If you're curious what a data analyst or data scientist does on a day to day
basis, this is the video for you. I spent years working as a data analyst, managing
analysts and data scientists, and working with people in these roles at other
companies. I've summarized what you can expect in the day-to-day role regardless
of what company you're working at. So stay tuned to get all the details. I'm
Jen with The Career Force. We help smart, career minded people stand out in
today's job market. We post new videos every week with all of the latest career
insights so subscribe and turn on notifications so you're the first to
know the latest career news. Day to day work in data analysis jobs consists of three
major things: process, data, and math. There's lots of other details that go
into the day-to-day work of this job or any other job, but these are the three
core pieces that are going to take up 95 - 99% of your job so let's look at each
of them. Process. When I'm talking about process, I'm not just talking about the
data analysis process, but I'm talking about the overall problem-solving
process. Your real value to a company as a data analyst is being able to take a
problem or a wanted outcome and figure out how to get from here to there. It's
really kind of like a math proof where you're taking all of the things that you
do know to find the answer to something that you don't know and explain
something that you don't know. So the process involves all of the information
gathering from the stakeholders that are presenting you with a problem that needs
solved to investigating what the real desired
outcome is, not just what the question being asked is. All of these pieces go
into that process so this is probably going to involve meetings, whether it's
one-on-one or in groups. It's going to be calling and talking to different people.
This process piece also is going to be some amount of research - looking for if
this has been addressed before or other pieces of information you might need as
inputs. The process piece is a lot of times mostly
on the front end, but there's a key piece that happens on the back end as well.
That's how you communicate your analysis and results back to the people that need
it or to the people that are going to make some sort of decision or take an
action off of it. Within that process it's how do you visualize the data? How
do you communicate in whatever form necessarily necessary? Whether it's
written or in person, you need to be able to communicate well and that's also part
of that process step for an analyst.
On this process step,
expect to spend about 20 to 30 percent of your time on this. In some cases, you
may spend even longer. There is such a critical piece of the work that's about
understanding what the problem really is and all of the necessary things that
influence it to be able to make sure that the answer you provide is correct
and then providing that answer at the end of your analysis work. Once the
problem is clear, you can move on to the data step of the work. Data is where
you're going to spend probably fifty to eighty percent of your time. This
consists of three major things. It's gathering the data, cleaning the data, and
processing the data. Depending on the problem you're working on and the
company you're working at or with, the gathering the data may already be done
for you for the most part. You may have easily accessible databases to go get
all the information you need. In other cases, you might have to do this yourself.
You might have to go to different stakeholders or go online and gather
some market information to use as inputs to your analysis. Then, you'll
clean the data. This is going through, it's understanding it, it's also making
corrections where needed - removing outliers or things that shouldn't be
included in the analysis. This can take a lot of time, but understanding all of
this is really necessary before you start processing everything. Then the
third step - processing the data. This is actually going through and doing
programming or using the different data tools that you have available to analyze
the work. Again, most of your work as an analyst
day-to-day is going to be spent on this part of the step. Lastly is math.
A lot of people go into analyst roles because they really like math and that
was the case for me as well. I really like math, but what I really like is the
logic side. What I found is, I really like data analyst work and the
day to day activity, but most analysts don't do that much math. There's
certainly math involved and mathematical principles involved in the day to day
life of a data analyst, but a lot of the work is really more about the data and
the process, and the math is maybe 10% of the actual work. Because
your bigger challenge is to figure out how to solve the problem and then apply
a little bit of math to solve the problem. Then you may also be setting
things up so that it's repeatable, but this math step - while those skills are
extremely useful - is going to be the smallest part of most data analyst jobs.
Do you have a better idea what a data analyst job consists of? If you work as
an analyst today, I'm curious how the split at your job looks like. Is it the
majority in the data side and the minority in the math side? Or some other
mix all together? Let me know in the comments. Thanks so much for watching.
I'll see you in the next video