Data Analyst vs Business Analyst | Which is Right for You?

what's up guys welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is justin and i'm currently a data analyst but i have worked as a business analyst in the past i'll go into that in a little bit in today's video i'll be going over the similarities and differences between the two roles the role of a business analyst and a data analyst i'll be going over the responsibilities that you might have in each of these roles i'll be going over the skill set that you might need to learn in order to land and perform well in each of these roles i'll be going over the challenges that i faced when i was a business analyst and currently as a data analyst i'll be going over which role my best fit for you based on your interest and your skill set and finally i'll be going over sally ranges that you can expect in an entry level position while working for my current company i had the privilege of being both a business analyst as well as a data analyst i was a part of a rotational program and for one of my rotations i was a business analyst so i learned kind of the skills that were required what responsibilities that i had in order to complete the job as well as kind of the ins and outs of the day-to-day and after i graduated from the rotational program i decided to pursue being a data analyst where i am currently right now so let's take a deep dive of the role of the business analyst i worked as a business analyst for nine months during my first rotation and i learned a lot about asking the right questions having good communication skills essentially as a business analyst you're sending between the business who are coming to you with the problem and your id team or whatever team that you want you are responsible of setting up those meetings with the business stakeholder to identify the problem to gather the correct requirements and after you are done with those meetings you come back regroup and come up with a detailed outline and requirements and therefore present those findings those requirements with your team so that your team can come up with the project plan to help solve the problem so that in essence is the role of a business analyst two of the biggest challenges that i faced as a business analyst is i remember when i was just first starting out i didn't really know what i was doing and i remember my first project i was supposed to gather requirements you know set up the meeting with a business stakeholder and i remember just setting up two a little too many meetings because i was able to have clear communication wasn't able to identify the requirements so it just took a lot of their time and my time to kind of have the communication down so my advice to you is to know what the questions that you're asking and having clear communication the second challenge that i faced was having business stakeholders add on additional requirements that wasn't part of the original scope so in order to solve that problem or solve that challenge is identify the scope right away in your first meeting list down the requirements so that the business stakeholder doesn't add on requirements as the project goes on so those were the challenges that i faced personally as a business analyst so let's take a deep dive of the role of a data analyst i've been working as a data analyst for about a year now and i just been really enjoying learning about the data pipelines learning how to pull in data using sql and using data visualization tools so as a data analyst my workflow starts with gathering requirements from a business stakeholder who is requesting a report to be done so that is pretty similar to a business analyst gathering requirements asking the right questions and once i kind of list out the requirements you know asking what data that they want what tables that are needed be pulling in they need you know specific filters specific slicers that they need on the report you know i jot those down and then my workflow goes into the second step which is pulling in the data from the data source so i use sql in order to you know select tables join tables and kind of customize the data set that i'll be using in order to build out the report by using data visualization tools so once i build out the data set and kind of having my sql script then i go into my data visualization tool which currently i'm using power bi my company uses power bi to build out the reports put the sql script in and then i'm able to build out the report by using graphs kpis and whatever the requester is asking for and finally the last step is validating the data which i think is the most important part is just comparing the numbers that are showing on the report to the source data that you are pulling from so that might take a little bit of time to kind of accurately compare but it's a crucial step one of the biggest challenges of being a data analyst and it might be because i work for a biotech company there's just a lot of data that is being housed in those data sources so it just takes a little bit of time to kind of figure out what tables being pulled in sometimes i don't even know where the data is coming from what tables that they're talking about so it just requires me to do a little bit of digging within those data sources to figure out you know what data is needed to be pulled in what tables i needed to be pulled in where is the data coming from and kind of curating that data set for the report so let's go over the skill sets that you might need to learn in each of these roles as a business analyst you're not going to be as technical as a data analyst so the priority is those soft skills such as good communication skills good presentation skills and overall just good people skills it's also really helpful to learn some technical skills as companies do like if you know excel and also maybe a programming language as a data analyst it's important to know those technical skills such as excel sql and one data visualization tool such as tableau or power bi or click and it's also good to have good people skills and soft skills as most likely in both of these roles you'll be working in a team so which role is right for you for me i chose being a data analyst because i really enjoyed the technical aspect of being a dna analyst i love learning excel sql and kind of flexing that technical muscle in order to analyze data and help the business make better business decisions so if you're a person that really enjoys the technical side of things and learning technical things such as sql and analyzing data then being a data analyst is right for you so for business analysts you are analytical but also not really technical you enjoy flexing your soft skills such as communicating skills you know gathering requirements and you know problem solving in that way then a business analyst is right for you either way both roles are really good starting points for any career so let's talk about salary expectations for both of these roles so for both business analyst roles and data analyst roles you can expect anywhere from 70k to 90k and that's pretty much based on your level experience when applying and when you do get that offer i definitely recommend doing your research of what the fair market rate is so you can negotiate your target salary and that's it i hope you guys got some insight on the roles of a business analyst as well as a data analyst leave a comment down below if you have any questions and i'll see you guys in the next one [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Justin Shin

Views: 21,136

Keywords: Business Analyst, Datavisualization, Tech, Excel, Programming, SQL, Career

Id: BCL2vXGluZ8

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022