Promised Land...

I completed the Jess Ramos LinkedIn Learning course today and I have no regrets about it one bit. I thoroughly enjoyed the course, despite having known more than half of what she shared. It was a nice reminder for me that I am in the right path, and to keep pushing till I get through. Data Analytics is a field that is quite saturated at the moment, but I don't care about how many people are in the industry right now, all I know is this is my passion, I love everything about Data Analytics, I love the challenges, I love the numbers, I love the logic, I love the problem-solving! Okay, I didn't like the storytelling initially, but now it's growing on me. What is an analysis without it's concise report and recommendations? The stakeholders, your audience, your boss, anyone involved must be able to see the data through your eyes, and hear it through your words. Storytelling is surely the key.

I got to note some points down from the course, and here are some of the ones that I would like to keep in mind;

What Data Analysts Do:

1. Digest business questions into data-derived insights and translate them back to the stakeholders

2. Take business problems from stakeholders and frame them into a problem that can be solved with data.

This involves:

1. Figuring out what data is needed

2. How the data can be used

3. What the best solution is to solve the business problem

Typical Day in the life of a Data Analyst:

1. Collaborate with stakeholders to understand business needs

2. Work with peers and manager to iterate on a solution

3. Writing queries in SQL

4. Building visualizations in Power BI or Tableau

5. Driving decisions with results

Typical business questions:

1. What is our monthly revenue by customer and product

2. Which customers have the best success with our product, and why?

3. How can we maximize the success of our marketing campaign by targeting users?

4. Can we predict which users will churn after their subscription expires?

5. Is there a live report that the sales team cab customize and export for their clients?

Deliverables include:

1. PowerPoint

2. Dashboard

3. Report

4. Excel File

5. Number/Percentage

Types of data analyst roles

1. Centralized role, working with all departments, usually not specialized.

2. Decentralized role, working in specific department, leading to specialization. Become and SME - Subject Matter Expert

Fundamental skills needed

1. Discrete Math

2. Logic and Critical thinking

3. Basic Statistics

   • Sampling and population sized

   • Distributions

   • Outliers

   • Measures of central tendency

   • Hypothesis Testing

   • Statistical significance

   • Regression

Basic concepts to learn

1. Data types

2. Dealing with NULL values

3. Identifying outliers and anomalies

Different data analyst positions

1. Financial Analyst

2. Risk Analyst

3. Product Analyst

4. Health Analyst

5. HR Analyst

6. 
   

- Connect business domain to analysis. Integrate business knowledge, recommendations and communication to your work

- Always think, why is this important and how does it impact the business.

- Practice SQL on IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) like Adminer, DBeaver, MS SQL Server Management Studio Express, Razor SQL, SQuirrel, My SQL WOrkbench, Heidi SQL, Oracle SQL Developer, Valentino Studio, Toad for SQL Server

- CRM means Customer Relationship Management. Hosted on Salesforce

- Learn Python to get more senior level roles

- Power BI is more robust

- Engage more on LinkedIn, build your network, brand yourself, create more visibility

- Build your portfolio, include project that are in the domain you wish to work in

- Projects can be added on github as a portfolio

- Tell stories about your projects

- Highlight your soft skills as much as you can when you are interviewing

- Find how your past experiences match up with the JD and use the STAR method to showcase what you have done and how it can be useful when you join the new company

- DO your homework on the company you apply to or the person you are doing a cold outreach to

Dear diary, I guess you can say this was a lot, right? Well, it's definitely a journey to that place flowing with milk and honey. I can't wait to find something new to learn tomorrow. I'm enjoying this moment, even though I know I really want a job. I am satisfied that I am not redundant nor wasting away time doing nothing. Tomorrow, I hope to round up on the playstore visualization I am working on. And also the customer retention visualization as well. So help me God.

XOXO...