Want to become a data Analyst in 2024? | Learn these skills

Who is a data analyst?

Data analysts are those who are responsible for collecting data, processing that data, and performing analysis on that data.

Their goal is to find insights from large datasets to improve business and solve problems for organizations.

Before jumping into the topics, you should know the roles and responsibilities of a data analyst.

1. Data Collection and management
2. Analyze those data
3. Prepare Report
4. Providing Insights

Let’s jump into the technical skills that are required.

1. Learning Statistics

No statistics, no insights.

Statistics is one of the major parts of data analytics. Building a strong foundation in statistics is crucial for a data analyst. Having a good knowledge of high school mathematics is enough to start as a data analyst.

Areas that should be covered

• Fundamentals of statistics: Probability, descriptive statistics, etc.
• Hypothesis testing

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Learning resource: Statistics Tutorial

Learn form YouTube videos and take some courses to get better ideas.

2. Excel

Excel is an essential tool for a data analyst. Whether a company is a startup or a large one, they use Excel for everyday work.

You need to master certain things, not everything:

• Basic Understanding of Excel.
• Formulas
• Formatting
• Pivot table
• Power Query
• Basic visualization
• VLookUP, HLookUP, etc.

Learning Resource : Excel from W3Schools

For practice: Excel-practice-online

I recommend W3Schools for learning purposes as a beginner.

and, of course, YouTube videos.

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3. SQL

I don’t need to explain how important SQL is for the data profession. Most of the time, they are working with SQL queries to analyze data.

SQL is the key for data professionals.

Having said that, you don’t need to master everything. Nobody knows everything in SQL, but we should have a basic understanding of SQL and be able to solve problems.

20% of SQL can be useful for 80% of your work. If you know 20% of the SQL, you can solve 80% of the SQL problems.

You should have an understanding of

• SELECT
• FROM
• WHERE
• GROUP BY
• HAVING
• ORDER BY
• AND, OR, NOT
• Joins in SQL
• Aggregate functions (SUM, AVG, COUNT, MIN, MAX)
• Window functions
• CTE (Common Table Expression)
• CREATE, ALTER, UPDATE, DELETE

Once you have gone through these topics, you will be able to solve SQL questions, and the more you solve, the more you get.

Learning Resource: SQL W3Schools and YouTube Tutorials

Practice : SQL problems leetcode & HackerRank SQL problems

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4. Power BI/Tableau

Power BI and Tableau are the data visualization tools. With the help of these tools, we can create beautiful interactive dashboards.

Tableau performs better when the dataset is large, and PowerBI is faster when the data set is limited.

So, as a beginner, starting with Power BI is better than starting with Tableau.

• Understanding of Power BI and Its Components
• Data Insertion (Diff. ways)
• Data Modeling
• DAX functions
• Dashboard Creation

When we work on projects, we will get a better understanding.

Learning Resource : Power BI Tutorial & YouTube Videos

Practice : Practice with YouTube videos and Built Projects

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5. Python / R

Having a good understanding of Python will help you get into data analytics.

You don’t need to be a master of Python.

The basics of Python and some libraries are enough to go.

Things that you should know:

• Basic python syntax
• Variables and data types
• Conditional statement
• Loop
• Functions
• List, Tuple, Set, and Dictionary

Python Library for Data Analysts:

• NumPy
• Pandas
• Matplotlib
• Seaborn
• Scikit-learn

Learning resource: Python Tutorials

Practice : HackerRank

Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash

Nice! We are gaining a lot of skills from the above list.

The market is competitive, and competition is too high. So, you need to have extra skills to prove them.

Technical skills are not enough for data analysts. You should have some non-technical skills to stand out from others.

• Communication Skills
• Problem-Solving
• Critical Thinking
• Team Work
• Analytical Power

Hope this will help you to understand the skills needed for data analyst in 2024. If you like this article please follow me and don’t forget to subscribe 🔔🔔 so that you will get my new articles in the mail.

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