The most difficult job to land is your first one as a data analyst. Your second job will be much simpler to obtain once you have some experience. By the time you are looking for your third job, it will seem like a stroll in the park and you will have only the most exciting alternatives to select from.
A rewarding route can be found in business intelligence and analytics. It can be rewarding in many ways, and if you’ve gained some experience, supply and demand will work in your favour.
This is all accurate. Unfortunately, it does not directly address the query on a lot of students’ minds right now.
How can I get a Data Analyst Jobs if I don’t have any experience?
That is the topic we will cover today. This article’s guidance is intended primarily for aspiring data analysts who are looking for their first job in the industry. But, a lot of this knowledge should still be helpful if your objective is to secure your first “Data Science” position or first position in any industry.
We should first divide the larger issue into a few separate areas that we may examine.
- Which abilities can you develop to increase your worth and appeal?
- How do you make sure that when you are seen, you look great?
- What can you do to ensure that more employers see you?
- How can you get ready to convert a job offer from a job interview?
In this post, we’ll concentrate on steps 1 through 3—the things you should be doing to improve your chances of getting a job interview invitation.
Which skills can you acquire that will make you more valuable and attractive?
Here, we’ll concentrate on the particular technical competencies, or “tools,” that employers find most appealing. Yet, keep in mind that the greater picture is not just about technical proficiency. Here is a summary of some of the qualities that hiring managers may look for in candidates for data analyst positions. In this post, we will concentrate primarily on technical skills because we go into further detail about these in the Analyst Interview Prep Guide:
Fit with culture
aptitude for addressing quantitative problems
General business acumen
Self-teaching Capability Communication
excitement about the chance
Let’s discuss tools. Where should you begin your education if you wish to become an analyst?
Excel is widely used. You will have a difficult time, in my opinion, finding a competent organisation that isn’t using Excel in some capacity. You may be sure that Excel will put your abilities to use in almost any business.
Excel, in my opinion, is the ideal starting place for a career in data. Even without prior coding or database experience, learning Excel is still rather simple. Also, it allows you a tonne of room to later diversify your focus and add value.
You can practice “column and row thinking” using spreadsheets, which will be helpful if you ever decide to switch to SQL, Tableau, or Power BI.
Learning Due to how simple it is to modify Excel formulas and data inputs, this method of gaining a foundation in logical “programmer thinking” is probably Excel formulas.
Without writing a single line of code, pivot tables are a powerful and simple way to begin segmenting your data into groups you can study.
With Excel’s built-in graphing features, you can practice data visualization.
If you find yourself performing the same operations again in Excel, you can look into using VBA for automation.
Excel performs admirably on its own and works nicely with many other programmes. There are analysts who become so proficient with Excel thanks to all of the characteristics mentioned above that they can base their entire careers on it. Others will combine Excel skills with other tools, but I can promise that even if they go on to become “SQL guys” or “Python gurus,” Excel will always be useful to them.
Check out Maven’s Excel Expert Path for a solid foundation of the many Excel abilities you should attempt to acquire if you believe Excel is a suitable fit. It can still be an excellent outline for your studies even if you are not interested in Maven’s courses.
- SQL for data management and retrieval
- Tools for creating dashboards, such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI
- software for web analytics, such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel
- modelling programmes like Python and R (avoiding SAS and SPSS)
Although I believe they are in the right order, there is also a very good case to be made that it depends on what you are most enthused about. Increase the priority of one of these buckets if you have a great interest for it. Genuine excitement, which will sustain you when things are difficult, is the best indicator of success in any of these.
A word of caution: if you are genuinely interested in modelling and data science tools like R and Python, I strongly advise you to start with SQL. I understand, I promise. The prepared datasets you will use in a data science course make modelling and data science work a lot more fun. Yet, nobody offers you that dataset on the job or in the real world. If you want to provide value, you’ll need to figure out how to do your own research and build the dataset for your modelling projects. Without knowing how to use SQL to access data, being proficient in R or Python on your own makes you somewhat impractical and less likely to independently provide value.
If coupled with someone who can combine data sets for them, a person like this might be useful in some exceptional cases, but this is the exception and not what you should be looking for. Be “full-stack,” or complete. Be able to get the data, organise it properly, conduct the modelling, and then convert your conclusions into practical business advice. I would hire someone like that. SQL combined with R or Python is that.
If the information above isn’t convincing enough, here are some other reasons to learn SQL:
Almost every business that deals with huge and complicated data sets uses SQL. SQL is often used to access data that is typically kept in a relational database.
Similar to Excel, studying SQL equips you with a talent that is highly transferable throughout industries.
It’s not too difficult to learn SQL. In terms of coding languages, SQL is fairly straightforward. You wish to choose the customer table’s address column’s data. SELECT address FROM customers is what you type. Done. The syntax is fairly easy to learn. Being a “code man” myself, I’m not. I never took a computer science course. I got a book on SQL and studied it. You too can learn. It’s really not that horrible.
