What are the skills you need to learn to become a Data Analyst
No need of Machine Learning or other buzz words for a lot of organisation needs. Having good Data Analysis skills will open various opportunities for you. Moreover, soft skills you could learn during our projects are, in our opinion, even more important than the technical skills (that you could always learn by yourself and experience on various exercises and projects). If you are new to Data Analytics and you want to do a career shift, Data Analyst are the more accessible and in demand, at the middle between business decision and tools expertise.
Source: ITcareercentral
Hard skills you should experiment
Spreadsheet (because a lot of problems can be solved with advanced spreadsheet). To have collaborative tools and same technology, we will recommend Excel or Google Sheets to manipulate Data, visualise and analyse raw Data & extract insights.
Data visualisation (Tableau is a leader, Power BI is progressing a lot, Qlik is still used a lot, plenty of players are catching up, and open source visualisation is possible with code.) However, we will begin with an easy & free tool (even if not the best in the market, Google Data Studio) for the same reasons than Google Sheets.
Statistics & Probabilities (because analysing numbers needs a basic understanding of statistics to be able to extract conclusions that have a meaning.) 3 is greater than 2 but a difference of 1 dollar when we talk about millions has no meaning. Online courses as Khan Academy, blogs like Towards Data Science or youtube videos are always good content to start with.
SQL (when Data is not stored in a spreadsheet but in a database, you need to learn this new language to manipulate efficiency the information and extract insights) You can test your first queries for free without installation with W3C
Python (It is the new standard when you need more advanced Data preparation pipelines, visualisations, applications, predictive Analytics). It is a wide topic but a good Data manipulation leveraging on Pandas package is a good start and will cover most of the needs. Google Colaboratory offers an interesting notebook solution to collaborate with no need to install anything (as before)
Business presentation (because mastering any technical skills without being able to share about it, is the worst situation) You should be able to understand and share insights properly. Being able to tell stories is having more value for your audience than your technical skills in most of the case as only your peers understand your jargon.
Do not be afraid by the amount of technical skills, you just have to begin somewhere. There is no unicorn and some people are better to tell stories, others to manipulate efficiently Data while others know what they want to have as insights but do not have the technical skills for. Data & AI are creating new opportunities and specialisations, if you master Data Analytics, you will have plenty of opportunities with your personal strengths.
So take your computer and begin your learning journey with us now !