Hi. I'm Jen. I have over 15 years of experience working as an analyst and
managing analysts so I exactly what options you have for a data analyst
career path. Today we're going to look at four of the most common data analyst
career paths and why you might choose to go down each of these paths. Are you
ready for an analytics career?Get the comprehensive guide "How to Become a Data
Analyst". Topics include key skills and how to build them, career paths, gaining
experience, and launching your career. Check out the link in the description
for more. The four main paths that your data analyst career might take will
generally be you'd be a specialist, a subject-matter expert, a manager, or you
would take varying lateral positions related to analytics or business. Each of
these has different career growth opportunities, different pay, different
responsibilities. Let's look a little bit at each one of them and what
different positions you're likely to hold in those careers. First let's talk
about specialists. Data analyst specialists career paths would be people
that want to stay in a technical role. For this data analyst career path you
would likely start out either as a data analyst or maybe a junior or associate
analyst depending on your experience and background and the levels the company
you're going into has. Some companies have multiple levels, some lump everyone
into the same title even with varying levels of experience. From there you
would progress to a senior data analyst position and then - depending again on the
options at different companies - a lead data analyst or a principal data analyst
type role. You might also move into a data scientist role. With this data
analyst career path you're really going to be honing your technical skills.
You're going to be building more programming skills. You're going to have
a lot of really strong statistical and analytical skills. You're likely going to
be integrated to some degree in the business where you will be building a
reputation as an expert or guru in data. The second data analyst
career path option is a subject matter expert or SME. These people may not be
the most technical analysts, but they are the go-to expert on data in a certain
area. Data analyst subject matter experts are THE authority when it comes
to a particular industry or business area or technology. For instance you may
choose to be a subject matter expert in HR or maybe you're a health information
systems data analyst or perhaps a warranty data analyst or financial data
analyst. You can get even more microscopic within those areas. Maybe
you're an expert in financial data as it relates to the banking industry or the
corporate world. If you pursue a subject matter expert career path, it may look
very similar in job title to a technical or a specialist data analyst.
You'll probably enter at, again, a junior level, associate or regular data analyst,
progress up to a senior and then a lead or a principal role even though your
responsibilities will be a little bit different than that technical person. The
other branch that this area might take as a subject matter expert is you may
move into more business analyst roles or project management roles because you
become the expert in that data so you have some versatility on what you can do
with it while still remaining within an analytic
sphere. As a subject matter expert, you're also closely connected with the business
and building a good network so this could be a great avenue for people that
really love data but also really love interacting with other people and
working in the business on specific business problems. The third path you
could choose is a management path. Again, you'll start out at that associate,
junior, or regular data analyst role, possibly move through a senior or
directly to some sort of a team lead role where you have a responsibility for
a certain area or a group of people but you're maybe not directly
a manager. And then you can move into management whether that's of analysts or
other people. This is personally the career path that I took. I have a lot of
technical expertise in analytics and I have a subject-matter expertise
particularly in warranty, but I actually ended up managing groups of people. First
a group of analysts and then a broader group of people doing more things within
the organization. If you decide to pursue the management path, one of your biggest
challenges is probably going to be stepping back from the details of the
data. You simply won't have time to be as hands-on in the data as you are as an
analyst. This doesn't have to be a bad thing and those skills are still going
to transfer because all of the skills that you learn to do analytics are going
to be useful as you analyze problems and challenges, but you're also going to
spend a lot more time connecting with people and managing people and having
the higher level picture of everything that's going on. So that's your third
option - main option at least - for a data analyst career path. The fourth option is
making lateral moves. As you're connected in with the business and working on
different topics, you are likely going to be building up your network in the same
way that a subject matter expert would and so you could look at lateral moves
within the organization or within parallel organizations to grow your
career. This is completely wide open as to what it looks like for you personally.
Some of the more common fields that would be lateral moves for people would
be moving into a business analyst role, moving into an Enterprise Architect type
role, moving into a programmer role. These are fairly common and have a lot of
overlap with the skills that a data analyst or a data scientist would have
which make them a common data analyst career path to take. If you want an N=1 sample of what a data analyst career path might look like I
already made a video on my analytics career path I'll put a link to that in
the description so you can go check it out and see how I navigated starting as
a data analyst and moved up to being a director in a corporate role. If you
liked this video and want to see more things like this, leave me a comment or
like the video and let me know what questions do you have about a data
analyst career? Which one are you going to pursue or are you already pursuing?
There's so many different options and there are so many different niches that
you can go into that can be a lot of fun as you grow your data analyst career. See
you next time!