What does a Data Analyst do? Where to study? How much is the salary of a Data Analyst? All the information in this article.
The data analyst is a fundamental and increasingly sought-after professional figure in a market where data represents the new oil.
Organizations across all industries increasingly rely on data to make critical business decisions: what new products to develop, new markets to enter, new investments to make, and new (or existing) customers to target.
Additionally, organizations and companies are also using data to identify inefficiencies and other business issues that need to be addressed.
There is currently a high demand for workers so it is easy to get a job and aim for an interesting salary. In addition, this profession is ideal if you intend to work remotely from home or travel.
What is a Data Analyst?
The Data Analyst is the one who explores, analyzes, and interprets data, to extract useful information for decision-making, and be communicated through reports.
In other words, the objective of their work is to search for quantitative evidence within large amounts of data, thus supporting business decisions.
What does a Data Analyst do?
The data analyst tends to use Microsoft Excel and relational databases for most of his or her time, responding to specific business requests through traditional extraction and analysis. He or she is also involved in creating and updating reports, in many cases with the support of one or more data visualization software.
This position becomes the one that performs exploratory analysis on large amounts of data and implements complex statistical models or machine learning algorithms. In trying to identify common traits, a good data analyst is required to have a basic knowledge of statistics and databases, relational and otherwise.
What skills should a data analyst possess?
- Data processing, cleaning, and storage: when data is not stored in an orderly fashion in a database, data analysts must use other tools to collect unstructured data. Once they have enough data, they clean and process it through programming.
- Advanced Excel skills: Those in this position must be proficient in Excel and understand advanced modeling and analysis techniques.
- Database and SQL skills: SQL databases are relational databases with structured data. Data is stored in tables and a data analyst extracts information from different tables to perform analysis…
- Programming languages: R and Python: data analysts must be proficient in one language and have a working knowledge of a few others. These programming languages are used for data collection, data cleaning, statistical analysis, and data visualization.
- Data visualization skills: Tableau, Qlik, Data Studio, etc.Additionally, it is important to have other types of skills such as:
- Mathematics and statistics.
- SAS.
- Business Intelligence.
- Analytical mind and a penchant for problem-solving.
- Ability to write comprehensive reports.
- Attention to detail.
What tasks do you perform?
Extract data from primary and secondary sources, and then reorganize that data into a format that can be easily read by humans or machines.
Use statistical tools to interpret data sets, paying particular attention to trends and patterns that could be valuable for predictive analytics and diagnostic efforts.
Develop and implement databases and data collection systems.
Identify, analyze and interpret trends or patterns in complex data sets.
Locate and define new process improvement opportunities.
Prepare reports for executive leadership that effectively communicate trends, patterns, and predictions using relevant data.
What tools do you use?
- Google Analytics (GA): GA helps analysts understand customer data, including trends and areas of the customer experience that need improvement on landing pages or calls to action (CTAs).
- Qlik: Provides a self-service business intelligence and data analytics platform that supports both cloud and on-premises deployment. The tool has strong support for data exploration and discovery by technical and non-technical users alike.
- SAS: SAS Business Intelligence provides a suite of analytics applications. It has many built-in collaboration features, such as the ability to send reports to mobile apps.
- Microsoft Power BI: is a superior business intelligence platform with support for dozens of data sources. It allows users to create and share reports, visualizations, and dashboards.
- Tableau: Analysts use Tableau to aggregate and analyze data. They can create and share dashboards with different team members and create visualizations.
- Google Data Studio: Google Data Studio is a free data visualization and dashboard tool that automatically integrates with most other Google applications, such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google BigQuery.
- GitHub: GitHub is a platform for sharing and building technical projects. A must for data analysts using object-oriented programming.
- AWS S3: AWS S3 is a cloud storage system. Data analysts can use it to store and retrieve large data sets.
Data analyst vs data scientist
Why is the data analyst not a data scientist or data scientist? The difference is not too subtle either. The data scientist deals with modeling complex problems through a deep knowledge of mathematical-statistical techniques and can program in one or more languages. The data analyst builds on the work done by the data scientist to convey and interpret information to support business users.
Can a data analyst become a data scientist?
There is some overlap between the role of a data analyst and a data scientist that can help a data analyst become a data scientist. Everyone’s path is different, but a common step is usually to acquire relevant data science skills and continue education.
Common skills used by both data analysts and data scientists can include data mining, data warehousing, mathematics, statistics, and data visualization.
What is the salary for a Junior Data Analyst?
Salaries for this position vary greatly depending on the industry and the knowledge of the individual. Average annual salaries are as follows:
Data Analyst annual salary:
United States: USD 61,000.
United Kingdom: USD 39,000.
Germany: USD 46,300.
Spain: USD 31,500.
Italy: USD 32,150.
Denmark: USD 48,400.
These are the salaries for positions with little or no experience. If you have some years of experience in this field, the salaries of a data analyst can be much higher.
Where to study?
There are different options for training in this field, from 4-year degrees to master’s in case you have another degree or different types of courses.
If you want to start, many pages on the Internet offers very interesting courses to get into the world of data analysis.
The most recommended platforms to search for online courses are: