What Does a Data Analyst Actually Do? (2023)

it's hard to say what a data analyst does from day to day everyone's job's different but we've created a list of the most likely tasks you'll be working on in your first job as a junior data analyst so if you want to do a better job be sure to watch to the end I've been working in the field of data for over five years and as a senior data scientist I've had to deal with many daunting complex data tasks so I have some experience in this field but I still remember how difficult it was starting out whether it's reading job descriptions or working on your first project as a junior data analyst you might be confused by all of the jargon and complex techniques that you're faced with so to make it easier for you if you're considering becoming a data analyst I'll shed some light what a data analyst typically does after watching this video I think you'll be a bit less apprehensive about becoming a data analyst so what does a data analyst do there are typically three main areas working with stakeholders working with data and working with reports working with stakeholders this means working with the people in your business that make the decisions your tip be involved in some of the following activities working with management to understand their business requirements and translating those into a plan of action for example advising and strategy committee meetings where you help key stakeholders understand if their business plans are achievable from a data perspective or another example is scoping project requirements where you might take the objectives that your business gives you and translate them into achievable project goals that means things like framing testable hypotheses having a high level sense of where the data might come from and what some achievable outputs will look like prioritizing workloads for example maintaining a kanban board on apps like Asana or jira this is basically a long list of all the work requirements your business has for you and on a regular basis as a data analyst you need to go into that list and re-prioritize with new inputs from the business or new prioritization of the importance of existing tickets identify critical metrics and kpis some of the key kpis might include customer churn or monthly reoccurring Revenue your job as a data analyst is to quantify those metrics and then build reporting Tools in order for the business to be able to see and monitor them monitoring critical metrics and kpis is essential for understanding the health of your business basically how much money is coming in how much money are you spending and are you growing or shrinking because presenting findings to the business by way of example reporting monthly kpis to the sea levels or simply creating dashboards or PowerPoint presentations so the job of a data analyst requires you to develop those soft skills essential to helping people to understand the message that you're trying to convey and encouraging data-driven decision making this might mean running internal seminars running lunch and learns or just organizing meetings where you explain the role of a data analyst the key across all these examples is encouraging people to use data to make better decisions now comes the most Hands-On part working with the data itself you will need to analyze data from a variety of primary and secondary sources this might mean your platform database with data typically stored in SQL structures it might mean working with external apis where your customer data is stored by a third party and you consume that data typically in an unstructured format or it might mean iot data if a key component of your business is wearables or devices then you're going to need to collect large sources of unstructured data from your clients in real time and derive insights from that data for all of the techniques I've just mentioned you're probably going to want to work with data Engineers who will help you build the data pipelines required in order to harness that data next let's filter clean and aggregate the data we've just collected this typically involves identifying and treating missing or duplicate data or dirty data this might mean having incorrect data types multiple data sources or other inconsistencies in your data once you've found these data issues you're going to need to take steps to clean and treat that data it's often helpful to build validation tests to ensure that in the future these data issues are handled you may also need to standardize or normalize your data this can be required for some of the statistical tests that a data analyst typically does you will need to aggregate data from multiple sources we talked previously about data stored in your platform versus data coming from external apis these will often need to be aggregated together using complex joints and you will build new tables as a result to store these new aggregations analyze the trends and patterns in complex data sets typically a data analyst will perform complex statistical tests to spot anomalies or find patterns in the data this might include a b testing hypothesis testing or root cause analysis with those patterns having been identified it's up to the data analyst to summarize these findings working with reports you've understood the requirements from the business you've prepared the data now is time to present your findings using visualization techniques creating new tables or views typically this is done in SQL or in Python data analysts do this because you need the data in the right structure to present the findings you're interested in and original data sources often aren't in that format building and customizing reports and dashboards this might mean using a dashboarding tool like Tableau and looker and in that dashboarding people creating entirely new reports to summarize the findings you've just been researching or it might be as simple as creating a PowerPoint presentation to report to the business creating and maintaining documentation regarding the data tests and visualizations you've just created this might mean maintaining an internal Wikipedia at your company or it might mean building readme's in GitHub repositories wherever the documentation is stored it's your job as a data analyst to make sure there is documentation so anyone coming into this project for the first time can really understand what it's all about well now you have the complete list you should be able to see that there's a lot of connectivity between these different areas and in a typical project you'll often find yourself going between each area so maybe you present your findings with an amazing dashboard to the business and there's stuff they don't like about it or new information they want added well you have to go right back to the process of working with the stakeholders to identify those business requirements obtaining new data and creating new visualizations the data analytics role is quite diverse in actual fact it's often very hard to say from the outside what your primary roles and responsibilities will be for example who else is working in your team how long have they been there for are they about to quit it's really hard to know the answer to these questions before joining a company having said that no matter where you work you're going to be doing some of the tasks we listed in this video If you still have any questions or if there are any topics you'd like me to cover in a future video leave a comment below if these tasks sound interesting to you or if you'd like to take the next step towards a job in data analytics why don't you check out our free online short course on data analytics with it you'll start setting up your portfolio and take those all important first steps towards Landing your first job as a data analyst in the industry the link to the short course is in the description below speaking of portfolios why don't you check out this video here where I go into more detail about how to create the perfect portfolio for landing your first job as a data analyst and what the hiring managers are looking for that's it for me stay tuned for more great data analytics content See you in the next one what that was weird it wasn't my arm it was someone else's arm okay all right [Music]

Channel: CareerFoundry

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Keywords: data analysis, data analyst, data science, data analytics, what does a data analyst do, how to become a data analyst, data analyst job description, data analyst job, data analyst career, data analyst daily work, what does an analyst do, what does a data analyst do on a daily basis, what do data analysts do, data analyst day to day activities, work of data analyst, data analyst skills, data analytics career, data analytics job, CareerFoundry

Id: oqhQwuQOpJA

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023