5 Differences between Business Analyst and Data Analyst!

Archi Agarwal
Elucidation Today
Published in
3 min readApr 5, 2021

BUSINESS ANALYST
A Business Analyst is responsible for using data to inform about strategic business decisions.
A working knowledge of the technology involved in analytics is required, though the need for hard technical skills is generally lower. For those looking for career advancement opportunities, however, developing an advanced knowledge of Mathematics, CS, and Analytics can act as a significant differentiator in the job market. A business analyst requires adequate volumes of high-quality data, so organizations seeking accurate outcomes must integrate and reconcile data across different systems, then determine what subsets of data to make available to the business.

Job responsibilities:
•Evaluating business processes for efficiency, cost, and other valuable metrics.
•Communicating insights with business teams and key stakeholders.
•Preparing strategic recommendations for process adjustments, procedures, and performance improvements.
•To work on improving the organization’s revenue generation and upscale the business operations.
• Come up with resolutions for the company’s operations as well as outcomes concerned with those ideas.
•Working with clients and developing an understanding of issues, outline those problems and communicate them well to the organization, specifically to the programming team or a data analyst.

Skill Set required:
SWOT analysis, feasibility analysis of an organization, soft skills, critical thinking and good communication, Persuasiveness, MS-SQL, MS-Access, MS-Excel.

Qualifications Required:
Bachelor in fields relating to Business, Commerce and Economics.

DATA ANALYST
The job role of a Data Analyst comprises gathering the required dataset and then analyzing it. Data analysis is more complicated in terms of Statistics and Mathematics. Data Analysts also focus on finding relevant data from the primarily derived information.
To be effective in their roles, Data Analysts must possess the technical skills necessary for data mining, hygiene, and analysis, along with strong interpersonal skills to communicate their findings to decision-makers.

Job Responsibilities:
•Solve the problems outlined by business analysts through given data.
•Create conclusive reports and presenting the overview to further team members.
•Designing and maintaining data systems and databases, including troubleshooting potential issues.
•Mining and cleaning data in preparation for analysis.
•Preparing reports which effectively communicate their findings to organizational leadership and key stakeholders.

Skill set required:
•Knowledge of programming, Google Analytics, Good with numbers and Stats
•SQL, Microsoft Excel
•Programming languages such as R/Python
•Data modelling and Data Warehousing
•AWS

Qualifications Required:
Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Finance.
For senior positions, hiring managers often require or strongly prefer a graduate degree such as a Master’s degree in Analytics.

CONCLUSION:
A Data analyst and Business Analyst generally use data in different ways and have different educational backgrounds. However, each role requires many of the same skills and performance in similar tasks. Specifically, they both collect data, analyze it, break it down, and present it to decision-makers to help find the best ways to improve processes, increase workflow, and reduce costs.

Both analysts are able to draw informed conclusions based on their analysis. They then can present their findings to stakeholders, and make recommendations. Management and engineering teams use the information given to them to make informed, data-driven decisions about how to prioritize their work.

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