Important skills required for Data Analyst Career

Skills required to Make a Career in Data Analytics

If we had to put it in layman terms, a Data Analyst typically gathers, cleans, analyses data, that helps organisations to make informed business decisions. And it is very important to understand skills required for data analyst career.

SKILLS and TOOLS are big words, that make a defining statement about a job profile. Skills typically means the ability required to expertise yourself at something. While Tools refer to all the necessary equipment required to display your expertise at something. This blog will explore all the necessary SKILLS that a Data Analyst must posses to make it big in the IT space.

1. Cleaning it up! – A Data Analyst usually inherits a mess in the form of ad-hoc data. 80% of the task revolves around cleaning, organising, and later preparing the data for analysis. The jobs hardly but began! Somewhere in between, a good Data Analyst will apply their skill at managing and interpreting the sketchy and missing data too!

2. The Analysis – Organisations often have important business questions that need to be addressed. A Data Analyst should apply their analytical and logical insights at acquiring the answers. With the data possessed a precisioned Data Analyst should be able to gauge the relevance of the addresses question. Fittingly harnessing evolving trends to a company’s advantage, is a responsibility that falls on the shoulders of a data analyst.

3. Love for Statistics – A pictorial representation of data using an array of patterns could help the analyst to make better sense of the data acquired. Statistical insights can help eliminate unwanted mistakes giving onlookers a better insight on the expected answers to the posed business questions.

4. Creating Data Visualisation – One of the tools that a data analyst should master, it to find their way around EXCEL. But if you think of it from a layman’s perspective, the idea of staring at an Excel sheet filled with numbers sounds a little more like a death-knell! It is a data Analysts job to create interesting visualisations around the acquired data. This also means eliminating every scope of misconception and misinterpretation! After all, the idea is, to wake up to the prospects of profitability!

5. Creating Dashboards and reports – This would literally mean, getting the raw data, cleaning it, analysing it, and then undoing the technical blips, to grant access to all the important points enabling the management to take actionable decisions.

The data will later appear in the form of a simple chart or table, with all the necessary filters, comprising of data points that can automatically update itself. The profile of a Data analyst will vary from position to position, but producing reports and building on dashboards is quintessential.

6. The Ability to Communicate – This skill forms the very crux of any profile. The ability to communicate does not only mean understanding the language, but it also means knowing how to speak, read, write and take instructions in the language. Communication is the key to collaboration.

Well, Imagine analysing all that data, and putting it into perspective, but you are not able to communicate all that you have explored and analysed, it could defeat the purpose of you becoming an analyst!

7. Understanding Dynamics – Domain knowledge will vary form company to company. Hence it is necessary for a Data Analyst to understand the working paradigms and evolving trends in each industry. For example, it you are working for a healthcare company, it becomes quintessential to understand the nuances of the advancing dynamics in the IOT and healthcare space. Understanding trends with each industry will come as a plus to any Data Analyst.

8. Problem solving – If you are the kind of person who shies away from challenges, you must then reconsider your position as a Data Analyst. As a Data Analyst, you will meet with blips and bumps, and might also go on dates with random half baked pieces of information that need to be bridged, but well, this is what we’d like to add the sexiest part of the job, and the icing on the cake! So if you have the strength to look at problems in the eye, then dance your way up the ladder while you successfully essay this profile.

The above mentioned skills are what we’d term as ‘THE MOST RELEVANT SKILLS that should be possessed by a Data Analyst, there is way more that can be added to the list, but this will vary form domain to domain!