What is a Data Analyst?
I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Author of Sherlock Holmes stories
Have you observed that today’s businesses have become more tech-driven? Today, you have access to thousands of products and services online, and you can order them in a jiffy. Even government agencies are not behind. These days you even get reminders through email and SMS to submit your income tax returns. Data analysis is playing a crucial role in helping businesses to use technology to their advantage. It is a process that allows businesses to predict customer trends, analyze their behavior, explain and deliver data in a meaningful manner that drives effective decision making.
Data analysis is an evolving field and helps in innovating something new for future trends. Data analysts take the responsibility of analyzing raw data and find trends that help drive the company ahead, improve efficiency, cut the costs of operation, and achieve organizational goals with increased profits. Companies have started offering Data Analyst training with an aim to train their employees with the latest digital skills and make the most of customer data available.
This article will let you know about the data analyst role, the responsibilities involved, and how to become one.
An Introduction to a Data Analyst Role
Today, you may find various data-related jobs available in the market. Some of the important roles include data scientist, data analyst, data engineer, and data architect. Talking about the data analyst role, a professional at this designation is tasked with gathering, organizing, and interpreting statistical information to draw meaningful conclusions for the organization. They use various data analysis tools to extract the data, remove redundancies, and perform the initial analysis to determine the quality of the data.
If you are hired as a data analyst, here are some of the tasks you will be accountable for:
- Your first step as a data analyst will be to understand the company’s goals and what problem they are trying to solve by collecting data.
- Data mining is an important activity that data analysts perform. They structure the raw data and formulate different patterns in the data using mathematical and computational algorithms.
- The data collected from different sources isn’t ready for analysis directly. So data analysts first perform cleaning of raw data. The collected data may be in different