Almost Timely News: Data Analyst Career Questions (2023-07-09)
Almost Timely News: Data Analyst Career Questions (2023-07-09) ::?View in Browser
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25% of this newsletter was generated by me, the human. That’s right, only 25%. Why? Because a friend and reader sent me a list of questions to answer (quite a few of them) and I answered them out loud first, then used Whisper AI to transcribe it, then used GPT-3.5-Turbo to clean up the transcript. It’s still all my words, but the net result is that a large chunk of this newsletter was processed in some fashion by AI. Also, as a result, the wording in the video will not exactly match the text in the newsletter because GPT-3.5-Turbo will prune out a lot of the stop words and other speaking junk.
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What’s On My Mind: Data Analyst Career Questions
My friend Rhino sent me a bunch of questions. She asked if I could answer some questions about a career in data analysis. So let’s go through these questions one by one and give the best answers we can.
What is the typical day of a data analyst?
There’s absolutely no such thing in data analysis. If you’re working at any kind of company where you are doing real analysis, meaning you’re not just copy-pasting and making PowerPoint stuff, you’re actually analyzing, you’re actually studying and trying to understand data, you don’t have a typical day because any number of things are going to come across your desk. It could be email open rates, it could be employee retention rates, it could be random stuff like the CEO asking you to analyze the stats of their kid’s softball team.
There is no such thing as a typical day. There are typical tasks within days. You will do a lot of tasks: data cleaning, data extraction to some degree, exploratory data analysis. You’ll do a lot of that. You’ll produce analyses, which is different than doing analysis. Producing analyses is data storytelling and data communication, where you are given a whole bunch of information and you have to order it, you have to make some sense out of it, create a narrative from it, and then be able to deliver that to stakeholders in a way that they understand.
That is one of the hardest tasks you will have as a data analyst: trying to figure out what am I supposed to say to this person? What is it that will provide them benefit? So that’s really one of the more challenging parts of your typical day. But in terms of the breakout of tasks, I would expect you to spend 80% of your time cleaning and preparing data. That is the truth about most data analysis. Most data analysis is a lot of data cleaning. So be ready for that.
What languages do you primarily use? And do you have recommendations on what order to learn them? I hear Excel is good to start.
Excel is not a language. Excel is a software package. There are escalating levels of analysis from the most straightforward, I would call them consumer-facing apps all the way up to the hardcore technical. So I would say, first, yes, learn a spreadsheet package. Excel is sort of the gold standard. Google Sheets is another one that is extremely good. They do differ. They do differ in a lot of ways. Google Sheets is free, and B, Google Sheets offers a lot of internet integrations, being able to pull data from the web that Excel does not. On the other hand, Excel’s programming language, Visual Basic, is very robust. Google Sheets has its own. They use a form of JavaScript. So you can do a lot in Excel. There’s a tremendous amount that you can do within Excel, for data sets less than a million rows. Excel is a fantastic tool for doing that exploration.
The one thing that is challenging to do in Excel, which is why I don’t use it a whole lot, is fully automating it so that it is productized almost. I use the programming language R for that. So once you’ve got the hang of Excel, then you want to start digging into BI tools. So we’re talking about things like Tableau or Power BI. These tools are designed for more sophisticated analysis of data and more for the publishing of data. So creating dashboards and things that you want to be able to share with stakeholders. Many companies have Power BI because it is a version of it that is included with Office 365. So if you have Microsoft Office 365, you have some version of Power BI already. Tableau itself comes in like three different versions: desktop edition, there’s an internal server that you can run on your company’s hardware, and then there’s Tableau Cloud. I happen to really like Tableau. I think it’s a very good piece of software that has a good interface that makes rapid ad hoc analysis easy. But it has no automation capabilities, or very, very few. And as a result, if you have to prepare the same analysis over and over again, like monthly reporting every month, it’s not as good at that.
There are more specialized data processing and analysis tools. Alteryx is one that is, shall we say, reassuringly expensive, but it is very, very capable. And then you get into the heavy tools, the big tools. You’re talking about IBM’s SPSS, which is both a language and an interface. There’s Python and the Jupyter Notebook. There is R and RStudio. I use R and RStudio because that’s where my brain works. My brain deals better with R than it does Python, although in terms of languages to program in for data analysis, Python is the most widely used. And it is the one that is used by a lot of AI tools. So you should have some fluency in it.
R is a statistical programming language. So it does a lot of the same machine learning and AI. You can do a tremendous amount with it, but it is not as well-integrated as Python. I don’t like Python syntax. I think Python syntax is dopey, particularly using indents to control loops. I just know, I like to have explicit declarations, you know, braces on stuff. But I also grew up in a period of time when, you know, I learned C as my first programming language. Actually, that’s not true. I learned BASIC as my first programming language.
Those are the languages that I would recommend. You will, as you move up in your career, you will still use the other tools along the way. It’s not like you use Excel, you learn Excel, and then you forget about Excel when you move on to R or Python. You will be using these tools a lot, particularly when stakeholders ask you for data in some format that they can manipulate, which is usually either a PowerPoint slide or a doc or an Excel spreadsheet. So those would be my suggestions. More important than the tools is understanding the processes, right, understanding how to do data analysis.
Do you recommend a paid certification course as an in-person or are Google certificates sufficient to start building a portfolio?
It depends on what kind of data analysis you want to do because data analysis is a very broad field. Any industry that has data has the ability to have data analysis in healthcare, law enforcement, the military, marketing, sales, customer service. If there’s data, there’s a need for data analysis. In terms of courses, I would take a strong look at data analyst courses and data science courses. There are a number Google has some through Coursera, which I believe is like $49 a month. IBM has a bunch for free at?CognitiveClass.ai. There’s a whole data science and data analysis track that I would recommend. I think it’s a really good setup. And even though they approach some of the programming side of things in a way that I find less optimal, the basics are still good, the foundations are still good there. So I would say if you want to start for free, use Cognitive Class. If you want to get something that is a paid certification, the Coursera one from Google, the Google data analysis course is a very good course.
In marketing specifically, there is the Google Analytics certification, the Google Analytics certification course and that is also free. That shows that you can pass Google’s course. It’s kind of like a college degree. It shows you can pass a college course. It does not necessarily mean you’re proficient, but it means you have a baseline or what I call minimal competence with Google tools. I think that’s very important. Other courses and other certificates really depend on how much money you want to spend.
Certifications, in general, are good early in your career. They’re differentiators from someone who doesn’t have that skill, but everything really depends on what you can actually do. Someone who’s got a really solid background of certifications, yeah, they can pass tests. That doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing. That doesn’t mean that they can use the skills they have in an intelligent way. They’ve proven they can do the basics - but can they think in the way that your company needs them to think? And that’s not something that you can get from certification. You need a track record, experience for that.
How in demand is data analyst as a job?
It depends. It depends on the industry, and things are really changing in the industry as generative AI gets better and better. And you see tools like the ChatGPT code interpreter, which is really a data analysis tool, among other things. The field is changing very rapidly to the point where you still need data analysis skills, but you may not necessarily need specific technical skills as much. If you can use ChatGPT code interpreter to build a Python script and have that Python script execute and run properly, you can build a toolkit of stuff very, very quickly that can process data rapidly and correctly.
The value you bring to the table, isn’t the writing of the code. It’s the ideas and how you think about code and how you think about data. That’s what’s important and what’s coming out of your head. Because just asking a tool like code interpreter, “Hey, give me a regression analysis on this data set.” Like, yeah, anyone can do that. But thinking through, well, what does a regression analysis mean? Or what does the Y intercept on this thing mean? Or what should I do next with this information?
That’s where the value is in what a data analysis person does. It’s not the ability to process the data. It’s the ability to tell somebody, “Here’s what this means. And possibly, here’s what you should do about it.” It’s like knowing that it’s raining out. The analysis is, “It’s raining out. You might want to get an umbrella.” That’s the difference between being a processor of data versus an analyst. And a lot of people in the career don’t do that second part. They just are good at the processing part. And again, you need those skills. But it’s not enough to prove your value, particularly in an era where the skills portion, the processing portion is being consumed more and more by AI.
If I really like coding for math purposes and the logical side of coding, is this a good career choice for me?
Yes. If you are comfortable with coding and you can think logically and you can, more importantly, understand how to talk to machines, this is a very good career choice because you’re going to do a lot of that, right? You’re really, in some ways, a communicator to two different sets of stakeholders. One, the machines. And that includes prompt engineering and generative AI for data analysis. And the other is humans and how to do data storytelling and tell people, “Here’s what’s happening in your data.” If you can do both of those things, you have a very, very valuable skill set, even if you are a little weak maybe on the specific technical stuff. These days, between AI and YouTube and Stack Overflow, there really isn’t any technical problem that you can’t overcome or you can’t get an immediate answer for from the tools and the data that’s out there. The tools, the information that’s out there.
What are some stressful parts about the job?
Oh, we could spend a lot of time on this. A lot of people ask for analysis and then never use it, right? They say, “Give me an analysis of our churn rate.” And then you toil over it and hand it off. And then they don’t make any decisions with data. A lot of people like to say that they’re data-driven, “Our company is data-driven”, “I’m a data-driven executive”.
Someone who is data-driven makes decisions with data first, even if they disagree with it. That is very rare. Most of the time, people make decisions with data only when they agree with the data because they’ve already made their decision. And they just want something to rationalize it. So a big part of the stress of the job is seeing a lot of your work not being used, right? Especially if it’s bad news. One of the things that we tell our customers, and we warn our customers, but in the prospecting stages, it’s a question as part of our intake, is how comfortable are you with bad news? How comfortable are you hearing answers that you don’t like? And are you willing to make changes and make decisions even when you disagree or even when the data makes you look bad?
There aren’t a lot of people like that. Very famously, the co-CEO of Netflix, Ted Sarandos, was going around for years telling people, “Oh, Netflix is a data-driven company.” And then in an interview in 2018, he goes, “Yeah, 70% of our decisions, we just make by gut. And then we rationalize these decisions with data.” I’m like, so you’re not really data-driven. If that’s how you treat data, you’re not data-driven. You’re not even data-informed at that point. You are manipulating the data to back up the decisions that you already made.
The other one, and this happens less rarely now than it used to, but it is still a problem, particularly at some companies and things, you will have stakeholders who will essentially custom order data. They will say, “I want data that shows this,” which is, depending on the severity of what this is, could just be outright lying. And so the question is, how comfortable are you? A) saying no to that person, or B) are you willing to cross ethical boundaries to do what you’re told to do? Because stakeholders, presumably someone who has that role power within a company to say, “Make me this thing,” even if this thing is wrong. How comfortable are you with that?
That can be very, very stressful dealing with people like that. Now, in my current company, which is a company I co-own with my partner and CEO Katie Robert, if we hear a stakeholder say that, and we attempt to educate them, and it doesn’t stick, then we say, “You know, we need to part ways because we’re not going to lie. And we’re just not going to violate our own ethics to tell you an answer that you already want. Just say that this is what you want and ignore the data at that point.” But those are some of the things that I think are really challenging.
I took computer science for two years in college before switching majors. Should I continue to pursue that for a better chance at data analysis?
Computer science is a different profession. If you enjoy computer science, if you enjoy coding for the sake of coding itself to create and make stuff, do that. But that field is changing even faster because generative AI, again, turns out generative AI is really good at writing code, like really good, better in some ways than generating language because a lot of code is commodity content and AI systems are really good at that. So that is a field that is having a reckoning of its own. That is a field that is very challenged right now in some ways. And so if you like that field, pursue it. But computer science and data analysis are not the same thing. So be aware of that. Data analysis, you’re going to spend a lot of time on mathematics, on statistics, on logic. And computer science is a lot of logic, but the math and stats parts are not as heavily used as the logic, creation, and ideation for writing software.
Does a certificate from an accredited university, such as the University of Washington, look better than an online certificate?
Depends on who’s looking. There are some folks who will look at a credential from a known body like IBM, Google, or Facebook, and to them, that carries more weight than a university. In other cases, depending on the person, they may think that a university has more gravitas than a corporate entity. It depends. I would say balance it based on cost.
But it’s really about the results you can generate. At the end of the day, that’s all anyone cares about. Can you do the job that is asked of you? Can you do it well? Can you do it in a timely fashion? And is it correct? When the analysis is done, is it correct and useful? How you get there, by certificate, by degree, by whatever, really doesn’t matter.
Expect some jobs to have interviews which are, in part, exams. Here’s a problem, solve this problem. Here’s a table of data, interpret this data, describe the visualization that you would use to communicate this data clearly. So it’s going to be more practical knowledge anyway because that’s what you’re facing within an industry.
How important is the portfolio to landing your first data analysis job?
Very unimportant in a lot of ways because people don’t typically have them. But they are impressive if you have something you can showcase and speak to. For example, if you have Tableau dashboards you’ve published on Tableau Public, that’s good. Be able to explain how you did it. If you have a shiny app that you built in R or a Python web app or a Jupyter notebook that’s interactive, showcase that.
But then be ready to defend it and be honest about it. Because the only thing worse than lying about stuff in an interview is lying about stuff in an interview and then getting hired for that and on day one of the job, proving that you lied and were completely incompetent. You want to represent your skills well, but you want to represent your skills accurately. This is what you’re capable of. And yes, you can and should be constantly learning, but don’t sign up for things that are way outside your skill set.
What kinds of projects should you include in a portfolio?
Data projects showcased in a portfolio are really data storytelling. So tell stories in a variety of formats: in Word documents, PowerPoint slides, dashboards in Looker Studio, Tableau Public, Excel spreadsheets—anything that shows, “I can take a data set and process it. I can take a data set and do the job with it.” Ideally, it’s a variety of types of data and a variety of analyses. And there’s so much free data online. If you go to data.gov, you can find a ton of data. Go to Kaggle. Kaggle has data sets you can download and then do some interesting visualizations and tell some interesting stories about the data and what you see. That’s where the value is.
What kinds of remote opportunities are there for this job?
A ton. Data analysis is obviously something that, as long as you have the right compute resources, you can pretty much do from anywhere and on most devices, right? If you have an environment like Google Colab, you can run that in a browser on your phone (though you shouldn’t), but you could run it on your phone or your tablet. So there’s a lot of opportunities.
The place where you will need to be in person typically is when you’re doing presentations of the data. But even there, you can do it remotely. For example, with many Trust Insights clients, we will record videos and ship the video along with the report as a video walkthrough, so that the client can experience it at their convenience. This is really useful for clients with many stakeholders in meetings. If you have a meeting with 20 people, getting 20 people to agree on a time is very difficult. But if you hand them a 30-minute video and then say, “Email me the questions,” everybody can do that on their own time. It’s also useful for clients in substantially different time zones. For example, we have some Australian clients, and we do a lot of video communication because they’re offset exactly 12 or 13 hours from our clock. So when we’re awake, they’re asleep, and vice versa. But that video allows you to work remotely with them and be successful.
What should I expect as a starting salary (realistically)?
Starting salaries for data analysts are all over the board. It depends on where you’re located and the cost of living there. It depends on the company and their needs, as well as your skill sets and the job requirements. You’ll see salaries in wild bands, ranging from $40,000 to $140,000, depending on the needs and what you bring to the table. So it’s pretty wild. In the metro Boston area where I live, it’s around $65,000 to $70,000 to start if you have about a year’s worth of experience.
If you had to start over in data analysis again, what would you realistically do differently or focus on learning more?
That’s a good question. I don’t know that I would do anything different. If I was starting today, I would spend almost all my time with generative AI because that’s where things are going. I would learn how to code so that I can inspect the output of the AI tools. But I would be heavily investing my time in generative AI and tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT’s code interpreter and BARD and stuff. Because 90% of the code you write is going to be commodity code, and these tools are really good at it.
Your skill, the value you bring, is not in writing code. It is in knowing what to ask of the tools and knowing how to communicate with stakeholders. I would take a class or a course or study in communicating well. Two books I would recommend are?“Find the Red Thread” by Tamsen Webster?and?“Steal the Show” by Michael Port. These are two books that are really about public speaking, to a large degree, but also about how to distill down ideas and communicate them clearly. Because that is a really important skill that a lot of data analysis courses don’t teach you. The same goes for presentations. I’m trying to remember who wrote the book, but?“Presentation Zen”?is a good book on how to make compelling slides. Because a lot of your output will be in that format. And how do you communicate intelligently? How do you tell a story?
What is the most interesting part of my job?
Finding new problems to solve. Finding interesting problems to solve. We have a little bit in the newsletter later on this, but the Save Warrior Nun campaign that I joined up on did for free. But it was really interesting because it was problems in a different domain, in the entertainment industry, which is not something I typically do a lot of work in. The ability to explore and test out new tools. All the time, there are tools like R packages or Python packages that are coming out that offer new capabilities. It’s kind of like the holidays. It’s like getting a new gift for the holidays, like, “Oh, here’s something else to try out. Here’s something that was really interesting or might solve a problem in a different way.”
Generative AI has been huge for the work that I do because it allows me to move faster, deliver better quality work, and make sure that I’m not missing things. So to me, that’s always the fun part. If you are a curious person, and I would argue that that is one of the most important core personality traits to have as a data analyst, if you are a curious person, there is no shortage of problems that need analysis that you can help out with. And in turn, you can level up your skills beyond what you’re normally doing in your day-to-day work.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you’re not currently employed as a data analyst, volunteering for nonprofits or not-for-profit causes is a great way to level up those skills. Because you will face real-world problems, but you will be able to do it your way and do analyses that are different and more interesting.
And finally, the last question: What kind of networking should I do to land a job?
Go where people hang out and contribute to conversations, right? Read people’s commentary, particularly on apps like LinkedIn, about the topic. Learn from them, and where you can contribute, offer a perspective. Regardless of where you are in your career, everyone theoretically has some unique perspective to offer because you are an individual person.
Networking is really about just getting to know people. It’s getting to know people, being helpful when you can, listening way more than you talk, observing. And look for patterns in people that you can then leverage to make connections and provide value. My friend Chris Brogan says any opportunity to be helpful is an opportunity to earn money or, in this case, find a job. So any place that you can be helpful is a place where you can make connections.
Volunteering for causes and nonprofits, particularly something you know, the organic movements. You’ll get in touch with a lot of different people, people that you would not expect to be in touch with. The person who submitted these questions, we met through the?Save Warrior Nun campaign. This is a movement that attracted tens of thousands of people, thousands of people in the Discord servers for this. And they’re from all walks of life. That’s networking.
Networking is not going to awkward mixers and standing around looking at all these other people. I mean, that is networking too, but to me, it’s not as impactful as showing up, volunteering, and doing the work alongside other people. Prove that you have value to offer, prove that you can do the thing. Other people who are in that situation are watching. They’re watching, in some cases, even scouting. You go into a Slack community or a Discord community, and there’s a need, an opportunity to help. You jump in, you help, and all the other people who are watching go, “That person knows what they’re doing. They’re helping out, and what they’re producing is good quality, even if it’s basic.”
One of our mutual friends, Jereczko, does hourly analysis of the Save Warrior Nun tags and trends on social media. And what she’s doing is not super complicated. She’s not writing advanced Python code. She’s doing a lot of data summarization things. But the work she’s doing is regular, reliable, and correct. As a result, people like me look at that and go, “She’s got the right skills, the right soft skills. She’s persistent, she’s dedicated, she’s on time, she gets the work done without anyone asking her to do it. That self-motivation is really valuable.”
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So when you can volunteer, you can prove your value through the work you do, through your efforts. That beats any other kind of networking to me because you’re essentially auditioning for a job. And that audition is providing real value to someone. But it is proving, it is showing, and not telling. Showing, not telling. That’s the best kind of networking.
So that was a lot of questions. But they’re good questions. I think they’re important questions. Hence why this newsletter issue is a little bit different. So thanks for the questions, Rhino.
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