How I'd Learn to be a Data Analyst in 2024

dead nerds in this video we're going to be going over what I'm learning as a data analyst in 2024 we're not only going to be covering the core skills that are necessary to land a job we're also going to be focusing on other tools during this AI Revolution that we're in a lot of the top analytical tools have been stagnant in development for years now however there have been a lot of upgrades this past year to help streamline analytics last year I built an entire data analyst portfolio Project without writing a single line of code so the barrier to entry to become a data analyst and actually analyze data is getting lower and lower now if you're new here I'm Luke a data analyst my channel is all about tech and skills for data science and previously in a past life I've worked as a data analyst in a variety of roles from Corporate America all the way to last year working for the number one YouTuber Mr Beast now prior to this 5 years ago before I was a data analysts I was transitioning out of the military where I served on submarines and it turns out in the civilian world there's not a lot of Need for these type of skills but I love data and I decided to go this route I loved it so much that I started this YouTube channel to share my findings I've interviewed countless other data nerds in this journey and I've started to see the effect of these new AI Technologies on our job so I wanted to put together this video in order to road map what tools I think you should be learning as a data analyst and that I'll be sharing on this channel as well but before we get into any futuristic tools we need to look at what are the core tools that a data analyst should just generally know for their job so as that analyst let's look at some data here's my app data nerd. Tech not talk about it way too much anyway it Aggregates job postings for data nerds and here I have the top skills listed in job postings for data analysts first is the most popular skill of SQL or if you're not a lazy English speaker SQL now this is the programming language in order to communicate with a database and if you look at this there's a whack of databases in order for you to choose from which one do you choose well we're on that in a bit so SQL tops the list as the most important skill of data analyst and also a lot of different data nerds anyway it's in almost half of all job job postings next up is Excel our favorite spreadsheet software that is a tool that should be used for ad hoc analysis in order to do some quick calculations but instead companies are using it in ways that it shouldn't be using it and causing it to be a little overhype and this hype causes it to be the second most important skill as it's listed in one-third of job postings next up are coding languages which here we have Python and R now both these tools in my opinion are used to flex on your Excel co-workers that don't know how to code and unlike Excel with some of these languages you can do everything from advanced analy ICS all the way to machine learning and it's this reason that chatbots are using popular language like python to perform analytics behind the scenes anyway for R they're only in about one of six jobs but for python they're coming close to Excel and almost a third and last up on this list are visualization tools specifically Tableau and powerbi these type of tools help you build interactive dashboards and visualizations for your non- dat nerd friend I've spent week building some dashboards that my co-workers never use so now that we have these top tools out of the way let's actually dive into what I'm going to be learning in inside of each of these tools and how I'm applying AI to each all right first up is SQL and for diving into each one of these Technologies we're going to be referencing the 2023 developer survey from stack Overflow it surveys over 990,000 developers and has insights into leading Technologies now I've tried out and used a lot of the different popular options here on this list so which of these am I going to focus on this year more importantly that you should learn well if we actually adjust this Poll for professional developers we see that postgress is topping the list however when sorting for those learning to code my SQL tops the list by far postgress is now down in fourth plate now MySQL is a lot more beginner friendly whereas postgress is a bit more advanced that's why we're seeing professional developers use it more so which one am I going with well there's also this poll on admired and desired desired is the proportion of respondents who want to use a technology and admired are those that have used the same technology in the past year and want to continue do so for this postgress dominates the field not only is it the most desired but it's also the most admired I tend to weigh the admired score more because I want to understand what developers are actually using and what they want to continue to use and with this it's pretty clear they want to use postgress and not MySQL but as a beginner I don't think you should be worried about whether you're going to pick the right database to start with if you actually dive into the Syntax for popular queries for both of these options you find that they're actually pretty much the same so if you learn the basics of MySQL you can apply that to postgress so what exactly then am I going to be focusing on with SQL if that syntax doesn't really matter well I'm trying to learn how to use AI to speed up my work flow with writing SQL queries right now I'm using the AI coding assistant GitHub co-pilot in order to do this but I think I'm missing something yes it can autocomplete along with answering my questions regarding queries but I feel like there's so much more previously I was using chat gbt and now a deprecated plugin notable all I had to do was ask it a question and it would generate the SQL on its own to query the database I didn't even have to know SQL but that notable plugin got cancell last year and it ruined my entire course that I built on chat gbt that was a whole another story so now I'm actually looking for understanding what other tools are available to interact with SQL to speed up my workflow so I'll be exploring that this year on this channel all right next up is Microsoft Excel there were two major advancements last year Microsoft 365 co-pilot and python in Excel and they're both kind of related let me explain first up is co-pilot Microsoft teamed up with open AI as they found out that chat gbt is basically a freak in the sheets they call this freak Microsoft 365 co-pilot with this you can not only ask it questions about your data of which it will provide some surface level insights but the more important thing is it actually can dive into the data analyzing it and providing graphs For You released last November it will cost you an additional 30 bucks on top of your current Microsoft subscription however there's just one big catch Microsoft is only allowing those that buy a minimum of 300 licenses to access this Advanced tool doing some math only have to spend $113,000 a month in order to get this feature anyway the second major feature inside of excel is the introduction of python this allows you to as you guessed it run python in Excel now I'll be honest most of the stuff you can do with this new feature you can already do with vanilla Excel so why was this released now when both these technologies have been available for decades well my theory is that was really released to support making it easier to do calculations inside of excel if you recall how chat Bots are now using python for calculations well that's exactly what Microsoft has built here to support calculations inside of excel anyway I'm excited to dive into this Microsoft 365 co-pilot as soon as they remove that 300C limit in order to better understand how to use this tool and better control Excel and the integration of python which I think it doubles down on the importance of learning python which the next thing we're going to cover is programming language so for this we have two options Python and R which one should you learn well personally I started with r and I think it's a great easy tolearn language to start with and the Google data analytics certificate which I'm a big fan of for beginners also agrees with this but as I've progressed in my career I've needed a more advanced tool python is a multi-purpose language whereas R is specifically designed for analytics and can't do a lot of the stuff that python can do whereas the vice versa is true shoot this entire app of dat nerd. Tech was built using python from the data scraped from the internet to displaying it on this screen R couldn't have done this and that's part of my goal this year and using AI with python to build out this app even more and there were a lot of advancements last year with AI coding assistants not only they good at speeding up your workflow but they're also good at helping you learn a programming language so GitHub co-pilot tops the list and is popular among not only professionals but also those learning to code but after this poll was released there's been a lot of big developments at the end of last year and a lot of competitors specifically Google just introduced their new coding assistant called Duet AI which not only works inside of things like VSS code and pycharm but you're also able to use this assistant inside of your different Google workspaces Now the other one I'm keeping my eye on is from the team behind the popular python IDE now the team at jet brains just rolled out this tool that has a lot of similar functionality to doet Ai and GitHub copil so I'm going be testing out this year all these assistant to find out which one is the best AI assistant but more importantly I'm interested in learning about how I can use these AI assistants to learn a programming language and then share it with you so stay tuned it has some futural tutorials on how to learn things like Python and also SQL while using AI tools to speed up your learnings all right with that let's get into the next one of VI tools with the similar programming languages you have two popular options should you learn powerbi or Tableau I'm biased to powerbi as I think it's a little bit more Superior with its integration of power query and also dax's functionality this allows me to clean and access data much more easily the problem with powerbi is that it doesn't have a strong Community when it comes to sharing dashboards whereas Tableau leads in this area with Tableau public as it is a resource for you go and share your work with the community anyway both these stagnant tools both got some major AI upgrades this year powerbi introduced a very basic version of co-pilot inside of this app and this allows you to write Dax functionality and so it saves me a lot of time from having to jump back into chat gbt and then back into power beond now this is only a limited feature of co-pilot as Microsoft has shown that they're plan to integrate it fully into powerbi to help even build out dashboards and that would be a GameChanger now Tableau has also gotten some upgrades this year although they haven't been as vocal I feel as powerbi well mostly tablo's parent company is Salesforce and their CEO tried to poach members of the open AI team during the whole Sam Alman Fiasco back in November bold move cotton now Tableau and also Salesforce are not new to AI they've been trying to develop their Einstein analytics now for years and they're building out their competitor Tableau GPT which basically allows you to use natural language in order to analyze data so when we look at all the top tools of a data analyst we can see that they're affected greatly by all these different AI advancements now there's something not on this list that would be remiss if we didn't talk about and stack overflow beat me to the punch by including this new section on AI search Tools in their survey this year it's pretty clear from these results that chat gbt is dominating the field we should basically also consider it taking up the second spot as well as being AI is basically chat gbt now although it's been in the dominant player Google is trying to catch up as they recently launched Gemini which they're saying is competitive with open AI models although they fold us all with this Hands-On demonstration I still think it's promising it's even been leaked recently that they have an advanced version similar to that of Chad gbt Plus so competition is heating up another one I've been testing recently is perplexity which I'm finding is replacing my normal workflow of going to Google instead I'm using this as not only it provides a quick summary of what I need but also links to all the different sources and it's fast AF the space cowboy himself Jeff Bezos invested in perplexity recently now valuing this company at half a billion dollars now for all these chat Bots and AI assistant I've been speaking of they're all powered by large language models or llms and all the ones I spoke of previously or closed Source but I think there's hope for the open- source LL Community the leading competitor in this space mistal AI just closed its last funding round at $415 million valuating the company at almost $2 billion now this is crazy that a company is valued this high and their main product is available for you to just download and use for free anyway I'm really eager about developments in the open- source Community because this allows two great things one is improved data security now I can take these large language models and host them locally process my data locally and I don't have to worry about Sam Alman stealing it additionally if I'm hosting this model locally I don't have to pay Sam subscription fee I just have to pay my own server fees and I think this is a win win now with all these different AI advancements that I've been covering to this video you're probably a little worried that this is going to replace your job as a data analyst well let's look at these words from Sadia nadela and today we have a vision for a pilot that can Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more and countless other Business Leaders and CEOs have echoed these same claims these AI assistants aren't being made to replace you in your job but instead they're made to actually assist you in your jobs and a recent KPMG survey shows this in it they ask Business Leaders how generative AI will impact their headcount within an organization and over half expected to expand the number of people people in their organization most notably some of the most popular roles they intended to add were around data scientist and analyst we have data to support that AI is not necessarily going to take our job and instead Business Leaders want us to use it on top of this Harvard released this study which tested those that used AI in their jobs against those that don't use Ai and spoiler alert Consultants using AI were significantly more productive they completed 12.2% more tasks on average and completed task 25.1% more quickly and produced significantly higher quality results more than 40% higher quality compared to a control grip so I think the DAT is pretty clear not only is AI here to stay but it's here to improve our jobs all right if you'd like to learn more about how I would go about learning to be a data analyst check out this video right here and with that I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Luke Barousse

Views: 196,709

Keywords: data viz by luke, business intelligence, data science, bi, computer science, data nerd, data analyst, data scientist, how to, data project, data analytics, portfolio project, sql, excel, python, power bi, tableau, data engineer

Id: _gF2Mj1354M

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2024