What Does a Data Analyst Do: Meetings, Data, Excel, SQL

Key Takeaways

What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. I know I talk almost all the time about what a data analyst does. I talk about the type of skills you need to have. I talk about the meetings you're going to be in, about the communication you're going to have to have. And so, in this video, we're going to take a look at what other people do as a data analyst and what they think a data analyst actually does. [music] >> All right. This is some trend on Tik Tok. Uh, but I do agree. I've actually been asked that a lot before. They're like, "Oh, you're a data analyst, so you code in Python." And almost none of my job historically or ever has been coding in Python. But as funny as this is, a lot of work is done in Excel. And so, although this video is quite humorous, it does display an actual fact of being a data analyst. I'll show you exactly what I do as a data analyst. A lot of people ask me this because my job lets me travel the world and work remotely. And you often times don't need a college degree to get started. So check this out. When you first learn about data analytics, it's graphs. Someone might ask, "What city had the most sales?" In this case, it's obviously Houston. Once you get better at data, you take a step backwards. Once you get more advanced, you can turn data that looks like this into data that looks like that. Now, a lot of data analytics is taking that one step further back. Now, you can take info that looks like this and [music] turn it into info that looks like that, which lets you make things that look like this. >> Well, how do you do it? It's something called SQL. And I'm gonna show you right now with a really quick example. Okay, what do we have to do? We have to count the sales, right? Count all the sales from what? From the database. Let's say from [music] DB. Now, that's just going to give us all the sales. We want it by city. So, we're gonna have to say group by city. So, it sometimes reads like a sentence. All right. So that was like a super super super simplified version of what a data analyst does but I do agree to a certain extent. Yes, we make visualizations. I for many of my roles in the past have done no data visualization. It was just collecting data, cleaning data and different things. But creating aggregations and all that stuff is absolutely something that you will do. Although he said you're going to do it in SQL, he had it all displayed in Excel. So, I don't maybe it was just for the simplicity version of it. Some companies literally will only use Excel for holding data. They don't have a lot of it. They don't really need different databases. They just use Excel. I worked at a nonprofit that just use Excel. But then, especially as you get to larger companies, he is right. You're going to start using SQL. You're going to need to know how to write that to get the data that you're wanting for either a report or a dashboard down the line. >> I'm here with Maida. What do you do for a living? I'm a data analyst. And what does a day in the life look like for you? >> It's really a lot of reporting, a lot of numbers, coordinating with teams, uh, to get certain, you know, KPIs, uh, insights, etc. I think mostly just reporting. >> How much do you make >> right now? I think I would say 70 plus. Depends on the company you work for, but that's like the average at the moment. >> What advice do you have for people entering this field? join it if it's something that you really really love doing because at some points it really comes down to your interest and your kind of uh motivation because some some tasks do end up being repetitive but when you're you know motivated you're creative as well. You can take it from a different perspective in terms of like the reports and things like that. All right, I think that was a good highle take because almost at any company you're going to have KPIs, you're going to have metrics, you're going to have reports that need to go out and typically data analysis is part of this in some way. Either preparing, getting all the numbers right, verifying that the data was collected correctly and everything looks correct. And then of course you have meetings and you're meeting with a lot of people and you're trying to you know get on the same page with things and that is a big part of it. Now there's some extra information in there as well and I completely agree with what she said at the end. you know, if you have an interest in this, it's going to be very fun. So, you're going to get in there, you're going to get to use all these tools. It's, you know, really exciting. I personally love it, as you can tell from my YouTube channel. But I have met people who were a data analyst and they were just like, "This job is not for me." Like, I have no interest in this. I'm just doing it for the money. And most of those people burn out after a few years. That's amazing. Making 100,000 plus without prior experience. [snorts] All right. So, we have checking emails, sending reports, and he's training someone. Uh, that's great. That's good experience. And after lunch, do the same thing as the morning. Sending [snorts] reports, following up, checking emails, messaging people. I'm sure All right. So, he's not 100% wrong. Some data analyst jobs, you're not going to be communicating a ton in person, especially if you're working from home. You may have some, you know, Zoom meetings or Teams meetings, but besides that, a lot of it is done via email and via chat. So emails are going to be for a lot of clients and kind of higher level management, but within your team or with your manager, most of it will be done through some type of direct communication like Slack or Discord. And then from there, you're answering a lot of emails. And these emails vary because some of these videos have just been saying emails, but emails are oftentimes a lot of requests. So people are emailing you for something. They're saying, "Hey, can you get this data? Hey, can you get me this report? Hey, can you refresh this data?" It's not usually just an email and then you respond. It's an email. you do some work and then you send it back to them. This has been this has been interesting for me because my experience was a little bit different than I think a lot of these other people. I had my standup then I got into SQL and Excel and AWS and Azure and Tableau and PowerBI and all these different tools. I build reports and visualizations. I feel like they've just kind of gone more high level. They didn't get as specific into what they were actually working in. But I'm guessing most of them do some form of that or use some of those tools in some way. Across all of them though, communication was super important. Lots of meetings, lots of talking to people, and that's what you have to do in order to get your job done. I hope this video was helpful. If you liked it, be sure to like and subscribe below, and I'll see you in the next video. [music]