Hello, World! Data Analyst jobs have been flowing out in the
world like a wildfire.
So I bring you this article on 8 Skills To Become Successful
Data Analyst.
We will be discussing the top
eight skills that you need in order to become a successful data analyst.
These are the skills that
they’ll be asking during the interview as well as once you become a data
analyst if you have these skills you can really become successful in your
career.
8 Skills To Become Successful
Data Analyst
1. Microsoft Excel
Believe it or not, our skill number one is Microsoft excel is still widely used in the industry for doing data analysis. Excel is a great tool for small data set.
You need to have knowledge of excel formulas, Visual Basic Application(VBA) formulas, charting, Pivot table, and different transpose techniques, etc
Having these skills will give
you an edge over your peers
2. SQL
Structure Query Language (SQL)
will play a crucial part as Data Analyst.
To fetch the data, to do
different operations and with that data as a data analyst you are often
involved in a data exploration
MS Excel is used for smaller data sets but as you start working, you will work with larger datasets.
Data
collection and all those operations. So having SQL skills will be extremely
useful
Mysql, Microsoft SQL Server,
Oracle are some of the database examples. There are different databases on
which you can run structured query language.
3. Visualization Tool (Power BI Or Tableau)
You must know at least one visualization tool such as Power BI
or Tableau. These are the two most popular ones, but there are many out
there in the industry.
If you have learned at least
one tool you can easily learn some other tools. I would choose and suggest you
go for either Power BI or Tableau.
These visualization tools allow
you to connect with the data sources, pull those data into them, and build a
lot of useful interactive dashboards.
So once you build the dashboard, it will look more like an application. You can export that dashboard as a mobile app too.
So when someone is looking at the mobile app, they can
interact and they can use various UI controls to fetch the data to fetch
different reports and different visualizations dashboards.
4. Communication And Presentation Skills
So far we have seen skills
required to play with data but communication and presentation skills will help
you to communicate the findings to your audience.
When you are becoming a data analyst you are often talking with your business manager your engineering groups and different stakeholders.
Your job is to communicate the requirements
or let’s say gather the requirements in an effective way and offer creative
solutions.
For which you also need
presentation skills because as a data analyst you are telling your data story.
Let’s say for sales insights,
you are building a dashboard. This means, you are building a story around sales
are declining less in a particular region, or they’re increasing in other
regions and the reason behind it.
So telling that data story is
important and the presentation skills are something that you need to master.
The idea of having this skill
is not to get your audience too much bored with your presentation and you
should have an effective and engaging presentation.
5. Domain Knowledge
Often if you’re looking at our
data analyst job position, it will say financial data analyst or retail data
analyst.
What it means is that if you
have a degree in finance or have a master’s or specialization in retail then
that domain knowledge is going to be extremely useful.
I have seen many times people
ask if they need to have a computer science degree in order to become a data
analyst.
The answer is No! You do not
need a computer science degree.
In fact, having domain knowledge in a particular industry that you are applying for will be extremely useful.
As a data analyst, you are solving problems in a particular domain.
And having that no knowledge
helps you do data analysis in an effective way
6. Python Or R Programming
After I mentioned that you do
not need a computer science degree, I am writing about Programming skills.
Well, programming is not very
much required. There are many companies that do not ask for this skill but it
will add as a plus.
I have seen job position
announcements where they rank people with programming skills with higher
weightage.
Python and R are two very popular programming languages in the
field of Data Science and Machine Learning. I personally prefer Python.
Python programming is easy to
learn and it’s so convenient so that anyone can learn it.
You can read my Python articles on this blog.
Having programming knowledge
will give you an edge over the competition. So if I’m hiring a data analyst I
have two resumes with the same skills but one of the resumes has Python. I
would just go with that person.
So even if you don’t have
programming knowledge as a data analyst you might end up doing just fine.
7. Math And Statistics Knowledge
Mathematics and Statistics knowledge is a must as I have
discussed Roadmap To Learning Data Science For beginners.
You can get away without
programming knowledge but you can’t without Math and Statistics knowledge.
When you’re doing data analysis
you are looking at your data distribution. You need to know what is normal
distribution, standard deviation, and how to remove outliers. So you need to
have basic math and statistics knowledge.
As you work on solving
real-life problems, you should try to enhance your knowledge of mathematics and
statistics.
8. Problem-Solving
The last skill is
problem-solving. This is a common-sense approach and a general skill where you
need to be street smart and offer different solutions for a given problem.
So there is no one silver
bullet that I can tell you. No, one magic trick that I can tell you to improve
your problem-solving skills, but it’s a general smartness that you need to
have.
Conclusion
All these eight skills are
super important to get a data analyst job or to become successful in your data
analyst career.
There are so many jobs being
open for data analysts and I see many people transitioning from another
background to a data analyst career. If that is something that excites you, you
should definitely consider this as an option.
Here are two YouTube channels
to learn the skills mentioned above:
FreeCodeCamp or freecodecamp.org CodeBasics
You can explore further and
search for specific topics.
Here is the List of 8 Skills to
become a successful Data Analyst:
1. Excel
2. SQL
3. Visualization
tool (Power BI or Tableau)
4. Communication
and presentation skills
5. Domain
knowledge
6. Python
or R programming
7. Math
and statistics knowledge
8. Problem-solving
This article was inspired by a
Youtube video, you can watch it below:
I hope this article on building
skills for a successful data analyst was helpful to you. If so, let me know in
the comments down below. Also, feel free to let me know your doubts or queries.
I would appreciate it if you
would be willing to share this article. It will encourage me to create more
helpful articles like this one.