Data Experts Check Out These Less-talked Skills of a Data Analyst

The necessary skills of a data analyst include more than just cleaning data.

In today's digital culture, something that is rapidly created everyday is data. Hence, let's accept that data is ubiquitous. Numerous organizations have already started harnessing the power of data and have leveraged data insights for their benefits. If you are not using data analysis, you are probably left behind. Hence, the demand for data analysts is likewise growing. But ever wondered what are the skills of a data analyst?

You may probably know the skills required to become a data analyst, but do you know the extraordinary data analyst key skills? So much information on the web talks about the skills needed for data analysts such as programming, data gathering, data cleaning, and processing the data to draw meaningful conclusions. These, of course, are required, but we will be talking about the less-talked skills of a data analyst.

While the above-mentioned skills somewhat overlap the skills and responsibilities of a data scientist, many people get confused between a data scientist and a data analyst. But to give you a clear distinction, data scientists should have a strong maths and statistical foundation, and business acumen. On the other hand, for data analyst job skills, you need a moderate level of maths and statistical, and coding skills.

Let's dive into the less-talked skills of a data analyst.

Story Teller

While the essential skills for data analysts are gathering, cleaning and drawing insights from data, the most effective data analysts can tell a story using data. To deliver a meaningful report, the best analysts will first see significant patterns in the data. At the very basic level, data is used to find insights and infer trends that organizations use to recommend to their clients. Reporting constantly, for example, weekly or monthly, can help a data analyst to identify key patterns in the data. All these patterns when accumulated together can picture a trend over time.

Fast Coders

While top skills for data analysts include coding, the most effective data analysts are ones that code extremely fast. With this, they can rapidly surf huge datasets, harnessing insights faster than any other specialist.

Such rapid insights can help businesses to act fast on the necessary ones and let go the least important ones. Decision-makers can quickly send such insights to ML engineers that saves them a lot of time on tedious mathematically impressive excavations.

Collaboration

Good communication is definitely one of the skills required to become a data analyst. Nonetheless, did you know data analysts have to collaborate with other team members a lot for effective data handling and processing?

Data analysts deal with a lot of data every day. Nonetheless, not all data is perfect and of good quality. Some data has a lot of holes in it. In such a situation, data analysts have two options -either keep hunting for further data or create artificial information to patch the holes in data.

Best data analysts will collaborate with other team members such as a machine learning engineer or data engineer for further insights. Majorly, data analysts can analyze data on their own but huge datasets are beyond their range of abilities. Hence, for massive data sets, machine learning processes are required to process and analyze it. For this, data analysts have to often collaborate with other team members. They help in creating algorithms based on their AI or machine learning experience and data analyst's analytics expertise.

Data Analysts are Key Decision-Makers

If you are wondering what are CEOs and CTOs for if data analysts are key decision-makers, read on to get your answer. With so many essential skills for data analysts, people tend to forget the basic responsibility of a data analyst. They are there to tell you what's in your data, which is then explained by a statistician to the leaders of your company.

To help you understand better, machine learning engineers basically feed data to algorithms, run them and repeat this until appropriate results are produced. But, machine learning engineers cannot see the hidden insights in the data. Without insights, are algorithms even fruitful? That's where a data analyst comes into the picture. They help ML experts and specialists see and tell them what is there in the data and what problems are to be solved. If data is summarized by a data analyst, half the job of taking a data-driven decision is already done. Hence, they play an important role in decision-making.

Did you know about any of these skills of a data analyst before? It's time to hire more data analysts as they can be the possible fix of all problems just like the last jigsaw piece that completes the entire puzzle structure.