DATA ANALYTICS
What Does a Data Analyst Do?
A data analyst collects, cleans, and interprets data sets to answer a question or solve a problem. They work in many industries, including business, finance, criminal justice, science, medicine, and government.
What Is Data Analysis?
Data analysis is the discipline of gleaning insights from data to inform better business decisions. The process of analyzing data moves through five iterative phases:
- Identify the data you want to analyze
- Collect the data
- Clean the data in preparation for analysis
- Analyze the data
- Interpret the results of the analysis
Data analysis can take different forms, depending on the question you are trying to answer. Briefly, descriptive analysis tells us what happened; diagnostic analysis tells us why it happened; predictive analytics forms projections about the future; and prescriptive analysis creates actionable advice on what actions to take.
What Is the Average Wage of a Data Analyst?
As of 2021, the average wage for a data analyst is $33.42 per hour. Wages vary depending on your location in the United States, the analyst’s experience, and other factors.
Data analysts are in high demand. The World Economic Forum listed it as number two in growing jobs in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reports related occupations having extremely high growth rates.
From 2020 to 2030, operations research analyst positions could grow by 25 percent, market research analysts by 22 percent, and mathematicians and statisticians by 33 percent. That is significantly higher than the total employment growth rate of 7.7 percent.
What Are the Tasks and Responsibilities of a Data Analyst?
A data analyst is a person whose job is to gather and interpret data to solve a specific problem. The role includes plenty of time spent with data, but data analysts should communicate findings.
Here are some examples of what data analysts do on a day-to-day basis:
- Gather Data: Analysts often collect data themselves. Gathering could include conducting surveys, tracking visitor characteristics on a company website, or buying datasets from data collection specialists.
- Clean Data: Raw data might contain duplicates, errors, or outliers. Cleaning the data means maintaining the data’s quality in a spreadsheet or through a programming language so that interpretations will not be wrong or skewed.
- Model Data: This entails creating and designing the structures of a database. The analyst might choose which data to store and collect, establish how data categories are interrelated, and work through how the data appears.
- Interpret Data: Interpreting data will involve finding patterns or trends in data that could answer the question at hand.
- Present Information: Communicating the findings of an analysis is an essential part of an analyst’s job. They do this by assembling visualizations like charts and graphs, writing reports, and presenting information to interested parties.