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Who is a Data Analyst?
A Data Analyst is a person who is responsible for collecting, processing, and performing statistical analyses on huge datasets. They figure out multiple ways to use data in order to answer questions and resolve issues. With the advancement in technology Data analysis has evolved a lot, also after the development of relational databases, it became possible to use SQL to fetch data from databases.
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What does a Data Analyst do?
In general, a data analyst will take data, arrange it, and use it to draw conclusions that are useful. The type of data that data analysts work with affects the type of job they do. Data analysts’ expertise may benefit businesses in practically every area, from healthcare to retail to fast food. Employers who wish to learn more about the demands of their consumers or end users might benefit from the information that data analysts provide to their organizations.
Data analysts should plan on spending their time establishing methods for gathering data and combining their results into presentations that can help their firm better, regardless of the industry in which they operate.
How to become a Data Analyst
To be a successful analyst you will need to have adequate Qualifications and Skills as follows:
Data Analyst Qualifications
Many data analysts acquire professional certification in order to gain expertise in the occupation and find work. This could be a four-year Bachelor’s degree in math, physics, computer science, business, or statistics. It could also resemble a professional certificate program, which usually gives you more study flexibility.
Data Analyst Skills
A degree is not always required to be a good data analyst. However, the qualifications and knowledge listed below will undoubtedly help you on your way to becoming a data analyst:
- Programming Knowledge: Data analysts should be fluent in at least one programming language and have a good understanding of several others. For data collection, data cleansing, statistical analysis, as well as data visualization, data analysts employ computer languages like SAS and R.
- Data Visualization: It takes practice to visualize data effectively. A skilled data analyst understands what sorts of graphs to employ, how to scale visualizations, and which charts to utilize depending on their client.
- Thinking creatively and Analytically: A smart data analyst must be curious and creative. It’s necessary to have a solid understanding of statistical procedures, but it’s even more important to approach challenges creatively and analytically. This will assist the analyst in generating fascinating research queries that will improve a company’s understanding of the issue.
- Data Warehousing: Some data analysts are recruited at the back end. They build a data warehouse by connecting databases from many sources and by using querying languages for finding and managing data.
- SQL Databases: SQL databases contain structured data and are relational. A data analyst retrieves data from several tables to conduct analysis since data is stored in tables.
- Strong and Effective Communication: Having Effective communication is really important for data analysts as they have to be very precise while sharing their observations with the team.
- Data Mine, Clean, and Manipulate: Data analysts must utilize additional techniques and tools to obtain unstructured data when it cannot be neatly recorded in a database. Once they obtain a sufficient amount of data, they clean & process it using programming.
- Computational Frameworks: Along with MapReduce & Hadoop, a solid understanding of frameworks like Apache Spark, Apache Flink, etc., is unquestionably necessary. These technologies support the streaming of large data processing.
- Machine Learning: Although machine learning is not a required skill for most data analyst jobs, still having this skill can give you an upper hand in this field. There are numerous opportunities under Machine Learning.
- Microsoft Excel: This is one of the most important skills that a data analyst is expected to have for data modeling and various analytic purposes.
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Data Analyst Roles and Responsibilities
Depending on their workplace and the technologies they use, data analysts’ daily tasks vary. Some data analysts prefer statistical software including Excel to programming languages. Some analysts use data visualizations or regression analysis, depending on the issues they are attempting to resolve. Now we’ll be discussing various roles and responsibilities that you might have to face as a data analyst:
Roles:
Data analysts generally work with structured data within an organization. They develop reports, dashboards, and other visualizations based on data related to customers, company processes, market economics, and other topics to help senior management and business executives make decisions. Data analysts deal with a wide range of data, such as inventory, logistics and transportation expenses, market research, profits, and sales numbers. They use this information to assist the company with tasks like estimating market share, pricing items, timing sales, and reducing transportation expenses.
Responsibilities:
When analyzing data, analysts try to comprehend the questions that the business needs to have answered and then examine if data can provide the information. They must be aware of the technical problems involved in data collection, analysis, and reporting. They must be capable of identifying patterns and trends. A few of the major key responsibilities include:
- Analyzing the data and providing reports
- Obtaining and maintaining data from various sources
- Filtration and cleansing of data
- Database designing and implementation
- Collaborating with management to determine the needs of business
Read our blog on Data Analyst Roles and Responsibilities for more details.
Data Analyst Salary
Data analysts are well compensated, even in their early years. They receive some nice salary amounts when they obtain more experience. Here is a brief summary of the typical base salaries for different data analyst roles:
- Junior analyst: $61,380
- Senior data analyst: $97,814
- Data Scientist: $123,257
- Business analyst: $82,729
- Financial analyst: $83,005
- Data analyst consultant: $91,000
Conclusion
If you want a stable career, a data analyst position is a great choice. Due to the increasing demand for data, businesses will need someone to collect, process, and interpret it. You’ll be in charge of helping companies interpret their data so they can make wise decisions. If you have the required education and work experience, you can have a prosperous and protracted career in this field.