7 Steps to Your First Business Intelligence Analyst Job | BI For Beginners

if you're looking to start or transition to a career in business intelligence as an analyst then i'm going to give you a seven-step strategy you can use to make that a reality let's dive in [Music] hello and welcome to vitamin bi bringing you business intelligence for beginners and beyond my name's adam and in this video i'm going to talk about seven steps that i would take if i were looking for my first job as a bi analyst knowing what i know now having been in business intelligence for over 10 years this is obviously not an exhaustive list and everyone's journey will be different but if you're serious about landing that job in front of the chasing pack then these seven steps will give you a great chance at success let's get started with number one you're watching this video then you're probably right at the beginning of your journey and aren't at all ready to start applying for jobs nevertheless i think the first thing you should do is to start looking at job listings this will give you an idea of what's out there and more importantly what employers are looking for in terms of qualifications and skills also the kinds of roles you'll be asked to fill this will in turn give you more focus as you're going through the next six steps it's all well and good for people to tell you you must learn this you must learn that but by actually looking at the job descriptions you'll get a real picture of what skills are the most sought after one quick piece of advice i can give you which might sound pretty obvious and not worth mentioning but i will anyway is to not aim too high when it comes to the jobs you'll eventually be applying for if you're looking for your first job as a bi analyst then no matter what qualifications you have if you have no experience on the job you'll more than likely not get a job ahead of someone who has sometimes it's good to aim high but i'd set realistic expectations look for junior roles or roles in smaller companies who are perhaps just starting on their bi journey as well you'll need to pay your dues before landing a job with a bigger fish [Music] whether you're looking for a job in bi data science or just really any job where you'll be required to work with data having a good knowledge of sql is a must when it comes to being a bi analyst you're not going to need to be a sql expert but there are certain things you'll need to learn how to do here's what i'd recommend you'll need to learn most importantly how to write queries to select aggregate and join data from databases this would include knowing how to write subqueries as well you'll want a good knowledge of different text and arithmetic functions that will allow you to manipulate the data in fields and conduct calculations in order to create new fields from existing ones then you'll need to learn basic syntax for creating and deleting databases and tables uh how to insert data into tables and then how to update and modify data in tables that is a great starting point then you'll find that you'll learn everything else you'll need on the job i taught myself sql and don't consider myself an expert at all but anything i'm not sure about can often be solved with a quick google search so don't worry about mastering sql completely a good basic knowledge will suffice to begin with [Music] if you're thinking that moving into business intelligence will mean you'll be done with excel for good because you'll be working with fancy bi tools then think again basically pretty much every business whatever their size works with excel i've worked with some of the biggest companies in the world and i can confirm that they all do just think of excel as a tool in your tool belt that you can use for certain tasks that although you could do them using other tools it might actually be quicker to do them in excel so if you don't already know how you'll need to learn formulas to not only clean data and write calculations but also how to do things like conducting regression and segmentation analysis your new employer might not even know what these are so if you can suggest them it makes you look like you know what you're doing i've posted videos on regression and segmentation recently so i'll link to them in the description step 4 is to master a bi tool just one you can be familiar with a few but i'd suggest mastering just one and when i say master i mean learn how to do everything with it to push it to its limits the reason i recommend this is because although bi tools are different at their core they're all essentially the same that have been built to do the same kinds of things by mastering one tool you'll get to understand the challenges that will present themselves when working on bi projects and how to overcome them these problems won't be bi tool specific normally they'll be to do with how to calculate aggregate or present data once you know what kinds of problems you'll face when you're working with a new unfamiliar tool you'll know what you'll need to do and it'll just be a case of finding out where the functionality lies within the tool to achieve your goal what i'm essentially saying in a fairly long-winded way is that bi tools are just that tools tools that you can use to get the job done so it's better to focus on doing more jobs than learning more tools to do the same jobs make sense if you want to know which tool you should learn then you can either go the route of learning the most used tools either power bi or tableau however if you're a mac user i'd forget about power bi because you'll need a pc or a pc emulator for mac or if you don't have any money to invest then you could start with google's data studio which is completely free to use you might hear some people be dismissive of data studio and say that it's really bad but no offense to them they're wrong data studio is perfectly fine if you're just starting out in bi and data analysis it isn't feature heavy which is actually a good thing for two reasons firstly you won't be overwhelmed by lots of stuff that you probably won't need and secondly you'll actually be learning how to do more with less which will make you use your brain more and be more inventive when it comes to problem solving one other good reason to use data studio is that you can use third-party data hubs to connect to lots of different data sources and in a lot of cases you don't actually need to have your own account for these sources because the data hub will let you play with some dummy data and build dashboards with it which is great if you need to so if you were looking to hire a photographer how would you be able to tell how good each one was you probably want to have a look at their portfolio right have they photographed the kinds of things you're hiring them to photograph perhaps they're great at wedding photography but not as good at real estate photography ideally you'd probably want to hire someone who knows how to do everything to a fairly high standard because that will speak to their level of experience this analogy i'd suggest could be applied to employers looking to hire a bi or data analyst except instead of different kinds of photography we'd be talking about working with different kinds of data sources or different ways of presenting data for this you'd need to be able to supply a potential employer with some kind of portfolio showcasing your varied talents have you worked with sales data marketing data hr data website traffic data have you worked with sql databases and written complex queries to solve problems how's your excel what about some statistical analysis on some open data perhaps you'd like to take on over 4 million rows of parking violations issued in new york city during this fiscal year more on that in a minute basically if you can produce a portfolio containing projects you proactively created this will not only show off your skills in working with these different kinds of data but also it'll show how passionate you are about working with and presenting data now you probably have two questions at this point where do i find the data sources to build these projects and how do i create this portfolio both are fairly easy to answer when it comes to data you've got websites like kaggle statista and dataworld or you could just do a web search for open data the new york city parking violations data can be downloaded along with thousands of other data sets from nyc open data then you have the un data website here's a great tip create a project using open data that will teach potential employers something they didn't know already something that makes them say oh i never knew that imagine the impact that could have on your chances of getting the job ahead of someone else another great way of accessing data that you may not have yourself i actually mentioned earlier you could use a data hub like power my analytics for either excel or data studio okay it's not free but you can get an extended trial if you say adam from vitamin b i sent you and then you can start from as little as 9.95 a month using their a la carte option links to everything i've mentioned in this video are in the description below when it comes to where to host your portfolio you could use any of the bi tools i mentioned before just remember that the whole point of your portfolio is to showcase your range of skills in terms of data sources and presentation styles the next step is all about getting yourself and your name out there in the right places to show that you're part of the different discussions surrounding bi data analysis data science etc you could say that this is more for your benefit than it is for any potential employer because it'll help you keep up to date with what's going on in the space having said that here's one way that social proof could help you land that job okay so you've downloaded some real world open data and you've crunched the numbers perhaps done some statistical analysis and then visualized and presented your findings in a beautifully designed report if you found out something interesting that you think other people might find interesting as well you could start a post about your project everywhere this could be for example in linkedin and facebook groups but what i would actually suggest you do is to write an article and publish it on medium then you can submit it to publications on medium and ask if they'd like to pick it up then you'd be able to say to potential employers and even put on your resume that you've been published again this would make you stand out from the crowd if you're unfamiliar with medium it's free and super simple just head on over to medium.com and open an account maybe just watch a youtube video or two on how to get started if you're really serious about landing your first job as a business intelligence or data analyst you're going to want to be learning as much as possible about everything surrounding your new chosen profession this means everything from subscribing to and watching youtube channels in the space like this one don't forget to subscribe by the way um to signing up with online learning platforms like skillshare udemy and coursera the benefit of taking online courses over say watching different youtube channels is that they collate all the information you need in one place and are theoretically taught by experts in the field you really ideally need to be learning and upskilling constantly to not only improve your chances of landing a job but also keeping it once you're there after all the more skills you acquire the more valuable you're going to be for your future employer and the fatter and more rounded your resume is going to be in fact to help you get started on your learning journey why not take 15 minutes now and learn some sequel basics with this video here if you found this video useful please do give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel as i said links to everything i talked about in this video are in the description if you've got any questions or comments leave them in the comment section below until the next time i've been adam finer and stay bi curious

Channel: LearnBI.online (formerly Vitamin BI)

Views: 20,911

Keywords: bi analyst, how to become a bi analyst, business intelligence, business intelligence analyst, what is business intelligence, how to become a business intelligence analyst, business intelligence career, business intelligence tutorial for beginners, become a business intelligence analyst, how to become business intelligence analyst, what does a bi analyst do, what is business intelligence analyst, consultant business intelligence, data science, google data studio, business analyst

Id: 0zN0MM1SJMw

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021