Do you want to learn data analyst
skills, and you are not sure where to
start? In this video, I am going to
provide 3 months step-by-step
roadmap to learn data analyst skills,
assuming you do 4 hours of dedicated
study every single day. Now you don't
need to have any prior background. You
could be a mechanical engineer
or even a person working in
totally different non-technical field.
You can still follow this roadmap using
online free resources,
do 4 hours study every day, and you
can learn essential skills that can help
you become a data analyst.
The first skill
that is needed is Microsoft Excel.
Believe it or not,
in the industry Microsoft Excel
is till date the most popular data
crunching tool.
So if your data set is smaller,
most of the time data analyst and data
scientists will be doing some type of
data analysis in Microsoft Excel. Now you
need to know certain features such as
basic Data filter functionality,
Functions,
Vba Macros, Pivot table, doing basic
charts and plots, and things like that.
Your first Excel data science project
could be managing your own personal
finances.
On Google docs there is a template
gallery for personal finances. So if you
click on this link, you will find
these templates where you can track your
monthly incomes and expenses. So if you
click on let's say monthly budget, you will
find this Excel file,
where you can enter all your monthly
expenses and then it will tell you how
much money is left after doing all these
expenses. So you're doing subtraction
basically, and you can also maintain
detailed transaction. Now in this Excel
file, if you look at any
of these cells you see the formula at
the top,
at the top. So these are the formulas
that you want to learn, so that you can
create nice visualizations like this,
because as a data scientist or data
analyst you will be involved in creating
these kind of visualization charts and
so on.
And working on your own personal
finances help you with that. You can also
do annual budget tracking, where
in one sheet you are maintaining all
your monthly expenses, on children, debt,
education and so on. In the other sheet
you have all your income,
and then you get a nice summary. So if
you look at
these charts right, see they have these
formulas. So these are the formulas you
want to learn.
If you look at
like different cells,
you will see how they come up with these
kind of
interactive
visualizations in Excel,
and
what you want to do is, you want to
create your own Excel file that can
maintain your monthly expenses and
income. And in the end you can plot the
trends in which month you are having the
maximum expense,
what is your trend of income overall,
month-to-month is it increasing or not?
So all of this you will be able to do in
Excel and in the end you are producing a
tool which is helping you.
So this gives you
a mental reward and you can continue on
your learning journey with passion.
There is this another website which has
a lot of templates. So I I downloaded
this family budget planner, and if you
look at that,
you will see
nice a planner like this, where
you can plot even these kind of bar
charts. See, if you look at this bar chart
there is some formula being used and
this is the formula that you want to
learn. So if you fill all these numbers
here, you will see these charts being
updated. So your goal is to
take inspiration from these files, and
you create your own uh budget tracker,
that will be the best beginner Excel
project that you can work on.
There is a YouTube channel called Chandoo,
and I suggest that you learn Excel
things from here. This guy is great he
explains
Excel really well. He also has this
website called chandoo.org
So if you are looking for any Excel
related help,
refer to this website and a YouTube
channel.
While you're learning Excel, you also
want to tackle statistics because
statistics is
used everywhere. So the first resource I
suggest is Khan Academy's basic course. So
if you look at this course,
it has a
very nice explanation using
visualization. It also has exercises. So
make sure you complete this course, and
you will learn
basic things about what is normal
distribution, the inferential statistics,
the descriptive statistics,
probability, the sample distribution,
uh summarizing quantitative data, and so
on. These are the concepts you want to
start with, and as you do more projects
you can learn
advanced topics. There is also a YouTube
channel for Khan Academy. So if you are
if you like watching YouTube, you can
watch the videos here as well. But if you
want that course, you will get a benefit
of doing exercises. So I suggest doing
that versus a YouTube channel.
There is another YouTube channel by
MartinStatsLectures,
this is also another great platform
where you can learn things like
different kind of charts,
histogram and density plots, box plot is
used for
outlier removal. So you want to learn all
these basic things.
The other channel that I suggest is Stat
Quest with Josh Starmer.
This person explains complex concepts in
a very simple manner using
visualizations. So if you have any doubt
on
statistics, any topic you're not sure
about, please refer to this channel. After
spending first 2 weeks in learning
Excel and statistics, you should spend
next 3 weeks which is week number
3, 4 and 5 in learning BI tools
such as Power BI, Tableau and Qlik Sense.
These are the 3 most popular tools
in the industry.
But you can learn just 1 or 2 tools.
Even if you learn 1 tool, that should
be good enough. Now these tools allow you
to connect to
different data sources. It could be Excel,
MySQL or MongoDB,
and you can pull the data and build
dashboards, and
different analytics. So for BI tools, as I
said 3 weeks.
If you want to learn Power BI, I have a
complete Power BI
sales insights project series, where I
took a real-time
scenario, real life scenario and I work
with my friend who is working for a data
analyst company in
U.K.
and we together did this project. So this
project is solving a real life problem
using Power BI, and this project
it covers uh how projects are executed
in corporate environment, in a
professional manner. So doing this
project series will not only learn you
teach you the technical skills, but it
will give you a glimpse of what happens
in the corporate life. So you you build
some soft skills as well, such as project
management for example. We we talked
about Aims Grid in
one of these initial videos. So that
touches based on how projects
such as data analyst projects are
managed overall.
For Tableau you can
follow this particular
playlist. For
Tableau again, there is another playlist
that I recommend you follow. So you can
just look at this playlist, these are
available on YouTube and you can learn
these things on your own. Now one thing
to keep in mind is that,
you want to spend
only only small amount of time in each
of these topics, and you want to move on
to the next topic. It's not like you
spend six months just learning Excel and
statistics. You should just have some
basic knowledge, move on to the next
topic, move on to the next topic and at
the end of the 3 months, you would
have covered
uh the basics of all different topics
and then you can start working on
projects. Projects are very important. So
your learning will be a continuous
process. It's not like you learn these
things for 3 months and and that's
it. You will be constantly learning the
the
the new things. But these 3 months
base learning will set a solid base for
you, so that you can continue your
journey smoothly. The next important
thing is Python programming language.
Sometimes people prefer R as well, but if
you're confused you always go with
Python. You want to spend week number 6
and 7 in Python.
Now these 2 weeks
you will learn just the basics of the
programming language. Now many people are
afraid of programming language. They'll
be like, "Ooh! How am I going to learn it?
Coding is not my cup of tea!"
Well Python is very very easy. Even a
high school student can learn it. So give
it a try. Remove all those biases that
you have in your brain, that you are not
made for coding. Python is like English
okay? It's super easy.
So just do it, do not give excuses.
For Python, I have a very easy to follow
tutorial playlist. So if you click on
this link, you will find this list where
you need to follow only first 16
tutorials. Now I have exercises as
well for these tutorials. So if you
go to this particular folder, you see
this folder,
and if you go to all these individual
folders, for example read and write file,
I have an exercise here. So after
watching the video if you do these
exercises, it will consolidate your
understanding and your Python
programming improve by whole lot.
If you want to see Python tutorials in
Hindi,
then I have Hindi tutorials as well. So
you can just say Codebasics Hindi
Python,
and then that will show you
my Hindi tutorials. So
these things are very very easy. It can
be done in a matter of 2 weeks.
You should spend next 2 weeks, week
number 8 and 9 in learning
Numpy, Pandas and data visualization.
Numpy and pandas are essential libraries
in Python that allows you to do data
analytics. For example Pandas has a thing
called a dataframe which is a
two dimensional, it's it's a two, it's a
table actually which allows you to do
SQL type operation in memory.
I have a playlist for both of this. So if
you look at Numpy,
like 4 videos 10 minutes. It shouldn't
take you long time to go over this. Then
for pandas you need to follow only 9
tutorials. I have complete list but
only first 9 videos are good enough.
After you learn Numpy and Pandas,
you also need to learn about
visualization library. You can learn
either Matplotlib or Seaborn. You don't
need to learn both, and I have tutorials
for both of it. So Matplot and Seaborn
and Matplot again.
7 videos 6 minutes each. So friends
how much time does it take? Like 6
minutes each, 7 videos 40 minutes you
will be done!
After you learned all these skills, it's
important that you apply those skills to
solve
on some projects. For that I recommend
you go to Kaggle and look at all the
notebooks and the datasets that we have.
See if you go to notebooks, you will find
many notebooks.
There will be many notebooks which will
be for machine learning. You don't need
to worry about machine learning as a
data analyst. So look at the notebooks
which are
focused on data exploration and data
analysis.
Usually when you're doing machine
learning project, like the first
part of your project is always data
exploration. So just do that and skip the
machine learning part.
You can find many public datasets in
Kaggle, so you see U.S. Election dataset.
So take these data sets and try to do
analysis in
Pandas, Numpy
and
Matplotlib.
After you spent 2 weeks on this,
the remaining weeks
should be spent in learning SQL.
I mentioned MongoDB here, but it's okay
if you don't even learn MongoDB.
Now let me close
all others tabs. Now for SQL,
Khan Academy's SQL course is highly
recommended. Here you will understand the
basics of relational database, what is
primary key, foreign key, joins,
relationship between the
the table, the SQL queries and so on.
Khan Academy is
very good, it is a non-profit uh portal.
It has videos, exercises, it is so good!
It's very easy to understand, even even a
stupid person can learn SQL so easily by
following this course. And there is this
Kudavenkat playlist, which I rec
keep on recommending all the time. Here
also you need to watch only first 16
videos.
Now this 3 month learning is not
just about technical skills. You need to
learn some soft skills. So the first
thing is how do you learn anything
effectively. For that I put together a
video,
where I'm talking about basically
spending
less time on input, and spending more
time on output. This is based on Nishant
Kasibhatla's
theory on how you can learn anything
really fast. So watch this video, simple
4 minute video. But
you will learn how to learn things very
effectively. So when you start this 3
month journey, the first thing is
watching this video, so that you can
follow that discipline during remaining
3 months.
Group learning is very important. If you
try to learn these skills on your own,
you know you might
be get demotivated. So for group learning,
I have this discord server
where
you know accept the invite whatever,
where you can find different channels on
my discord server, and you can find
uh your partners. In this partner and
group finder group, you can find partners
and you can
make a group and do this study together.
Having a partner
will uh
create an accountability. Also, if you
have question, you can always discuss.
So if you do group study, it is always
always the best thing. I have different
other different channels, where you can
you know discuss different topics such
as Python, SQL and so on. So make use of
this discord channel.
I have also mentioned
different books and resources:
Think Stats this is a free PDF book on
statistics.
Another
good book on statistics is Naked
Statistic. This is not free, you have to
buy it.
I also have videos on see I have like
4 videos on mechanical engineers
uh transitioning to data analyst. For
example this video I did with my good
friend Hemanand, who is a data analyst
manager in a company working for a
company in U.K.
He
mentioned his story about
you know how he transitioned from
mechanical engineer background, to a data
analyst background. I have another video
of Chinmay who also did the same
transition, mechanical engineer two data
analyst. And then I have a video with
Hitesh
where he transitioned from B.Com to a
data analyst. So by watching all these
videos
you are learning a concrete skills. Let's
say you are doing B.Com right now, and you
want to do become a data analyst, you can
follow
some tips from Hitesh here and you can
make use of them.
After you learn these skills it's not
like someone is going to give you a job.
These are the base skills which makes
your foundation solid.
But after that you have to work on
projects. You have to work on as many
projects as you can.
Now I only have a sales inside project
series on my channel. I'm planning to do
another
project on Tableau,
and I might have more projects uh on my
channel in future. So if you're watching
this video in the future,
you will find all the useful links below.
But if you don't then
find try to find projects on your own,
and make a solid project portfolio.
After that,
you need to build a solid resume. For
resume also, I have done couple of uh
sessions
on a resume review with some experienced
data analyst, and I have some
data analysis resume templates as well.
All the links are in video description
below, and you can
use those
resources to build a solid resume. And
then there are some tips on how to build
connections on LinkedIn, etc. So try to
make connections with
data analysts who are already working in
the industry. So when their company is
hiring maybe you can use those
connection to get some referral and get
interview calls. So overall
it will be a long process.
3 months is just to learn base skills,
after that it might be many many months
before you get a job.
But the interesting thing is
you don't have to spend much money. You
just can learn these things on your own.
All you need is a willpower, an internet
connection and a laptop. So I hope you
like this video. If you did, please give
it a thumbs up! If you have any question
please give it,
leave a comment.
I try to respond to
the
comments which I get in first 2 days
okay? So if have question,
please post a comment, I will try my best
to respond. Thank you!