Practical Steps to Begin your Data Analyst Career

what's up guys Wale here welcome back to the  channel in today's video i'm gonna be talking   about some of the different competencies  and resources that can be helpful for people   that have no data analysis experience and are  interested in getting started in learning data   analysis recently i was discussing with a friend  who is quite interested in data analysis and i was   asking him what tool he planned on learning first  and his answer was python and i asked why python   and he says because it's the hottest tool right  now and everyone is talking about it so i know   there's a lot of buzz around learning python to  be a data analyst and it's easy to get carried   away with that buzz but try not to get carried  away rather you want to see through the noise   and find a tool that suits your style and then  you can gradually build competence around that   too so i'm going to provide some options to some  resources which are going to be free extremely   beginner friendly and i'm going to focus on the  core competencies to get you started generally   there are four main areas to build competence  in data analysis and very broadly i list them as   data querying that are cleaning analyzing data  using statistical or non-statistical methods   and data visualizations so as a data analyst  you'll be required to be knowledgeable using   one or a combination of microsoft excel  sql tableau or power bi python or r the reason why microsoft excel is first on  the list is because if you work in a corporate   organization or plan to work in a corporate  organization most of the data analysis tasks   you will do will be on microsoft excel typically  your colleagues will send you an excel file   to work with and it might be unnecessary  and sometimes inconvenient to switch   into python to do an analysis that can be  done using excel as a beginner data analyst   it is important to learn microsoft excel  and you should really be aiming to become   knowledgeable in areas involving the use of  salt and filter vlookups pivot tables formulas   and basic data cleaning methods to master excel  for an absolute beginner here are the courses   i would recommend introduction to data analysis  using excel you'll find this course on edx it's   a free course for four weeks where you learn  how to use pivot tables aggregate functions   in basic knowledge of formulas cell referencing  and many more after taking this course then you   can jump into the next course which is also an edx  which is analyzing and visualizing data with excel   here you'll learn how to import data from  different sources using power query manipulate   your data using dax formulas and prepare for data  analysis into power bi one major limitation with   excel is it's limited to one million rows of  data so when working with large set of data it   starts to become slow and might crash on you a  few times but if your job does not require huge   data set then microsoft excel is good enough  nonetheless i cannot deny the huge demand for   data analysts with sql and tablet skills so i  get the need for picking those skills up as well sql is a language that lets you as a  data analyst interact with a database   a database is a collection of  data stored in a computer system   usually large volumes of data where accessing  it requires some form of structured coding   as a data analyst you might be required to  run sql queries and to do so you must first   understand the basis of relational database  and structure specifically things like primary   key foreign key relationships between tables  then you go ahead and learn sql functions like   select statement from statement where statement  group by order by joins area you want to master   for learning sql again you can check out this edx  course on sql it's called sql for data science   alternatively you can check out khan academy's sql  course called intro to sql querying and managing data the third competence to learn is either one  of tab u or power bi i just finished learning   tableau and what i discovered was it's not so much  different from power bi you do basically the same   thing which is to visualize large data sets and  the cool thing about both 2 is you can import   your data directly from sql or a csv file or  any other database to create your visualizations   at this point because you're already  familiar with visualizations using excel   it becomes super easy to understand how  to use either one of tablet or power bi   to learn power bi once again head over to edx  enroll for the analyzing and visualizing data with   power bi costs in this course you'll  learn how to identify different types   of data visualizations and how to create  fully functional reports and dashboards   now finally python as a data analyst python is  used to manipulate data similar to what you do   on sql python is also used in data science for  highly mathematical and statistical analysis when   using python what you're really learning is how to  use statistics to analyze data remember my friend   who's learning how to use python so far he's  gotten a hang of some of the theoretical concepts   however there is the practical side which he is  currently struggling with and by practical side   i mean how do you know what sort of problems or  challenges that should be solved using statistics   not all analysis requires statistics and that's  something you must be aware of as a data analyst   so some of the basic statistical concepts  you should be aware of or you should know   are sampling frequency distribution mean media  mode measures of variability standard deviation   probability significant testing z-scores  confidence intervals and a b testing all these   can be learned and practiced using microsoft excel  data analysis 2-pack even before picking up python   class so if you ask me learning python is quite  optional which is the whole essence of this video   i do not want people to feel they have to learn  python or r to become data analyst trust me i know   data analysts that have worked solely on excel  and they are fine even right now as a data analyst   most of the work that i do is a microsoft excel  and to really show you this here is a data analyst   role on Andela Andela is a renowned technology  slash i.t talent pool company in Africa and   let's jump straight to the requirements for this  role here you have must have deep understanding   of statistics have strong excel skills have  experience with sql and database management   have experience with any statistical analysis  package such as excel spss and sas so the bottom   line is you can be a data analyst with the  simple tools at your disposal start with excel   move over to sql if you need to try  your hands on different visualizations   tab your power bi if you're really curious and  you want to take it a step higher by all means use   python at the end of the day as long as you can  use the tool to get the job done then fantastic you must find ways to apply your knowledge in  specific projects to deepen your experience   and showcase your skills without projects you will  not be able to retain what you've learned for long   cargo.com is one place to download some  data sets and play around with them   apply the knowledge you've learned and experiment  with different visualizations it will help   increase your confidence levels significantly  all right if you have any questions do leave   them down in the comment section below i'd  be happy to answer them and if this video   has been helpful to you in any way do smash  the like button so that others can benefit   as well thanks for watching and  i'll see you in the next one

Channel: The Work Life Man

Views: 22,538

Rating: 4.9826169 out of 5

Keywords: beginner's guide to data analysis, the worklife man, the work life man, data analyst, how to become a data analyst, becoming a data analyst, how to learn data analyst skills, how to become data analyst, become expert in data analyst, data analyst tips, data analysis for beginners, data analytics for beginners, data analyst for beginners, how to learn data analyst, how to learn data analytics, learn data analyst, data analysis, data analytics

Id: SfE3aO3LWi0

Length: 8min 16sec (496 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021