Learn PYTHON to be a DATA ANALYST?!? (or is R enough...)

with the recent release of google's data analytics certificate a lot of my subscribers have been upset with google's choice of teaching r over python and i mean a lot so i was recently watching a podcast featuring al bellamy who's built up quite a bit of following on linkedin and he was talking about his thoughts on why python fans are pushing for this they need you to believe that python is better like it's not enough that they like it more it's offensive to them that anybody doesn't think that so when i heard this i was curious was al talking about me am i a python fanboy soon thereafter al posted this on linkedin in fact confirming that i was a python fanboy because of this it really got me thinking about how i could form an unbiased opinion on this topic so like any data nerd would do i set out to collect data perform some analysis and then answer the question do data analysts really need to learn python what up dead nerds i'm luke a data analyst and my channel is all about tech and skills for data science and in this video today we're going to be diving into this topic further of understanding the importance of python specifically i've been scraping data analyst job data from linkedin for the past month using python of course so through this data collection i was able to go through and better understand how important python is specifically when compared to other skills such as r excel sql and vis tools like tableau and power bi and the results and conclusions that i found that i'm going to share with you today i found were really surprising and spoiler alert python isn't the most in demand tool all right so let's dive in unless you've been living under a rock recently python is one of the most popular languages on the planet right now and for good reason it's a multi-purpose programming language that's used in a variety of different applications such as web and internet development software development game development and even internet of things but for us data nerds we don't really care about those use cases of python instead we care about how they're used for our jobs thus for our relevant use case of scientific and numeric computing we can use it for data analysis data visualization text analysis machine learning web scraping and the list goes on let's actually see a use case of how i use python to collect analyze and interpret the data to perform my own analysis on if python is important to learn for a data analyst all right so for the best place to start for this i felt actually that going to job postings themselves are the best place to look and understand what skills are required for an entry-level data analyst problem is though there are thousands of job postings on linkedin for data analysts so what am i supposed to do go through and copy and paste this so i seem to recall something as far as i can tell python's better for web script so i built a python script that logs on to linkedin goes in searches for data analyst jobs scrapes all the data associated with those jobs and then adds these to a csv this script runs daily and so i'm constantly updating what jobs i have in my database now that i have all this data that i collected over the month i once again can use python to go in and analyze it specifically i can use things like pandas to go in and further compile and analyze the data i can then move into visualizing my results so i've been using things like matplotlib and word cloud to actually perform the data visualization all right so now let's get into understanding what my analysis looks like comparing python to r if you don't know what r is r is a programming language as well and specifically like python's a multi-purpose programming language r was specifically designed for statistical analysis r can do a lot of things that i just demonstrated here it can go in and do data collection data exploration data modeling and then also even data visualization so if python and r are no different in their core functionality for data analyst what are employers asking for are they asking for python are they asking for r so with my linkedin data i went through and analyzed how frequently terms such as python or r appeared in the job description unsurprising to me i found that python is found more frequently in job postings than are specifically the skill is requested almost two times more than are so wait all things being equal if python and r are similar for a data analyst to use but python is almost twice as much as requested why did the google data analytics certificate go with r over python so i investigated this as well and it turns out for good reasons first although google agrees that both python and r are great for data analysts to learn they think that r is better starting point for foundational data analysis next although they cite python's popularity they feel that r is actually an easier language to grasp and learn and then finally probably the most important point they feel that r provides a greater perspective in understanding how programming languages play in data analytics and they even shared this plus you can apply these skills to other programming languages like python julia or javascript and frankly i agree with the facts that google is providing right here i myself started my data science journey learning r first and then from there once i understood that r was barbaric i then switched over to learning and utilizing python so when would i learn python well i'll touch on that more at the end of this video because there's actually a bigger problem that we need to look at when analyzing the data further everybody has been so wrapped up in this python verse r debate that they've failed to realize that there's actually more important tools that a data analyst needs to learn and master before they even need to consider things like python and r when we go back to the data script i find there are three general tools that data analysts need to look at and potentially learn first before even getting into python first up is excel in almost half of all job postings excel is mentioned as a key skill needed for entry-level data analysts when compared to python r this is definitely a skill that i would recommend learning and mastering first so why is excel so popular and requested by employers first excel is more widely used 800 million people use excel whereas only about 8 million people use python secondly working as a data analyst i found that other people that i interact with including non-data analysts know how to use excel when they probably don't know how to use a programming language such as python or r because of this it's much easier to collaborate and share your work with others when it's in a tool that other people know now excel is plenty of downfalls i'm not going to go into this video you can check out this video if you want to learn my thoughts on excel but it is a tool that going to help you with collaboration and thus sharing your insights with other and so i think it's a tool that you need to master and learn all right next up is sql and although slightly less popular than excel it's still appearing in almost half of all job postings for data analysts sql is the language used to communicate with a database and a database is how companies are storing their data for an example an excel file can hold about 1 million rows of data whereas a single table of a database can hold hundreds of millions to billions of rows of data why make trillions when we could make billions so why is sql so popular well companies small to large need a place to actually store their data and databases provide this infrastructure for that these companies then need to interact with this data and sql provides a method to do that so therefore it's an imperative skill that a data analysts know how to use sql in order to interact with this large amount of data so once again if i had to choose between python and r or sql i'm going to go with that sql first and then move on to advancing my python skills okay last up is visualization softwares and the two most popular options right now are tableau and power bi these programs allow you to connect to your data sources and then use a drag and drop style editor in order to build these different visualizations that you can thus share with your different stakeholders i've built dashboards in both tableau and power bi and i've used it to share my insights with my team and then allow them to go in and play around with the data further to understand and gain their own insights so how do visualization software is compared to python r overall it's mostly a toss-up they're about equal in how often they're requested compared to python and r in my experience i've usually seen an entry-level data analyst either know a programming language or a visualization tool and then as they build their knowledge they usually try to learn both of these so my recommendation is this after you've gone through and mastered excel and also sql then from there to find out what your interest is and either then dive into programming languages or visualization tools okay so let's move into my recommendations for if and when and how you should learn python but let's start with the first case let's say you're brand new to this field of data analytics and you're trying to determine if you need to learn python i think your time is better spent learning other skills first before python so things like excel sql and possibly visualization tools for this type of person i highly recommend the google data analytics certificate from coursera which i have a video above describing an overview of the course but this course will provide you with everything you need to know to get started in data analytics although the course does teach r over python i still think it's a great starting point and it's great for you to begin your journey in data analytics all right so now let's look at the next use case let's say you have some familiarity with excel sql some vis tools and maybe some programming languages at this point should you dive into learning python well i think you need to answer a key question do you have a portfolio to showcase these skills that you know as i detail in this video above skills alone are not going to get you a job instead you need to be able to demonstrate and show your worth through a portfolio i think it's much more important to showcase these skills that you currently have vice diving into learning a new programming language all right so let's look at the final case let's say you have some familiarity and you've building up your knowledge with these different tools of sql excel and maybe some vis tools at this point yes i would dive into learning python for your job the first resource is what i utilized which was data camp data camp actually has an intro to python course that is completely free and it provides you with the basics of understanding python i personally follow data camp's skill track of python for data analyst and it taught me all the skills that i needed and i demonstrated them today and how i actually went through and collected that data and analyzed it from linkedin if you're more of a coursera fan i highly recommend checking out the python for everybody course in coursera this is also a great resource for understanding the basics and getting up and running with python really quickly bam so that's my recommendation for whether or not you should learn python as a data analyst i can say that early on my career i didn't really use python as much but as i've advanced and moved on in the years i can say that i use python much more frequently because of this i personally feel that learning a programming language such as python is key to further developing yourself as a data analyst and standing out in this field and finally for those that are looking to transition potentially to other roles to maybe increase their salary or responsibility such as roles as data scientists or data engineer python provides that pathway for you to learn the skill and therefore transition more easily into these different roles also real quick if you're looking for content resources on data analytics i highly recommend that you follow albellamy on linkedin when he's not posting content that's crushing my dreams of using python he's actually posting a lot of really insightful content for those that are working in data analytics as always if you got value out of this video smash that like button and with that i'll see you in the next one you ever hear the old joke that um you know an atheist a vegan in a crossfitter walked into a bar and i knew because within 30 seconds they told everyone there a python user is akin to those atheist vegan crossfitters python users like they need you to know that they're right

Channel: Luke Barousse

Views: 189,786

Keywords: data viz by luke, business intelligence, data science, bi, computer science, data nerd

Id: Zcy-ND_4ydQ

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021