The Power 5 Skills to Become a Data Analyst
The top 5 skills to land your first entry level Data Analyst position
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Get a good base in descriptive statistics so you can interpret your data more effectively. You can easily provide misinformation or underrepresent significant events with a lack of knowledge.
Here are a few key concepts:
- Summary Statistics: Your mean, median, mode, standard deviation, etc. With these you can develop better KPIs and metrics to measure the performance of a business process.
- Distribution: Know what a normal distribution looks like and itโs properties. A bell shaped curve where the mean, median, and mode are about the same.
- Outliers and their effect on the distribution. When outliers are present in the data, you will notice the mean either much higher or lower than the median. The distribution will also have long tails on either side.
Free resources to learn statistics:
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Many courses give you .csv or Excel files to start your analysis. Don't be fooled. Expect to write SQL code to pull your data from a database. And normally not just one table, but multiple ones. Here a few key concepts:
- GROUP BY and aggregations: Get comfortable with creating business metrics from columns using different aggregations and operators. Once you are comfortable with basic ones, learn how to create calculations with CASE WHEN statements.
- HAVING vs WHERE: Be able to create queries with multiple conditions in the WHERE clause. But, also know that you cannot place aggregates in the WHERE clause. This is where HAVING comes in.
- Joins (LEFT vs INNER): Part of the bread and butter of SQL. Know your joins and know them very well. The most common will be LEFT and INNER. Your data will look very different depending on which you choose. First, consider if theres any data you would like to exclude in your resulting table.
For example, lets say you have a customer and orders table. The customer table contains all customers in your database and your orders table only contains order information for customers who placed an order. An INNER join of customer and orders will only include customers who placed an order. A LEFT join would include all customers (those who placed an order and those who didnโt). This would also have more NULL values.
- Advanced topics such as CTEs, subqueries, and window functions. You may encounter problems that require more complex queries that simple aggregations and joins canโt handle.
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Free resources to learn SQL:
3. Microsoft Excel
Some teams live and die by the spreadsheet. Some use it less. Regardless, you will most likely use Excel in some way. Be prepared with some key concepts such as:
- Text, date, and arithmetic functions: Know the essential functions that manipulate your data.
- Lookup functions: The most common are VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP.
- Pivot tables: Great drag and drop way to analyze your data and build quick reports.
Free resources to learn Excel:
4. Tableau or Power BI
Be able to build production dashboard reports so your stakeholders can monitor the performance of the business processes. This will allow them to gather insights more quickly vs reading a spreadsheet.
You can pick either one. Thereโs many jobs for either tool. Also, thereโs teams who use different enterprise dashboard tools so some roles may have you learn something else on the job.
Want to practice your Tableau or Power BI skills with monthly challenges? Sign up here.
Free resources to learn Tableau and Power BI:
5. Effective Communication
Anyone can pick up technical skills, but few know how to communicate well. Change won't happen if leadership doesn't understand you or your work. No matter how amazing it may be. A few concepts include:
- The 7 Cโs of effective communication:
Clear
Concise
Concrete
Courteous
Complete
Coherent
Correct
- Data visualization best practices: After you learn how to create and drag charts in Tableau or Power BI, spend significant amount of time upskilling in best practices for data storytelling. Intentional use of color, size, and chart selection can make or break your presentation.
Free Resources to learn effective communication:
Before You Go
I would like to leave you with a great video from Analytics Manager and Tableau Wizard, Anthony Smoak, on additional advice on becoming a Data Analyst. Anthony has 20 years of experience and constantly still develops his skills, so I highly value his opinion.
Until Next Time,
Kedeisha Bryan