What Does A Data Analyst Do?

By | October 25, 2019
Data Analyst

Data Analysts are one of the in-demand job holders of the 21st century. The roles and responsibilities of a data analyst are to collect, process, and perform statistical data analysis. A data analyst has to translate data and numbers into plain English as it helps the organization to understand the ways for making better business decisions. Almost every organization nowadays has to rely on data. When it comes to a data analyst, he will take the collected data to find out many things such as the way to deal with issues that cost money, the way to reduce transportation costs, and how to price new materials. Becoming a data analyst is undoubtedly a career-boosting opportunity. If you look forward to becoming a data analyst, Wagner College’s data science bootcamp will the best choice as it will help you to polish your skills in data science. Data analysts have certain responsibilities that help them to fulfill the organizational need.

Data Collection

The most technical requirement of a data analyst is to collect data. In a nutshell, it can simply be assumed that you will have to work together with developers for optimizing data collection. The data you collect must meet the standards and should provide the quality information that the organization aims to have. The key to a data analyst is to streamline the data collection. A data analyst has to work for developing the routines that can later on automated and modified to reuse in different areas. In order to streamline data, a data analyst is required to keep certain specialized tools and software which are helpful for him while dealing with data.

Reports Making

One of the foremost requirements of a data analyst is to be able to write the report effectively. The majority of the time of a data analyst is spent to produce and maintain the reports. One may not value the reports, but the reports produced by a data analyst give management insights regarding the new trends. The reports help to uncover the area that needs to improve within the organization. There is a high need for data analysts to create narratives with data. There are two types of workers in an organization; technical and non-technical. Whatever is written in the report can be understood by a data analyst regardless of the terminology used in it. However, the report is not to be read-only by the technical persons instead it is to be read by the non-technical individuals as well. In order to tackle this, a data analyst prepares the report in a way that can be understood by technical and non-technical persons.

Understanding Data

You may have learned that data is not useful as long as it has been converted into a piece of useful information. Even experienced individuals sometimes fail to understand the data unless it has been converted into information. In the case of a data analyst, he has to understand the data and tell others what it means. Your report is completely dependent on the data you have chosen. If the data analyst successfully understands the data and is able to portray it then a meaningful report can be made. Data provides the data analysts with trends and insights that can be used for making recommendations to the client. Every data has some patterns which guide the data analyst to make useful information from it. Therefore, he has to work by following an incremental approach as it will help him to notice significant patterns of data.

Teamwork

One of the misconceptions regarding a data analyst is that he works alone by himself and he does not collaborate with anyone. However, this is not the true case in any sense as there is a whole requirement for a data analyst to meet with each department person. A data analyst has to collaborate with a number of departments and meet the salespersons, executives, and marketers. If you take data science, Bootcamp classes, you will understand that a data analyst has to collaborate with database developers and data architects who work in data science. If you become a data analyst and you have been asked for a collaboration, the foremost requirement for you, in that case, would be to have effective communication skills. A data analyst is required to be a great communicator as it will help him to deal with others and understand them more precisely. For a data analyst, it is quite essential for developing communication skills as it will help him to fulfill the requirement of an employer. Whether you are the initial stages of your career or have stepped into it, you may know that teamwork is more productive. In the case of a data analyst, his entire success is dependent on his ability to work with the ones from whom he has to gather research questions.

Responsibilities

With a big role, there come bigger responsibilities as well. The job of a data analyst comes with a number of responsibilities. When it comes to setting goals, a data analyst will have to work with management or technology teams. The goals that are set must be aligned with the organizational objectives and needs. He has to perform data mining from primary and secondary sources which must be reliable. When data is collected, it is in its raw form which is not understandable due to a lot of irrelevant information. A data analyst has to clean and dissect data in order to leave only useful information behind. Discarding the irrelevant information will help the non-technical persons to understand the report clearly. There must be a great knowledge about statistical tools and techniques for a data analyst as it helps him to analyze and interpret results effectively. A data analyst is the one who has to identify new opportunities for process improvement. There often comes problems in code which makes the whole process quite complicated. Due to this, a data analyst is trained to fix code problems and the issues related to data. Apart from this, a data analyst must be able to design, create and maintain database and data systems.