Today’s businesses are becoming more digitized, fast-paced, and tech-driven so data analytics skills are playing a vital role in businesses and going to have a significant impact on how companies use the technologies to run their business. It is an internal function performed by data analysts. This job role is becoming crucial in any type of business or organization which is using data in any form because it requires a much more in-depth approach to record, analyze, and dissect data and present the insights in an easier way/format.
Data Analysis is becoming more and more important in today’s business as it predicts customer trends and behaviors, analyzes, explains, and delivers data in a meaningful way, drives effective decision making, and increases customers and business productivity. Data analysts’ responsibilities are to analyze raw data that help business managers in decision-making to drive the company ahead, improve efficiency, achieve organizational goals, and increase profits for the company. It helps in better targeting the consumers as it enables us to understand what methods of advertising will have the biggest impact on the target audience because it already knows the target customers.
Data Analytics is an evolving field so it always innovates something new for future trends. It also helps to cut the cost of operations with its new technologies. Data analytics helps to solve business issues and assists the organization to run the business perfectly.
So this article will tell us more about Data Analytics skills to get in this domain, and how data analyst training helps you in gaining them.
What is a Data Analyst?
A Data Analyst is a professional who collects, organizes, and interprets statistical information to make it meaningful and useful for every type of organization and business. It scrutinizes information using data analysis tools. Data analysts identify various facts and trends that help their employer or client make an important decision to find meaningful results from raw data. They use advanced computerized models to extract the data and remove corrupted data. They perform the initial analysis to assess the quality of the data and perform further analysis to determine the worth of the data. Thereafter, they perform final analysis to provide additional data screening and meaningful insights to prepare reports which are based on the whole process of analysis and presenting to management.
Many typical employers such as banks, consultants, software development companies, telecommunication companies, public sector organizations, pharmaceutical companies are hiring data analysts to run their business smoothly.
Types of Data Analytics
There are four types of data analysis that are performed by different job roles in this domain.
- Descriptive analytics- It answers the question of what happened.
- Diagnostics analytics- It answers the question about why something happened.
- Predictive analytics- It tells us what is likely to happen.
- Prescriptive analysis- It tells us about what action to be taken to eliminate a problem or take full advantage of a trend.
Every business or organization needs a different type of analytics which depends on the current state, problems, and insights required for the company.
Top Data Analyst Skills
Top essential skills for data analysts are:
SQL
SQL or Structured Query Language is the industry-standard database language and is the most crucial programming language/skill for a data analyst to know as it handles large datasets easily. With SQL data analysts can manage and store data related to different and multiple databases, and build and change those database structures all along. So if someone wants to work with big data, learning SQL is a must.
Microsoft Excel
Data Analysts must learn Microsoft Excel also for writing Macros with advanced Excel Methods and VBA lookups for smaller lifts and lighter, quick analytics. For startups or new companies, the first version of the database will be in Excel as it has remained a mainstay for every business or industry.
Critical Thinking
For a data analyst critical thinking is a necessary skill to identify the problems, questions, and possible solutions using data. It uncovers and synthesizes connections that are not clear. So start improving your critical thinking skills to give tricky and quick solutions.
Python or R
Python and R are faster and better than Excel. They are powerful statistical programming languages that perform advanced analysis, predictive analysis for big data sets. These languages can take you beyond SQL to explore datasets and doing ad-hoc analysis.
Data Visualization
This skill will help to be able to tell a compelling story with data to get your point across and keep the audience engaged. Visualization of your data can make your findings quickly and easily identified.
Presentation Skills
It is closely related to Data visualization and goes hand-to-hand. As data analysts get more comfortable with the presentation, they can improve and focus more on the audience.
Machine Learning
It is considered the key component of an analyst’s toolkit. It is crucial to know how to get ahead in the field. The new advanced tool like Orange can help to start building machine learning models.
So every data analyst must achieve those skills to think out-of-the-box and advance the data analytics career.
Advantages of Taking Data Analytics Course
To learn data analytics and obtaining the certification is important to carefully analyze the data. So companies are better equipped for setting up future campaigns and goals. To achieve a certification course is beneficial because of the high demand for analytics skills, as employers are looking for ways to explore the power of big data. The trend of implementing big data is growing and is considered to be a high priority among global businesses. These courses also help you to get huge job opportunities and meet the skill gap as there is a shortage of data scientists, managers, and analysts. Strong demand for certified data analytics skills is boosting the salary packages for qualified professionals.
Today’s world of business is full of critical competition, so big data analytics has become a top priority in a lot of organizations because it provides the flexibility of working in any sector and better practice knowledge.
Conclusion
Data analytics has become a crucial tool for every company to solve major business problems and so are the professionals in this domain (data analysts, data scientists, data managers, etc). So if someone wants to land their career in this fascinating field of data analytics, start to find an online or offline data analytics program that offers several benefits depending on how a candidate is familiar with data analytics. Grab the opportunities and get your niche in data analytics.
