Data analyst job openings exist across industry, government and academia. Every industry, be it banking and finance, insurance, healthcare, retail or information technology has space for skilled data analysts. These roles are a sought after in large businesses as they are in startup San new ventures. According to Forbes, the global big data analytics market that stood at 37.34 billion US dollars in 2018 is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12.3% from 2019 to 2027 to reach 105.08 billion US dollars by the year 2027. Currently, the demand for skilled data analysts far outweighs the supply, which means companies are willing to pay a premium to hire skilled data analysts. There's a wide variety of job roles available for data analysts to understand. The career path is open to you, we will broadly classify the rolls into data analyst, specialist roles and domain specialist roles. Data analyst specialist roles are for data analysts who want to stay focused and grow in the technical and functional aspects of their role. On this path. You could be starting your career as an associate or junior data analyst and work your way up through analyst, senior analyst, lead analyst and principle analyst roles. The boundaries between these roles, the years of experience that qualify you for the next level and the nature of experience you need to gain to move up could vary depending on the industry, the size of the organization, and how big your team is. In smaller teams, for example, you could be gaining experience in all facets of data analysis from gathering data all the way through to visualizing and presenting your findings to stakeholders, and this may happen within a short span of time in larger teams and organizations, roles may typically be bifurcate it based on activity, which means you could be gaining experience in one specific phase of the process before you move to the next. This helps you hone your skills in one part of the process before you move to the next. On your journey from an associate data analyst to a lead or principle data analyst, you will be continually advancing your technical, statistical and analytical skills from a foundational level to an expert level. You will be demonstrating your ability to work with a wide ranging set of tools and platforms. Different aspects of the data analysis process and a wide variety of use cases in terms of technical skills, you may start off knowing just one querying tool and programming language. Anyone type of data repository or a limited set of visualization tools. As you gather more experience, you're expected to learn and demonstrate your ability to work with more and more tools, languages, data, repository's and newer technologies, your communication skills, presentation skills, stakeholder management skills and project management skills all need to be honed and taken up A notch progressively. As a lead or principle analyst, you may also be responsible for establishing processes in your team, making recommendations for software and tools. The team should work on upskilling the team and expanding the team to include more profiles. In some organizations, these responsibilities could be aligned with the manager level person who has risen through the ranks to manage a team of data analysts. Domain specialists, also known as functional analysts, are analysts who require specialization in a specific domain and are seen as an authority in their domain such as our healthcare, sales, finance, social media or digital marketing. They may not be the most technically skilled people. These roles carry titles such as our analyst, marketing analyst, sales analyst, Healthcare analyst or social media analyst. And then there are the analytics enabled job roles. These include roles such as project managers, marketing managers and HR managers. These are jobs where analytics skills lead to greater efficiency and effectiveness. Affair amount of the data analyst job openings are analytics enabled. As more and more organizations rely on data for decision making. As a data analyst you also have options for exploring and learning new skills to gain entry into other data professions such as data engineering or data science. For example, if you're starting off as a junior data analyst and really like working with data lakes and big data repository's, you can acquire further expertise in these technologies and evolve your career into becoming a big data engineer. If the business side of things excite you more, you could similarly explore the skills required for making. A lateral move into business analytics or business intelligence Analytics. While the data analyst career landscape is very vast, the good thing is that you have a plethora of resources available to help you grow to be successful in your journey as a data analyst, all you need to do is grab the opportunities you want to pursue, or the ones that present themselves to you and learn along the way.
