Top Courses to Become a Data Analyst

with so many options for tools to learn to become a data analyst such as sql spreadsheets and database tools where do you even begin your journey and where should you go for developing these skills for this we'll be looking at my top recommended courses for becoming a data analyst 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 discussing my roadmap of courses in order to become a data analyst to showcase a quick example of how this can be implemented let's take a look at my personal learning journey after graduating from school i was really only a master of excel but this was good enough to get me my first job once on the job i had to learn power bi for my projects for my next job i upskilled prior so that i could work with tableau and also sql and then for my most recent role i work with python heavily i share this for multiple reasons although there are multiple tools of a data analyst you don't need to master every single tool knowing one tool is good enough to start the other reason why i shared this is that i have a lot of experience with learning new tools and i find that there's a two-step approach to learning any tool the first is actually learning the basics of it and the second is actually building something with that new skill and this general concept of learning relates directly to the sponsor of this video coursera they not only focus on teaching the skills you need to know in courses they take it a step further with their specializations and professional certificates to allow you to go and actually build something with your newfound skills which you can then actually go and showcase in your portfolio to show to an employer as an experience so with that let's get into my recommended learning plan for courses to take to become a data analyst as a note i have chapter markers below so if you have a particular tool in mind you want to look at feel free to jump ahead first up is the data analytics professional certificate from google and this is the starting point that i recommend to all aspiring data analysts it's been out for less than a year and already half a million people have participated in this certificate program the course is 39 us dollars per month with a seven day free trial and has over 260 hours of content coursera estimates that this can be completed in less than six months but for my hardcore data nerve subscribers they've told me they've completed it even less time now if money is an issue for any of these courses that are recommended today understand that coursera has two great options for this first is that certificates like this one have financial aid available so you can apply for this and if you qualify you'll get the course for free the second option is that you can audit a course to be able to see a lot of the course material the only downside is you won't get a certificate or get any graded assignments so getting back to that google certificate why is this my recommended starting point for data analysts first this course is geared for beginners there are no prerequisite classes or courses required if you're watching this video and have an interest in data analytics you have what it takes to complete the course next this course is about breadth not depth it provides a holistic introduction to data analytics from actual data analysts additionally it focuses on only the most important skills so spreadsheets sql vis tools like tableau and programming languages like r and lastly going back to the best way to learn tools you take all those skills you learned about and apply them in a capstone project which i feel is the most beneficial aspect of this entire certificate because then you can then display this as experience for employers now i'm not going to go into any more detail in this course because i can make a whole video about this which i did multiple times because i think it's that good so once you have this google data analytics professional certificate and you have this capstone project in your portfolio where should you go next to better understand what skills you should be focusing on as a data analyst i recently went through and scraped job postings from linkedin to understand what skills they were requesting for entry-level data analysts interesting enough the top skills being requested by employers were the same skills that were being taught by google in their professional certificate looking deeper into the top skills being requested by employers it seems that excel and sql are an almost half of all job postings for entry-level data analysts from there visualization tools like tableau and power bi and programming language like python and r are in about one-fourth of all job postings so this now all segues into where you should go next in developing your skills as a data analyst based on these results and also how google will prioritize the tools in their certificate i think you should next focus on either excel or sql as they're the clear winners in popularity when choosing one to start i would focus on one that you feel you have more of a passion of learning once you've learned both excel and sql i would then move into learning a visualization tool or a programming language once again take a similar gradually to excel and sql in that it doesn't matter which one you choose first go with where your passion is and remember you don't need to master every single skill to become a data analyst for my first job i only knew excel and that was good enough to get the job all right so now let's get into my recommended courses for learning those four different types of tools of a data analyst so sql spreadsheets data visualization tools and programming languages let's start with sql first for this the specialization track of sql for data science is great for mastering the basics of sql with all of coursera specializations that i'll cover today they start at 39 us dollars a month but once again financial aid and also auditing is available this has about 80 hours of content and is a curated combination of courses that ends with a capstone project to practice those newfound skills so why do i like this course so much for sql well it includes all the basics to get started if you've taken the googled professional certificate i feel you like you'll be able to complete this course even quicker as you'll be able to fly through the first course when i worked through the problems in this course i found that i really related to courses two and three of cleaning up data sets because this is where i spend majority of my time as a data analyst one thing to note is that although this course calls out data scientists as its target audience it's also perfect for data analysts i also found that the specialization had some pretty fun data sets one being a yelp data set where you built an assignment and then submitted it for peer review my one concern with this course that it may not align with your learning style as i found by reading through some of the reviews since coursera has a seven day free trial if you're finding that this course is in line with that i would recommend then switching to the postgres for everybody course dr chuck is a phenomenal teacher and super engaging so this is why i recommend this as an alternate option i wouldn't worry too much that it focuses more on postgres as these core skills can be applied to other popular sql tools as well next up is excel for those that are complete beginners with this tool the excel skills for business specialization has one of the most thorough overviews of everything you need to learn for this tool although the title of this specialization is for business working through the course i found that the content was very much applicable to data analyst role for example it not only focuses on core formulas to use but also deep diving into pivot tables and then also best practices for visualizations also i really liked their approach for teaching macros in excel the recording them and then editing them i feel that macros are sort of a party trick of excel to know and i've implemented them in my role as a data analyst and you seem almost like a magician to your co-workers with some of the things you can pull off with them one thing to note is that this specialization doesn't have a capstone project per se although they do go into how you should communicate or build a dashboard for clients now this specialization is somewhat long compared to my other recommendations of 110 hours but i will say that i've spent probably double this amount of time trying to master this tool so i think it's well worth it one thing to note on software requirements for this course is that you'll need to have microsoft excel installed on your machine to complete this course so for those that maybe need a faster track or don't have microsoft excel installed on their computer i would recommend the excel basics for data analytics course this course only focuses on the most important skills of a data analyst and uses the free browser version of excel for the course but i do feel like it only scratches the surface so that's why it's my second recommended option all right moving on once you have that excel and sql mastered it's time to move into data visualization tools or a programming language so let's start with my recommendation for data vis tools and that is the data visualization with tableau course which is about 48 hours to complete once again if you have that google professional certificate completed prior to this the first few courses will be just a review and you'll be able to finish this even quicker and also similar to the certificate you'll be able to use the free downloadable software of tableau public on your machine to make these visualizations so what do i like about this course well tableau can be really overwhelming at first as a lot of different visualizations to use my favorite instructor in this course govind does a great job of really focusing on the art of building visualizations and really specifying down what visualizations you should focus on i can really relate to this because all too often i've built a tableau dashboard that my stakeholders either didn't use or didn't want so i think this is a really important concept to focus on with tableau this specialization concludes with creating a dashboard which you can then host on tableau public to showcase in your portfolio now if you're more interested in learning another visualization tool such as power bi check out this two hour crash course on it called getting started with power bi last up is programming languages and the two most popular options right now are python and r we're not going to go into debating which one is better because frankly i feel like they're both great languages so let's look at recommendations of courses for both for python i really enjoyed taking the python for everybody specialization dr chuck is the instructor which i talked about before and he does a brilliant job of breaking down how to learn python for those that have no experience prior with coding this course does a great job of explaining the basics and then building on it further for example i took the course to learn more about apis and it taught me what i needed to know in order to execute a project i was trying to accomplish the specialization takes 81 hours to complete and i think my favorite part is the capstone project where you build an end-to-end python project from retrieving the data cleaning the data and then finally visualizing it now let's say you want to focus on r instead then my recommendation is on data science foundations using r specialization now let's be real about this this specialization is not short coming in at about 158 hours this is a deep dive into the r language but i feel like this is a great course following the google professional certificate in that you have the basics of this and it helps you dive deeper into this great language specifically this course is great at explaining the basics of r getting it set up on your local machine coding performing eda and then finally communicating insights from your findings i also thought it was interesting that it went into depth with how to use the application for r so r studio and also how teams manage different versions of r via version control for both python and r they allow you to execute the code within the browser so you don't need to install software but both of the courses are great at explaining how to install and get the software on your machine so that concludes my recommendation on what courses and specializations you should be taking in order to master the tools you need to become a data analyst editor luke here back again unfortunately one one apologize about my hair two i wanted to talk about how i actually save money with the coursera tauruses that i take by using coursera plus so personally i pay for a subscription to coursera plus and this allows me to have unlimited access to over 7000 courses in coursera which includes all the different courses that i covered today corsair estimates that you can save 30 by joining coursera plus and on top of that they're going to be offering 100 off until january 13th so this is the option that i use to access all the different coursera courses that i take and i highly recommend that you take advantage of it all right back to regular luke now before we conclude i really want to go into why i like corsair as you can see from the courses i recommended they were specific to coursera and i really like this platform because it not only offers courses but then it also offers things like specializations and then professional certificates so what does this all mean now courses by themselves are great but they can become very siloed so you could potentially go from one course to another and have repetitive material in it with coursera they have specializations and also these professional certificates to curate this learning plan if you will so that way you don't have repetitive information in it and are only focusing on the topics that you need to focus on additionally with these specializations and professional certificates you typically always have a capstone project at the end to where you can build on those skills and then showcase something in your portfolio for employers to see now certificates take specializations a step further by giving you this validation if you will through a certificate to showcase on your resume that you've gained the skills necessary by a certain organization to carry out a task so take for example that google.analytics professional certificate this is great to list on your resume and to show that you have what it takes from google if you will for the role of a data analyst but going back to the very beginning of this video recall that i talked about those portfolio projects and so those capstone projects that you do are great at also showcasing on your resume that you have the experience necessary for a job as a data analyst all right so with that as always if you got value out of this video smash that like button with that i'll see you the next [Music]

Channel: Luke Barousse

Views: 7,677

Keywords: data viz by luke, business intelligence, data science, bi, computer science, data nerd, data analyst, data scientist, how to, data project, data analytics, excel, SQL, Tableau, Power BI, Python, Python vs R, How to become a data analyst, become data analyst, top courses for data analysts

Id: aqRxZSrJLEc

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021