Don't Become a Data Analyst: Unlock Your Competitive Edge

I'm a data analyst with six years of experience working with large complex data sets and yet here I am telling you that you should not become one and here's why you don't have to be a data analyst to be great at working with complex data sets your only an ultimate goal doesn't have to be and probably should not be becoming a data analyst but rather to learn new applicable data analysis skills knowledge and techniques that can help you speed up your career growth and advancement today I'll give you some practical examples highlighting how you could utilize the power of data irrelevant of what your official job title is and for those of you who don't know me my name is moan and I currently work as a data and analytics analyst within the financial services industry it's really hard for me to think of a job nowadays where you're not involved in working with data in some way shape or form whether you're a financial analyst a business analyst or work in a role completely non-related to data analytics you probably still use spreadsheets and other tools to capture information and to do some basic analysis on your data sets of course I'm not saying becoming a data analyst is bad all I'm saying is that the emphasis should be on learning new data analysis skills that you can actually apply in real world settings rather than solely focusing on lending super specific data roles like data analyst data scientist or data engineer I mean come on just look at how many positions there are where the official job title says data analyst and then look at how many of you want to become data analysts I don't want to discourage anyone but chances are you will not become a data analyst which is absolutely fine data analyst is nothing more than a job title a stat symbol I dare say job titles don't matter skills do now with all this said let me just dive deeper on why I think your ultimate goal doesn't necessarily have to be and probably shouldn't be to become a data analyst using some real life examples first up let's say you're a business analyst your job is to bridge the gap between data and business strategy you're already great at identifying opportunities for streamlining processes and um driving decision-making within your team and your wider organization fantastic you're in a good place and you have some great ba skills currently you do all of your data analysis work with Microsoft Excel as it's the go-to tool in your data analysis toolkit all right so now imagine if you learned a popular visualization tool like Tableau or powerbi to create even more engaging visualizations and dashboards you'd be able to develop even more compelling data stories and get that crucial stakeholder Buy in obviously you can still do all of your data cleaning and manipulation and wrangling in Excel but to take it to the next level You' create the final visual outputs in your chosen bi tool to really impress your audience you could for example leverage your existing Excel knowledge and combine that with your new visualization and storytelling skills to influence business decisions even more sounds pretty good to me right now it's no secret that domain knowledge combined with technical knowhow is a killer combination for a successful long-lasting data career I talk about this all the times I highlight this week in week out in my videos on my posts on LinkedIn and anywhere else on social media where I'm present I have a whole module dedicated solely to domain knowledge across the most popular data driven Industries in my ultimate data road map technical skills alone don't mean anything just like domain knowledge alone is not that powerful that's why learning both and learning both really well is super important in my opinion and also the reason why I have not just the technical skills modules covering Excel SQL powerbi Tableau and python in my road map but also soft skills stakeholder management skills and domain knowledge all right just a super quick plug here if you've gained any value out of this video or any of my content so far can I please ask you three simple favors one can you please subscribe if you haven't already done so it helps the channel more than you know and as the channel grows I promise to make even better even more educational even more practical content two if you're after the complete data package to get your data job then check out my ultimate data portfolio and all of the bonuses that come with it three I provide even more applicable detailed and Hands-On data analysis content for the truly committed ones on my patreon please have a look if you think you're one of those truly committed data people and that's it back to Pure knowledge now with another practical example so let's say you're a financial analyst which which is very close to my heart given that I've worked in banking ever since I started my career so say your current role involves evaluating investment opportunities assessing um financial performance and making recommendations to investors and stakeholders you have a regular pattern of reporting whether that's weekly monthly or um whatever quarterly and you're looking for a way to automate the data cleaning and manipulation processing you could Explore Learning a coding language like python to help you speed up those repetitive workflows and free up your time to do the real value ad analysis which is to interpret the insights and develop recommendations and next steps if you can be the financial analyst who's amazing at using Excel and can also do some data manipulation in Python that will surely set you apart from the crowd right just imagine all the tedious data cleaning and reporting processes you could automate with really just some basic python libraries if you spend some time learning just the basics I mean the true Basics so think of the pandas the numpy the math plot lib and the Seaborn libraries that's all you need really and by the way you guys have been asking me in the comments whether data Camp is a legit platform to learn anything on really and I can confirm that it definitely is I recently started a partnership with that as I genuinely believe that their tracks their courses their certifications they're good so feel free to check them out I do recommend data Camp I used it before and yeah it's just a good platform to learn on so now that I gave you a couple examples of the diverse roles that involve working with data on a daily basis here's the key takeaway the key takeaway is that if you're looking to break into the world of data couriers do not limit yourself to the title of data analyst it is what it is just a title it's meaningless being a data analyst doesn't make you great at data analysis you know what makes you great at data analysis learning data analysis skills skills are transferable job titles are not use your domain expertise your critical thinking along with your data analysis skills to unlock your full potential in any industry and now let me just touch on those data analysis skills start with Excel and SQL that's what I always say they're the most popular tools out there and mastering these will give you an extremely strong starting point on which you can build your entire data career focus on Advanced functions and formulas shortcuts to speed up your workflow um pivot tables pivot charts when it comes to Microsoft Excel and focus on queries that help with extracting and analyzing data in SQL rather than queries tailor to create and alter database unless you're a data engineer it's highly unlikely that you'll be asked to do data modeling and uh database building and managing databases which is why I always suggest you spend your time wisely and efficiently on data analysis SQL queries course careers have a great data analytics course where you can learn Excel SQL and um Tableau as well I know there are so many courses out there so if you already have to pick one make sure you pick a good one I wouldn't partnered with them for months now if I thought their courses were not of high quality but anyway let's move on to programming languages and I'll only provide two options here R and Python and now that I think about it let me just give you one option instead python R is not bad but python is more popular and in my opinion a more powerful better allrounder coding language When You Learn Python please make sure that you don't go away and do endless General programming tutorials I've done that before and wasted at least 6 months of My Life Learning coding skills that I would never ever use in data analytics I coded up rock paper scissors games dice throwing games and guess what most things I learned coding up those games I couldn't actually apply in my job because I am not a software engineer and will never be a software engineer so focus on python libraries made for data analysis such as the pendas numpy matplot lib and Seaborn libraries and then if you're into machine learning try psyit learn and scipi now I just realized actually that I didn't talk about a super important tool which is data visualization tools so sure Excel has some pretty Advanced Data visualization capabilities but nowhere near as good as the tools specifically made for this purpose when it comes to user interaction with the visuals and dashboards imagine if you've already put in so much hard work to extract transform and analyze your data but your final output simply looks rubbish I can guarantee that you will struggle to get and retain the attention of your audience and ultimately struggle with getting your main messaging across in my opinion visualization tools are the most bank for buuck data analysis tools as it's crucial to produce eye-catching aesthetic and meaningful visualizations I would urge you to add a visualization tool like Tableau or powerbi to your data analysis toolbox I'm only mentioning these tools here because even though there are so many out there Tableau and powerbi are by far the most popular ones so don't go away and learn something super Niche just go with something that most companies already use all right um let me just close with a story from my career to prove my point on how anyone can become great at analyzing data sets so I remember when I first started my career I had zero technical skills involving data analysis I have a master's degree in finance and economics which gave me extremely strong foundations in math statistics finance and banking but I must admit that I really struggled to apply my knowledge initially as I simply did not know how to use the data tools at work all of the technical skills I have I learned by myself and through Henson experience whilst working which just goes to show that if I could do it you can definitely do it too I'm by no means a genius I'm simply someone who was willing to put in the hours consistently for years to get to where I want to be consistency is key and let me just say this again consistency is key consistency negates Talent consistency beats Talent the reason I strongly urge you you to become proficient in various data analysis tools is not because you need to be the best at Excel SQL Tableau powerbi or python but because having the confidence that you can Implement and build Solutions will give you such a boost when it comes to your professional growth you'll notice throughout your career that people who can talk to talk and walk to walk as in people who can come up with the solutions and build those Solutions using their technical expertise these people are highly valued at any organization and I'm afraid I'm going to have to end it here for now if you enjoy content like this make sure to subscribe check out my data package on my website that will help you get your data job at moan. info and go to my patreon for even more detailed and Hands-On data analysis content thank you so much for taking just a little time out of your day to watch this and I shall see you in the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mo Chen

Views: 16,284

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Id: dC2LPESmUII

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2024