4 Areas Every New Analyst Should Focus

You’re a data analyst. It’s your first day. You don’t know anything.

Blank Whiteboard — Wikimedia Commons

Day One

Once you’ve finished the company onboarding, someone or, more likely, multiple people are already telling you all of the initiatives they want on your radar. So you’ve got to build a new dashboard, integrate a new data source, fix existing models. In the meantime, someone from the tech or security team has granted you the keys to the database kingdom. Tens or hundreds of databases to query, a link to hundreds of architecture artifacts (if you’re lucky), and a Tableau login; all yours.

Where do you start?

Many people, including myself, have and would simply ask a few top-level questions, glance at the artifacts, and jump straight into writing queries. Some might even argue that the best way to learn the data is by getting your hands in it. But is it the most efficient way? Remember all of those initiatives queued up?

In the previous two articles, I discussed the need to propagate information literacy throughout the organization and the importance of having data analysts that can craft compelling narratives around that information. If you’re the data analyst, though, how do you make sure you understand the business, prioritize the proper deep dives, and…