Data Analysts

 

 

             What do Data Analysts do?

           A Data Analysts main responsibilities includes finding, retrieving, wrangling, and delivering insights from data. Data Analyst also help to report and uncover meaningful insights from the data underlying products. Specifically, they are responsible for obtaining, analyzing, and reporting on data ranging from business metrics to user behavior and product performance.
For example, responsibilities may entail:

• Writing queries to retrieve data from a database and share them with right stakeholders
• Looking through user behaviors to find insights or trends that can be used to improve their company's product's performance
• Interpreting results of A/B tests and make product recommendations based on results 

           How to become one with or without formal education

                 As a Data Analysts it's important to have a strong combination of analytical (math/stats and programming), communication (presentation/data visualization) skills, systematic approach to problem solving with a high attention to detail, and the ability to apply them in a business context. Below we've outlined a few ways where you can learn some new skills.
There are a number of publicly available datasets on the web—they can be a great resource and provide you with opportunities to build up a portfolio of interesting independent projects. Our friends at Mortar have curated a master list of interesting data sets found by some of the best and well-known data scientists in the field today.
                  If machine learning is more your style, Kaggle competitions can be a great arena to hone your skills and prove yourself (some companies search the Kaggle leaderboards when hiring!).
                 If you want to present your findings through data visualization, you can create and share interesting visualization with others on sites like Many Eyes, Plot.ly, or Blocks.io.
                 To showcase your new skills and projects you can create your own website through GitHub pages, WordPress, Medium, or other webpage or personal blog platforms. 
         
             

The portfolio that gets you an interview

                 A good portfolio should showcase a series of projects and show the range of skills that you've learned.
Ideally these projects will demonstrate your:

• Hands-on experience with R, Pandas, Numpy, Scipy, Scikit-Learn or related data analysis tools
• Experience working with and wrangling very large (too big to fit into one spreadsheet), disparate and/or unstructured data sets
• Knowledge of machine learning and data-mining techniques
• Strong problem solving, math, statistics and quantitative reasoning skills

            Most importantly, these projects should demonstrate your outstanding communication skills. Specifically, showing that you can analyze complex data sets, find interesting insights, and present them in a clear and simple manner in the right business context.