Data analysis is the process of collecting data, creating visualizations, interpreting the results using reporting tools, and then evaluating the results to understand if it will solve a particular business problem. A data analyst is a good career option, as is a data scientist or software developer engineer. In this article, I’ll walk you through how to become a data analyst.
What is The Role of a Data Analyst?
A data analyst is someone responsible for working with data to solve a particular business problem. It is very useful for all large multinationals especially companies based on products and services to have an analyst as it adds a lot of value to the organization while understanding and interpreting the results of the data.
The role of a data analyst begins with a problem statement. First of all, you need to understand what the problem is and what should be your approach to solving this problem based on the business environment. Then you need to form a few questions to break the problem statement into small steps. In this step, you will create simple steps like what data should be useful for this problem and where you will get the data from. Next, you need to collect the most appropriate data for your problem statement. Then you need to analyze this data based on the business problem, find the result and understand what that result means.
Most of the time, the result you get is in the form of numbers that cannot be easily understood by management and the decision-makers, so you have to interpret the results in the form of dashboards, visualizations, and storytelling. This is what the role of a data analyst is.
How To Become a Data Analyst?
I hope you now have understood who is a data analyst and what is the role of a data analyst. Now to become a data analyst, you have to learn some tools and technologies that will help you to work with data. Before getting into the tools and technologies that you need to learn you should also know about the business environment. You should be able to solve most of the problems by doing research and understanding the business environment. For this, you need to keep reading about the growth of startups and how some big tech companies escaped failures.
Tools and Technologies:
Below are the tools and technologies that you need to learn to become a data analyst:
- SQL:Â SQL is the language of data. While working with data you should be good at querying data from a database. Learning SQL by using MySQL will be a good start.
- Excel:Â Excel is still used in working with data and as a reporting tool. By learning Excel I mean to say you have to learn how to create visualizations and do calculations in a cell by using the advanced formulas provided in Microsoft Excel.
- Python:Â Python and R are the most used programming language for working with big data. But Python is more suitable than R because of the support of libraries and frameworks. You do not have to learn all the libraries in Python for data analysis. Only learn the fundamentals of Python and then start learning NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, and Plotly.
- Tableau: Tableau is a great tool that can be used for visualizing data by using dashboards. This is one of the tools that you will use a lot as a Data Analyst.
Finally, keep upgrading your skills with the upgrading technologies but to get into data analysis the above roadmap is perfect. I hope you liked this article on how to learn data analysis. Feel free to ask your valuable questions in the comments section below.
