Day In The Life of a REMOTE DATA ANALYST

[Music] thank you [Music] hey my name is Mo Chen and I work as a remote data analyst within the financial services industry I'm based in the Lake District in the UK which is a national park with beautiful countryside and Wildlife nice clean and fresh air an amazing sceneries everywhere you look I used to live in London but relocated during the pandemic and never looked back since then actually on this note let me know in the comments below where you are currently based and if you're working what your working model is is it hybrid is it remote or are you in the office all the times let me know in the comments below I usually wake up at 7am and the first thing I do is go and make my wife and I some great coffee then I just stay in bed with her and our dog rocket he's a yorkie poo and plays an integral part of our family I love starting the mornings in a nice and slow fashion stay in bed if we get to talk to each other spend some quality time and talk about the day ahead of us I tend to start work at around 7 45 by looking through my emails quickly to see if there are any urgent messages I need to respond to any urgent tasks that would need me to rearrange my diary for the day then I move on to the more business as usual tasks which in my current role involves maintaining existing dashboards and building new dashboards now of course there's a lot of work that needs to be done before you actually get to the point where you get to visualize your data you need to go out and speak to your stakeholders and understand the business requirements and you must make sure that you're not just building something that looks flashy and nice but something that actually solves the business problem once you understand the business ask and the problem you're trying to solve you can move on to data Gathering and data manipulation so that you can have a clean data set that you can load into your bi tool which can be Tableau or power bi so let's pick a specific example here the business problem that I need to solve is that I need to create a data management dashboard that showcases the data management best practices and the progress within my organization this should cover actionable insights on topics such as data quality data integration data transformation reference data or math data management you would use SQL or python to connect to the data sources and gather the data where the data is offline which usually means it sits somewhere with business smes in some local Excel spreadsheets you would have to think of an efficient way to pull this information in you could say for example use pandas to create a single data frame for your data and use that as a data source once you've gathered the data you need to make sure that you're consuming good quality data to to do this you're gonna have to perform exploratory data analysis combined with data wrangling wherever necessary if a column is meant to show percentages make sure that the actual values in the column are in fact percentages if a column is meant to show yes or no Flags make sure that in fact it has only two unique values yes and no once you've cleaned and transformed your data creating the necessary visuals doesn't actually take that much time I probably spend much more time formatting my dashboards to make them stand out and look nice then building the core visuals like bar charts line charts or heat Maps one pro data analyst tip I can give you here is that always put in the time and effort to create aesthetically pleasing visuals no matter how much work you put into it before cleaning the data Gathering the data manipulating the data if your end product your dashboards and your visuals look rubbish then it'll be so much harder for you to convince your stakeholders and get the necessary buy-ins I have breakfast anywhere between 9am and 10 30 am depending on how hungry I am and how many meetings I have I have some staple meals and foods that I like to eat and I usually consume any combination of these for breakfast so my meals can include bagels with cold cuts porridge with protein fruits or yogurt at noon we take rocket for a walk just outside where we live we're lucky that we live in such a quiet area that he gets to just run around Chase his ball and be happy I really enjoy my lunchtime walks as I get to spend more time with my wife and Rocket which is probably what I love most about working from home after we get in from the walk I have my second and final coffee for the day and some lunch at my desk I pretty much tend to eat the same items as for my breakfast with the exception that if we do have leftovers from the dinner the night before I might just eat that in the afternoon I respond to more emails have some more stakeholder or team meetings team meetings and regular check-ins allow me to connect with my colleagues inquire and understand more about what projects they're working on and see whether or not I could help out or join forces with them on closely related work items if there's any data quality issues or other ad hoc analysis I'll work on those along with refining current dashboards and working on new dashboards a recent ad hoc analysis required me to investigate bankwide metadata on systems key data points and key outcomes within the organization I had to check whether these key data points existed in a single system or a set of systems had to check whether these systems were being double counted due to various naming conventions and assigned these systems to business areas within the bank I actually did my entire analysis in Excel given the exercise was more about applying business knowledge and lots of lookups rather than some megahord coding exercise the task required me to use my own business and domain knowledge and coordinate with other smes to get their inputs this exercise just goes to show that being a data analyst is not just about coding it's also about strategic thinking being able to apply your business and domain knowledge and finding and using the right tools to do your analysis I mean I could have done the whole analysis in Python but it probably would have actually taken me more time given that I was mostly just doing X lookups I try to always set aside time for Learning and Development the world of data and Tech is changing rapidly and I'm a True Believer that if you're not constantly learning you will get left behind very quick learning doesn't necessarily have to mean learning some new code it can be as simple as researching and reading about new tools and Technologies let me know in the comments below the last data related thing you learned and like I said this doesn't have to be hardcore coding this can literally just be reading about something let me know sometimes just knowing that there's that system or tool or capability out there that can potentially solve your problem is enough in the sense that it can get you started recently for example I came across a great project management tool in which you can create boards to track your work items you can then extract any information within the tool as a CSV file which you can then clean and manipulate and load into Tableau to create a dashboard that can track your entire team's workflow after work I do some form of exercise this can be yoga lifting weights body weight exercises boxing battle ropes running or even paddle boarding in the warmer months I love being active exercising takes me to my happy place where I get to truly unwind be in the zone and not think about anything else do you have any hobbies that can help you truly unwind let me know in the comments below I'd love to get to know you guys a little bit more I'm really lucky in the sense that I have the space right next to my home office for my home gym which I love and I'm really proud of I make sure that at the end of each workout session I foam roll and stretch as they're really important for recovery and improving your mobility and flexibility for dinner we usually cook Asian inspired meals we love Korean Chinese and Japanese foods and have built up a pretty decent collection of Oriental Food Supplies I think we have a great balance between making our food eating out and getting deliveries after dinner we take rocket for another walk so he can get his steps in and practice one of his favorite hobbies yet again chasing one of his many balls then in the evening I might do some YouTube work but there's definitely always time to watch something with my wife and the dog we're big into British Crime TV shows at the moment we just binge watched the unforgotten recently and can only recommend you have a go at it as well if you have access to it within your country I like my sleep a lot so I try to be in bed by 10 pm 10 30 PM so that I can be well rested to do this all over again if you like this video make sure to check out some of my other videos right here thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one foreign [Music]

Channel: Data With Mo

Views: 315,341

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Id: sNF2oHpxMS4

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2023