Data Analyst

Average salary: $68,752

What is a data analyst? This is typically considered an “entry-level” position in the data science
field, although not all data analysts are junior and salaries can range widely.
A data analyst’s primary job is to look at company or industry data and use it to answer business
questions, then communicate those answers to other teams in the company to be acted upon. For
example, a data analyst might be asked to look at sales data from a recent marketing campaign to
assess its effectiveness and identify strengths and weaknesses. This would involve accessing the data,
probably cleaning it, performing some statistical analysis to answer the relevant business questions,
and then visualizing and communicating the results.

Over time, data analysts often work with a variety of different teams within a company; you may
work on marketing analytics one month, then help the CEO use data to find reasons the company has
grown the next. You will typically be given business questions to answer rather than asked to find
interesting trends on your own, as data scientists often are, and you’ll generally be tasked with
mining insights from data rather than predicting future results with machine learning.

Skills required: Specifics vary from position to position, but in general, if you’re looking for data
analyst roles, you’ll want to be comfortable with:
 Intermediate data science programming in either Python or R, including the use of popular
packages

 Intermediate SQL queries

 Data cleaning

 Data visualization

 Probability and statistics

 Communicating complex data analysis clearly and understandably to people with no statistics or
programming background
Career prospects: Data analyst is a broad term that encompasses a wide variety of positions, so your
career path is fairly open-ended. One common next step is to continue building your data science
skills — often with a focus on machine learning — and work toward a role as a data scientist.
Alternatively, if you’re more interested in software development, data infrastructure, and helping
build a complete data pipeline, you could work toward a position as a data engineer. Some data
analysts also use their programming skills to transition into more general developer roles.
If you stick with data analysis, many companies hire senior data analysts. At larger companies with
data teams, you can also think about working toward management roles if you’re interested in
developing management skills.