A data analyst is a person whose job is to gather and interpret data in order to solve a specific problem. The role includes plenty of time spent with data, but entails communicating findings too. A data analyst gathers, cleans, and studies data sets to help solve problems. Read our career guide article about what data analysts do.
It is valuable to learn about how to be a data analyst because companies in almost every industry would benefit from the work done by data analysts. The insights brought forth by data analysts are extremely valuable to employers who want to learn more about customers, marketing trends, and future scenarios. Data analysts are responsible for the ground-level work of seeing trends and patterns that help businesses eventually decide to make major organizational moves.
Typical career opportunities for data analysts are in major insurance companies; large technology companies like Oracle, IBM, and Siemens; financial credit bureaus; consumer and B2B technology firms; financial firms; and cloud data companies. Data analysts can find jobs in a variety of roles in creative fields as well, as data is researched and used in the marketing, advertising, broadcasting, and film industries too.
When you take online courses to be a data analyst, you have the opportunity to learn how to use statistical techniques to acquire data from key sources. You might also uncover key data analysis concepts in Python programming, data science, pivot tables, data visualization, and more. Online courses can expose you to new insights on how to identify, analyze, filter, clean, and report on data that show trends or patterns that have been researched in complex data sets.