Data Analyst Skills Path | What Skills You NEED to Know

Key Takeaways

what's going on everybody my name is alex freeburg and today we're going to be talking about the data analyst skills path what skills do you need to know how long should you be focusing on those skills and within those skills what do you actually need to know in order to put it on your resume and be good at it as a data analyst number one should be absolutely no surprise to you if you have ever watched any of my videos ever it is sql now why is sql number one sql is an expected skill for a data analyst and it needs to be on your resume and the reason why it is so important is because that is how you communicate with databases to retrieve and query your data and being able to go and get that data by yourself is a vital skill to be a data analyst another reason is because it is going to be asked in almost any data analyst interview typically during a data analyst interview you will have a technical portion and for the vast majority of the time you are going to be asked some type of sql question and if you do not pass the technical interview question traditionally you are not going to get the job and so i highly recommend knowing sql going into any interview that you're gonna have the things i think you absolutely need to know how to do in sql are the select from where group by order by as well as case statements unions and joins this should be the bare minimum of things that you know before you put it on your resume something that i would specifically focus on is knowing how to use the aggregate functions in the select statement and how those work with the group by statement those two things are going to be used so much as a data analyst and so i highly recommend knowing how to do that efficiently i recommend spending at least two weeks only focusing on sql to learn all the basics and work on some type of small project it can take anywhere from two weeks to potentially a month to get a really good grasp on sql but it is something that i think is absolutely pivotal and something that you should focus on first the next skill that i recommend learning is tableau tableau is an absolute staple you have to know how to visualize your data and tableau is one of the most popular data visualization tools in the industry and you can create beautiful dashboards with it that you can also add to a portfolio it's a little bit harder to talk about specifically the things that you need to know within tableau but generally speaking you need to know how to connect to a data source know how to do basic calculations and know how to use popular visualizations such as bar chart scatter plot and density maps on the low end i recommend taking about one week and solely focusing on tableau to learn all these things that we've talked about but it can take up to a month to really learn the skill and get very good at it the very next skill that i recommend learning is excel and excel is an absolute must you have to know how to use it and employers expect you to know it the reason that you need to know excel very well is because you are going to be using excel a lot whether you like it or not you are not always going to be in sql or tableau a lot of the times you are going to be working with excel documents and excel can be used for so many things you can create a report from sql and put it into excel and send that to a client or it can be used to share data with other business units who aren't as tech savvy who can't go into sql and pull their own data and so it can be really useful to just drop some data into excel and send that over to them some of the things that i think you should absolutely learn are things like conditional formatting vlookups and pivot tables as well as being able to create charts and visualizations within excel i recommend spending about one week either brushing up or really learning how to use these things within excel i don't think that you need to take much more time than that unless you really want to go into some of the more advanced things but knowing those things within excel should definitely set you up to be successful in a data analyst job the fourth and final skill that i recommend learning is python python is an absolutely amazing tool that can do so many things but python is number four because of the large investment in time that it will take to learn it the reason it's a big investment in time is because of the large learning curve that it takes to learn python if you have never done any programming before it definitely will take you a little bit longer to learn this skill and what i will say is that python is very vast and there are so many things that you can do with it and so learning all the basics that you need in order to use python as a data analyst is going to take quite a bit of time some of the things that i think you should focus on within python are definitely the basics like for loops functions and data types and there are some specific libraries that i highly recommend learning like pandas numpy matplotlib and seaborn for this skill i think you should spend at least one month minimum on learning all of these skills but it can take anywhere from one month to three months to really get a good grasp on the skill i wish that i had learned these skills in this order when i was first starting out but i didn't i was all over the place learning random skills that i never really applied into my job i really hope that this video can help guide you into what skills you should specifically be looking at especially at the beginning if you were looking for specific course recommendations for these skills i created two videos one for udemy and one for coursera that i highly recommend checking out i will have links in the description as well as probably a card right here thank you guys so much for watching i really appreciate it if you like this video be sure to like and subscribe below and i'll see in the next video