Data Analyst Career: Essential Aspects to Achieve Your Career Goals

Palak Sharma
4 min readMar 14, 2024

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data analyst career

Many organizations have understood the value of a data-driven business strategy. As organizations store and assess a huge amount of data online, they need people who can take care of managing, organizing, and assessing the information. Many enterprises are hiring data analysts to meet their data requirements. Data analysts need certain skills and tools to excel in their positions.

If you are just starting your career and wondering what things one needs to be aware of to land up in a top position in the field of data analytics.

Data Analyst Career

A data analyst is someone who implements the technical skills to retrieve, organize and analyze data and report insights to help the organization improve the production, efficiency, and other factors of the business operations. Data analysts use the data and offer solutions to stakeholders in the form of updated systems, procedures, or protocols. Globally many firms use the help of data analysts to advance the results and to understand customer needs and employee requirements.

Responsibilities for Data Analysts are:

  • Gathering information, designing, and maintaining the data systems and databases.
  • Summarizing patterns will be crucial for predictive analytics.
  • Creating reports will effectively communicate trends and predictions with the help of relevant data.
  • Developing custom solutions for process enhancements, system modifications, and building policies for data governance.
  • Collaborating with stakeholders to identify several various opportunities that affect the organization and the industry.
  • Defining datasets and more demographic analysis to determine business and product-related strategies.

The industry is expected to grow in coming years

If an individual is planning for a data analyst career, then he/she is required to know the wider context in which they will be working. The Global Big Data Analytics Market was estimated at USD 37.34 billion in 2018 and expected to reach USD 105.08 billion by 2027 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.3 percent throughout the forecast period from 2019 to 2027.

Essential technical skills data analyst needs

If an individual is planning a career as a data analyst, then doing a data analyst certification will be a great perk as they can learn the tools and the skills that are necessary for their jobs. Follow this list of crucial technical skills to ace the data analyst role.

✅Programming languages

Python — This is a high-level, general-purpose programming language highly used in data science, which gives a remarkable number of specialized libraries. Few libraries of Python are listed below:

  • Numpy–This is a lower-level library used for data manipulation.
  • Pandas–This is mainly used for data manipulation and data preparation.
  • Scikit Learn–This library is for more advanced modeling like regressions and decision trees
  • Matplotlib–This is helpful for plotting and data visualization

R — This is one of the highly used programming languages in data analytics. The R’s structure and syntax are made to help the analytical tasks. R is among the most appealing programming languages for businesses as it possesses the capacity to take care of large and complex quantities of data. R has packages that ensure to take care of analysis in an easier way. A few of the packages are:

  • Ggplot2 — This package is helpful for data visualization
  • Dplyr — This package is used for data manipulation and data preparation

MATLAB — It is a multi-paradigm numerical computing environment that facilitates faster data cleaning, organization, visualization, algorithm implementation, data plotting, and matrix manipulations. It can execute any ML models created in its environment across multiple platforms.

✅Data Visualization

Data visualization is the depiction of the data in an easy-to-digest way that consists of charts, images, maps, and graphs. It offers in-depth details of data-driven insights. Data analysts can support the business’s decision-makers to identify patterns as well as to understand complex ideas briefly.

✅SQL and NoSQL

Structured Query Language (SQL) is helpful for querying and managing massive sets of data and processing information in relational databases. The unstructured data is present in a NoSQL database in the document format. The NoSQL database querying needs a proprietary language that differs from SQL.

Non-technical skills data analyst needs

Apart from technical skills, there are other non-technical skills that boost one’s data analyst career, such as:

Communication

Communication is an essential skill for data analysts to explain the findings of a variety of stakeholders, other data analysts, and IT representatives.

Problem-solving

In their jobs data analysts usually tackle a lot of technical issues. They must effectively solve problem-solve and come up with better solutions.

Teamwork

Data analysts are required to perform tasks with many different teams. So that they can meet the business goals.

Domain knowledge

Domain knowledge is relevant to the organization one works for. It helps the data analysts to acquire resourceful insights of data and transform it into useful information.

Summing Up

An individual can gain advanced knowledge by enrolling in a data analyst certification. Informed decisions are always the best decisions anyone can make. Research well, analyze so that success in this field will be just a few steps away!

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Palak Sharma

Data Scientist — Keeping up with Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. AI/ML Enthusiast. #DataScience #BigData #AI #MachineLearning