots of time to run any calculation. So, when data scientists are dealing with large data set, it needs advanced data analytics tool.
Among all the data analytics tool, R and Python are leading the market. Apart from these tools, there are other analytics tool are available like Stata, SAS, Hadoop, Apache Spark, Alteryx (What is Alteryx
Recommendation: As a recommendation, you can start learning MS Excel to begin with and then move into R & Python as an aspirant of data analyst.
Non-Technical Skills
Non-Technical skills required for data analyst which is the bridge between technical skills and its use and implementation. So, non technical skills are like untold required skills for data analyst.
Critical Thinking
As per organizational need, data analyst needs to think about the data point from which a business problem can be solved, or a question can be answered. So, critical thinking is an important skill to develop.
Recommendation: Ask questions, open your thoughts and think logically in any real-life problem.
Problem Solving
Organizations are having many business problems where data analysts are playing role to provide data driven decision making to the business leaders. So, problem solving is the key skill among other non-technical skills which data analyst must have.
Recommendation: Practice with business case studies available in internet which will help to build the thinking process and mind set.
Domain Knowledge
Domain knowledge is the basic requirement for any data analyst. If data analyst is working on a project to solve a business problem then it is not possible to connect the dots with only data points, so domain knowledge will help to understand the problem from ground reality and solve the problem with facts and insights from data.
Recommendation: Read business news and case studies to understand any business from basic level.
Presentation Skill
Let’s say for an example, data analyst has created one report by data churning but presentation skill of the data analyst is not up to the mark, then it has no use of the findings if it cannot be presented in a simpler manner to the stakeholders.
Recommendation: Look at different business presentations from LinkedIn.
Communication and Writing Skill
Like presentation skill, communication & writing skills are an important skill to communicate the findings and action points. Presentation communication & writing skills are dependent on each other.
Recommendation: Practice business communication. Also follow few good business leaders to understand how they present.
Project Management
Project management skill is among those skills which helps data analysts to run the projects in a structured manner and close the loop of the project from start to end. There are many components in Project Management like Planning, Time Management, Objective setting, tracking the progress and so on.
Recommendation: Practice business communication. Also follow few good business leaders to understand how they present.
Collaboration and Teamwork
Data Science projects are getting delivered by a team in most of the cases. So, it is important to develop the collaboration and teamwork skill to deliver the project timely and team spirit should be on peak.
Recommendation: Get personal touch and motivate with team members to develop team bonding which will reflect to your work by default.
Learning and Development
The digital world, data analytics tools, techniques are changing rapidly with time and changing world. So, learning and development is the only key to perform in the said job role and add value to the organization.
Recommendation: Invest at least 30-60 mins to develop yourself in terms of reading books, learning online, attending workshops and so on.
So, the skills required for data analyst has been discussed. If you have all the discussed skills, you are ready to get into the job role of Data analyst. Also be a student in the data analyst job role so that your mind set push you always to learn more and more.
All The Best.
