Should you become a Data Analyst to become a Data Scientist?

hi friends welcome back to another video in today's video we're going to talk about a very very important question and that question is is data analyst a pathway to become a data scientist yes you probably have heard this one before where i would go as far as to say it's a myth where there is this misconception that a data analyst is a pathway or a prerequisite to become a data scientist and i wanted to dedicate this video and specifically address this question and answer it with details while comparing the two jaw families the similarities and differences and specifically talk about if data analyst is a prerequisite or not let's talk about the similarities between the two roles i'm gonna divide categorize the the skill set required for data analysts and data scientists into a framework with four categories so the first category would be math and statistics skills required the second is the programming knowledge required the third is software and tooling required and the last one is if there any other bucket so basically the last the fourth one is my other bucket so let's start with the data analyst and see what are the skill sets that are required let's look at the both of the job families side by side and following this framework let's look at what are the skills required for a data analyst math and statistics category a data analyst needs to understand foundational math and basic statistics for a data scientist they need to understand basic statistics math as well as advanced statistics and modeling knowledge second is when we're talking about so in programming for data analysts that acquire skill set is having a really solid understanding of sql and complementing it with some scripting language such as r or python for data scientists they also need to know sql but knowing the scripting languages such as python or r or both are a must so they must have both of the skills for um they must have sql understanding as well as advanced knowledge of object oriented programming the third category is software and tooling so for software and tooling data analysts typically require to know data extraction tools such as like etl tools where they can extract their data microsoft excel or google sheets for basic data analysis as well as some reporting tools such as tableau or just reporting in your excel i know many data analysts who do that so visualization and reporting tools such as tableau microstrategy um quick time is that a tool quick site i think that's one of the amazon one of the aws tools or any of the other visualization tools that are reporting tools that are out there so having a good understanding of those is important for the data analyst role for data scientists the software and tools that are specifically required are dependent on the are very dependent on the project and the company that they work with but typically you can think of it like they also need to have a good understanding of the etl tools for extracting data but for data analysis they would typically either use r if they're using r they'll be using our stat studio or use tools such as jupiter notebooks or google cloud notebooks and they also would be depending on your role depending on your team they might also be um using some sort of uh code review tool and that would mean that they would also have to understand how to use the terminal and basically submit the cr and be very familiar with that process for code review see our means code review um all right so that covers the software and tools category and then the last category is the other bucket so for other bucket i would say that for the data analyst you would need to have like solid understanding of the business which is also true for data scientists for data analysts you have to have very solid analytical skills and critical thinking which is again also true for the data scientist role and the last one which is very very important for both roles is solid communication so that pretty much gives you a quick summary of what are the skill set that is required for data analysts and data scientists role so by now you should have a good understanding of what are the differences what are the similarities between the two roles and what are the differences between the two roles so you can see very clearly that a lot there's a lot of overlap between the two roles um in data analyst rule primarily covers a lot of like the fundamentals and basics introductory stuff for example when we're talking about statistics or programming language knowledge and things like that so it's very easy for someone to interpret this as like data analysts is a prerequisite to becoming a data scientist but the answer to this question is no you don't need to be pursue a data analyst career in order to become a data scientist and i think one way to figure out what career you is best for you and what career you're interested in is actually do a project let's say if you pick up some data from kaggle and you want to do an analysis on it do a varied data and do two projects on it do a very data analyst focus project that includes data analysis uh reporting and visualization um and presenting and communication summarizing the results and such and do another project maybe with a different data set or similar data set and do more advanced modeling and using machine learning advanced statistics um and using like programming languages such as python or combination of python and r and try to do your project using that and yeah so do a project and then summarize your fine summer summarize your findings and insights and create basically a document or a presentation that summarizes what you did so that way you have do basically two projects under both jaw families and that way once you do those projects you will actually realize what you enjoy doing more and once you have figured that out you actually know what career you want to pursue do you want to pursue a data analyst career or do you want to pursue a data scientist career so let's say if data scientist is the career that you want to pursue then you can scratch the data analyst career because you don't need to become a data analyst to become a data scientist yes there's a lot of commonality between the two two job families but you don't need to pursue a career in data analytics to become a data scientist you can directly jump into data science by taking the courses and organizing your curriculum that covers pretty much everything and let's say if data analyst is the type of work that you enjoy doing you like reporting you like building visualizations i mean both are old required visualizations but like using tools such as excel working in excel you enjoy kind of like creating reports and looking at historical data and kind of like creating summaries for business using that data then data analyst is definitely a career for you and you should definitely jump directly into data analytics and basically pursue your career um i think there is a misconception in the industry and i'll i'll maybe talk about it in another video but i think data science job family there is like levels of depth in for each role as you go into different roles for example data analysis is like very reporting and data analysis heavy for data scientists go start stepping into like machine learning and advanced statistics modeling and things like that and then you go into applied science role and machine learning role and kind of like builds on top of each other but they're like still very um very distinct differences between each job family i remember when i was in my last name i was working there as a data scientist and there was also applied scientists there there was this misconception that the ideal goal career goal for a data scientist is to be an applied scientist and i think the similar pattern is the similar pattern i've seen for like among data analysts uh people surrounding data analysts career ladder as well where they think like the ideal goal of a data analyst is to become a data scientist i think that mindset is completely wrong there is a place for each role and each of the roles stands on its own if you are a data analyst and you want to become a data scientist that's absolutely fine if you are a data analyst and data scientist is not your goal that's also absolutely fine what i'm trying to say here is that data analyst becoming a data analyst is not a prerequisite to becoming a data scientist um what are your thoughts on this do you think data analyst career is a prerequisite to become to becoming a data scientist i would actually love to hear your thoughts in the comments and if you enjoy content in today's video give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel if you want to hear more about data science tech lifestyle and everything else in between thank you so much for watching and i hope you're having a great day i will talk to you in another video bye

Channel: Sundas Khalid

Views: 44,986

Keywords: data science, data scientist, self-taugh data scientist, tech jobs, amazon, women in tech, big tech, google, Machine Learning, Python, data science projects, data science tutorials, data science jobs, AI, data science 2022, big data, data analyst, data analytics, business analyst, sundas khalid, sundas, women of color in tech, people of color in tech, data science at google, become data analyst, data engineer, data analyst interview, data analyst to data scientist

Id: kr59DGtWDTs

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2022