What does a data analyst actually do?

hi my name is Sofia and I've been working in data analytics for about 5 years in this video I would like to tell you what exactly a data analyst does on a daily basis if you're thinking about starting a career in data analytics I hope that this video will help you to make right choice and understand if it's actually a good option for you I will start by defining a data analyst in general a data analyst is a professional who collects and processes large data sets defines and calculates kpis and develops dashboards and reports and then they present the result of that to business stakeholders depending on the industry or company one works in the job of a data analyst may actually vary for instance if you work in healthcare you will probably work on different data and on different problems than a person who works in finance or Logistics although this role can differ from industry to Industry the fundamental steps in the projects that we work on as well as the Technologies are going to be pretty much the same across all the industries now let's discuss what exactly you're going to do on a daily basis as a data analyst work of every data analyst starts from a business requirement I like to explain things using simple examples so let's imagine that I am a data analyst working for a company that bakes and distributes cookies to different retail stores imagine that a sales director approaches me and asks to develop a dashboard that will help him to have a good overview on the performance of his sales team such request of course sounds very vague and it's not really clear what performances and what exactly they want to see as a final result normally I would have a meeting with the request or even their team to understand the requirement better once the requirement is more or less clear I am ready to start development and the first step in the development process is to find and retrieve the data that we need for the analysis normally companies store their data in databases so I would go to my database management system find the necessary tables and use SQL to retrieve data SQL stays for structured query language which is a programming language for processing data in a relational database data analysts use SQL every single day to prepare data for further analysis so you will need to learn this language if you want to work in data analytics after I have prepared a data set I can connect it to a bi tool such as powerbi or Tabler and start development of a dashboard you might not be familiar with with bi dashboards so I decided to show you a very simple example here you can see a dashboard that was developed in powerbi and as you can see it's just a visual summary of some data the reason why such bi tools are so popular is because you can develop interactive dashboards so it means that a user can click on different elements and data on the visuals will change accordingly for instance if you C here you will see that the visuals have changed as a data analyst you're going to work in such bi tools very very frequently and dashboards like this one are going to be the output of your work for me personally it's probably one of the most fun part of the work because it's really a creative step where you try to play around with visuals and you look for the best way to communicate actionable insights to the business holders after I complete the dashboard I will go to the stakeholder present him the dashboard and when they are happy with the result we will publish it and then I'm ready to switch to another project that's basically it that's how a typical project is being done now let's discuss the other part of the work of data analyst that is not truly covered a lot in social media before you start working in data analytics you should know that we do a lot of routine and boring things for example when you work on a project it's necessary to create a documentation the point of a documentation is to make sure that once you leave the company another person will be able to maintain your projects you cannot imagine how many projects end up in a trash bin just because a new person does not understand how to maintain it and modify it just because they did not get any input from a person who developed this project another example of boring stuff we have to do is data quality issues let me give you an example from real life imagine you have a dashboard and application for which you took a data you might have a call from a stakeholder who says hey there is a difference between the two like I see one result in the application but I see another result in the dashboard so it's your job to go and try to find out where the difference comes from sometimes you also have to cooperate with other departments such as the data engineering team because you know if there is a problem in the database itself and you cannot fix it by yourself you actually have to ask people who are responsible for the data in the source to fix it for you so if you hate routine you should probably stay away from data analytics because you're going to do a lot of boring and stupid things I know it's not really nice but it's really necessary part of our job if you are still interested in this career option let's discuss what a typical data analyst team looks like normally there are two options the first option is when you work as a part of a specific function in a company for example there are departments such as marketing or sales and you might be a data analyst who is attached to this department the second option is a big data analyst team which is usually a part of it and that team usually includes tens of Specialists who provide services to different functions within the same company for example during one month you may be working for marketing and the next month you may be working for finance now let's talk about how you're going to work and in interact with other data analysts although you're going to be a part of a team you will probably work for most of time independently normally there is one data analyst who is responsible for a project from start to finish however it does not really mean that you will work in isolation first of all you're going to be in close contact with the business stakeholders who ask you to do something also you will be in contact with people people from other technical domains such as data science or data engineering I heard a lot that a data analyst is actually a good choice for those who don't like to communicate a lot and I would say that it's a myth to be honest I think that among all data related functions it's really the worst choice for people who don't want to communicate if you really hate communication you want to sit and develop something I would recommend to go for data engineering or data scientist now let's talk about such important thing as work life balance I appreciate my profession for good work life balance first of all you probably know that a lot of data analyst work either partially or fully remotely and of course I'm extremely happy by the fact that I don't have to stay every single day in traffic jams for hours instead I can spend my time time with my significant other with my dog or doing some other fun stuff that's it for today thanks for watching the video I hope that it was useful for you if you still have any questions about the profession of a data analyst please leave them in the comment section and I will try to answer them also it's very helpful for me to plan other videos for this channel hope to see you next time bye

Channel: Sofya Data Analytics

Views: 7,321

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Id: GOxGTznIT1s

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2024