22 Jul 2022

8 In-Demand Data Analyst Skills For 2022| Ekeeda

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8 In-Demand Data Analyst Skills For 2022

A data analyst is one who collects, cleans, and does the interpretation of BIG data sets in order to answer a question or solve a particular problem. They will work for various industries like healthcare, logistics, shipping, finance, science, government bodies, Oil, gas, or power sector, etc. The data the analyst derives is as such: what kind of customers should a business target in the next ad campaign? What’s the age group most vulnerable to some form of disease? Where does the customer like to travel a lot? What patterns in behaviour are connected to financial scams? etc. Let’s dig deep into our blog about who is a data analyst and what key skills you need to have in 2022 to ace the position:

What Is Data Analysis?

It’s the process of collecting valuable insights from data to make better and informed business decisions. The process of analyzing data typically revolves around five phases: namely - Identify the data, Collect the data, Clean the data and get ready for analysis, do data analysis, and interpret the results of the analysis. Data analysis can take various forms based on the questions you’re trying to answer. You can read more about the types of data analysis on google. Briefly, the descriptive analysis will tell us what has happened, diagnostic analysis tells us why it happened and further predictive analytics forms projections about the future, and finally prescriptive analysis creates actionable advice on what actions to take.

Who Is A Data Analyst?

A data analyst is a person who will use technical skills to analyze data and report insights. On a typical day, a data analyst may use various skills as per the requirements such as: SQL skills to pull data from a database, Programming skills, mainly coding for data analysis, and communication skills to report their findings. Data analysis is one of the peripherals of data science and it’s the hottest career field in the market. But which data analyst skills are most important to land a job? To derive the answer to this question, we have performed various research including interviews with brilliant data analysts, data scientists, and recruiting officers.

Curious to learn data science? Check out our blog: All about Data Science and Career Opportunities and take a headstart today!

What Tools Does A Data Analyst Use?

For some data analysts, there is a wide variety of tools to bring accuracy and efficiency to their work. Some of the most common tools that the data analytics industry includes are: Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, SQL, Tableau, R or Python, SAS, Microsoft Power BI, and Jupyter Notebooks.

What Are The Key Skills Required For Data Analyst?

Due to the data science tools, your role will vary based on the company, sector, process, or industry. Thus, we have to focus on skills and not on tools such as SQL, Tableau, Power BI, etc.

Here are the eight must data analysts’ skills you need to ace the game:

  • Data Cleaning & Preparation
  • Data Analysis & Exploration
  • Statistical knowledge
  • Create Data visualizations
  • Create Dashboards & Reports
  • Written & Communication Skills
  • Domain Knowledge
  • Problem Solving Skills

Let’s understand them one by one in detail:

Data Cleaning & Preparation

Data cleaning & preparation will consist of about 70-80% of the work of most data professionals. Thus, it’s one of the vital data science skills. A data analyst will commonly require to retrieve data from one or more sources and prepare it for numerical and categorical analysis. Data cleaning will also involve resolving missing and data inconsistencies that will affect the analysis. Data cleaning in data analytics might not always be exciting, but data preparation is challenging yet fun when treated with problem-solving skills; we’ll come to that in a later part of our blog.

Data Analysis & Exploration

Data analysis is one of the crucial skillsets that you need to possess in your arsenal.  Another important skill includes data exploration. Data exploration mainly includes looking for the interesting trends or relationships in the data that bring value to the business or key areas for profits. A business question might guide exploration, but it might also be relatively unguided. When looking for data patterns, you may come across various opportunities for the business to decrease costs or increase growth.

Interested in this skill? Check out our beginner-friendly data analytics online training courses.

Statistical Knowledge

Probability & statistics are important data analyst skills that go hand-in-hand. This knowledge will guide your analysis & exploration and also help you decipher the data. Additionally, understanding statistics will also help you to make sure your analysis is valid, and avoid common faults & logical errors. The kind of statistical knowledge you require will vary based on the demands of your particular role & the data you work with. For instance, if your company relies on probabilistic analysis, then you’ll need a deep understanding of such areas

Create Data Visualizations

Data visualizations will clarify data trends & patterns. Humans are visual creatures — which means people understand charts or graphs better and quicker than a spreadsheet presented to them. Thus creating clean, visually compelling charts will help others to understand your discoveries. It also means avoiding things that are either difficult to interpret (such as pie charts) or that can be misleading (like manipulating axis values). Visualizations even prove very important in your data exploration. Sometimes, there are things that you can see visually in data that want to be visible when you look through numbers and figures. It’s rare to find a data science role that won’t need data visualization, and thus it becomes a key data analyst skill.

Interested in this skill? Learn in-depth about Data Visualization through Ekeeda Data Science Program

Create Dashboards & Reports

As a data analyst, you’ll need to help others to take key business decisions with confidence. By building dashboards & reports, you’ll give others access to data that is free of technical barriers. This might take the form of a simple chart & a table with date filters, or it may be a sophisticated dashboard that will contain hundreds of interactive data points. The job description and need might vary from process to process, but every data analyst has to produce reports on their findings or build dashboards to showcase them.

Written & Communication Skills

The ability to talk and communicate in various forms might be an out-of-the-box yet important data analyst skill. Communication skills are all about Writing, speaking, explaining, and listening to others that will help you achieve your analytical goals and convey the right message to stakeholders, fellow employees, and clients. Communication is the key when you collaborate with your colleagues. For instance, in a meeting with business stakeholders, you need to carefully listen to help you better understand the analyses they require. Similarly, during your project, you need skills to explain complex topics to non-technical teammates in layman’s terms. Written communication is also equally important — especially when you write a summary or report to explain the data discovery, analysis, and exploration. To communicate clearly & directly is a skill that will advance your data career. It will be a “soft” skill, but don’t underestimate it. Even the best analytical skills prove worthless if you can’t explain what they mean and if you can’t convince the audience to work or act on your discoveries.

Domain Knowledge

It’s about understanding the topics and findings that are specific to the industry or the type of company you’re working for. For instance, if you’re working for a cab service, then you need to understand the nuances of travelling rules, roads, pick and drop, charges, etc.  If you’re analyzing data about mechanical systems, then you might need to understand how these specific systems work. No matter where you work if you don’t understand what you analyze then you won’t be able to execute your work in a proper way and making things difficult for you. It’s certainly something that you can adapt and learn on the job. However, if you know a specific industry or area you’d like to work in, then build as much understanding as you can to make you more attractive for the job position and - a more favourable employee once you get the job.

Problem-Solving

Last and not least, as a data analyst you will come across a lot of problems, bugs, and roadblocks in a typical day’s time. Being able to solve problems in your style is another key skill that will prove valuable as a data analyst. 
Some possible scenarios that you should learn to handle with skills:

  • You might need to research a quirk of some software or coding language 
  • Your company might have resource constraints thus, you need to innovate how you approach a problem.
  • The data you gather is incomplete, not clear, or rather not so good for the company. 
  • You have to do lots of rigorous data analysis due to particular deadline

But whatever may be the circumstances, strong problem-solving skills will an incredible asset in your arsenal as a data analyst. 

Other Data Analyst Skills 

The exact definition of ‘data analyst’ will vary based on your company and process, so not necessarily all of these skills are required for a data analyst. Similarly, there may be skills some companies will need it might not be on this list. Our focus is to develop skill sets that most data analyst roles require in order to create the best data analyst learning paths for aspirants.

Grab The Best Data Analyst Jobs

If you want to build your technical skills you need to successfully get a data analyst job in the market, for this, you can check out our interactive data science online course. This course is taught by world-class data practitioners, with an industry-relevant curriculum & capstone projects that give insights into real-world projects and working. Ekeeda unique and project-based learning style will help you develop confidence, learn quickly and retain concepts to stand out from the rest. Learndata science skills you need to work as a data analyst with the top edtech platform. Sign up now and get access to interactive Data Science with Python, R, and SQL content.

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