5 Steps to Breaking Into a Career in Analytics
Getting your first job in data analytics can be daunting, but making the career change is possible.
I did this myself in August 2011.
I started my own career as a mutual fund accountant in June 2008. At the time I thought this was a pretty natural thing to do with my newly-minted Econ degree, but after a few years I realized that what I really wanted to be doing was Analytics. I didn’t have the skills, the network, or even the vocabulary to start my job search once I had that realization, but by the summer of 2011 I had an offer in-hand and my new career was about to begin.
In the almost 10 years since my first job in Analytics, I’ve managed dozens of data analysts, met and interviewed hundreds more, and have now moved my own career into Product, having built data products at 2 Boston-area tech companies now.
I’ve managed people who have switched careers into Analytics. And I’ve helped people change their careers and get hired for their first job as an analyst. Some of the best analysts that I know have made this career switch.
Analytics is a natural application of your undergrad work if you studied anything like Economics (as I did) or Math or Computer Science in college, but I’ve also worked with very talented analysts who studied Philosophy, English, or History. You can move into data and analytics no matter your undergraduate starting point.
So I’ve done this, and I’ve seen others do it, how do you know if it’s right for you?
What I’ve observed to be most important to finding and succeeding in your career as an analyst is an inquisitiveness to measure the “what?” and then quickly understand the “why?” behind it. You must be curious and have the skills and desire to use data to answer business questions. You must also have the ambition to learn a new set of skills that will help you do this.
So if you believe that switching to a new career in Analytics is the right decision for you then what follows is my advice on how to make this a reality.
1. Understand who is hiring for these roles and what they are looking for
Right now, in March 2020, there are two primary places that I go to see who is hiring for Analytics roles:
Go to these sites and search for job keywords like “business intelligence analyst”, “analytics” or “data analyst” in the markets where you want to work.
Set up email alerts for these so that as you continue your journey of switching careers you are automatically notified of new opportunities as they become available.
Since you are making a career switch, you’re probably going to be starting out at entry level, so watch out for jobs that have senior or manager in front. These probably aren’t for you yet, so it’s better to focus your time on the entry level roles.
That being said, you want to be using these job listings to understand:
- Which companies are hiring, and
- What skillsets and experience they are looking for
The specific technologies that analysts use are always changing, and each company could be using a different analytics “stack”, but you can get a sense for what’s worth investing in now by reading job descriptions and seeing what current companies use.
Some current examples are Snowflake and Vertica for database technologies, Tableau and Looker for data visualization, and Python and R for general purpose analytics programming languages.
You can also use these job alerts to start researching potential companies where you’d want to work and start understanding the space they play in, and what verticals might appeal to you (e.g. life sciences vs. technology vs. finance, etc).
You’re probably very busy in your current career, but this step is the best place to start as you work towards your career transition.
It’s passive and very easy to do. It requires about 15 minutes of up-front work, and then some time reading of the emails that come in so that you can start to understand the companies that are hiring and what exactly they are looking for.
Once you have a handle on that you want to start building your skillset…
2. Start learning the basic skills you need
As you start to get a feel for what your desired companies are looking for, you will want to start investing in acquiring those skills.
The first, best place to start for a career in analytics is learning SQL.
The specific technologies always change, but SQL (pronounced like “sequel”) is the lingua franca of the analytics world. It reads like english and has been in fashion more or less since 1974.
There are lots of great, free places to go to start learning SQL today.
Just pick one and start. Don’t overthink it. Find a free course you like and go.
After SQL, the next best place to focus your time and effort is in learning a data visualization tool.
My personal recommendation is to learn Tableau.
It’s one of the market leaders in data visualization today, lots of companies doing exciting work are using this today, and they have a great free product that makes it really easy to learn the basics of dataviz and publish your work to their Tableau Public Gallery (any work you publish there can then later be shared with prospective employers).
Beyond learning SQL and a dataviz tool, it can be very helpful (though not necessary) to learn a langauge like Python or R.
Programming languages like R and Python are useful for transforming data (i.e. taking an unstructured data set and structuring it so that you can analyze it) and taking for doing more advanced stats on an already structured dataset (e.g. running a linear regression or k-means clustering analysis on a dataset that you’ve already prepared). If you don’t have any previous experience with programming languages already, the learning curve will be steeper here so I would recommend focusing first on SQL and a dataviz tool.
If you’re going to learn one though, all other things being equal I’d recommend you learn Python.
3. Go to meetups and start talking to real people
Now that you’ve started honing your skills and building your vocabulary, it’s time to start meeting people! Meetup and Eventbrite are great platforms for connecting with people in real life and hearing talks about topics that are relevant to the current data and analytics space.
Like searching for jobs in your local area, I’d recommend going to Meetup/Eventbrite and searching for generic terms like “data” and “analytics” but also search for the specific technologies that you encounter on job descriptions too. Snowflake and Tableau, for example, both have very active user communities across the U.S.
These events are worthwhile because you’ll start to better learn the vocabulary and understand the current topics and challenges that analysts and business intelligence professionals are facing today.
At these events you can talk to other analysts to hear about their experiences and how they got into analytics. There will also inevitably be leaders and managers who are looking for talent that they can recruit to join their organization.
This step has been incredibly valuable for me in my own career, and I have personally helped individuals find their next role in analytics by first connecting with them at these events.
When you attend events like these, find the speakers afterwards and ask them questions. Very few people do this and it differentiates you. The speakers are typically eager to talk more about their work and they are often well-connected in the local area.
There is ultimately no substitute for making these connections though. What you know is table-stakes for any Analytics job (go back to Step 2 for this), but it’s who you know that really helps you get you where you’re trying to go much faster.
4. Show your work
As you build your skillset and start talking to people, you’re getting much closer to getting interviews with hiring managers and you’ll need something concrete to talk about when you do. This is where demonstraing your initiative and applying what you’ve done is most important.
If you are someone making a career change to Analytics, this is actually a risky proposition for the hiring manager you are approaching. How do they know you’re serious about it? How do they know you’ll be good at it? How do they know they’ll be able to get you up to speed fast enough so that you can be making an impact quickly if they hire you?
You need to show them you’re capable and willing to do the work, that you’re a self-starter, and that you’re able to adapt quickly.
For this step, you’ll want to combine everything that you’ve learned in steps 2 and 3, but know that the point of analytics is to derive actionable business insights from data — so that’s ultimately what you’ll want to showcase here. It can be anything from starting a blog to publishing Tableau Public vizzes that tell a story with data to their public gallery.
So how do you do this? You have to put in some hours, but don’t overthink it. Just find a dataset and get started.
- Find a dataset to analyze. Go to Kaggle and download a dataset that interests you. Or if you live in city like Boston (where I live), your local government may even have structured public datasets available that you can do some analysis on to put together a story. Either way, at this point there are lots of great free and structured datasets that you can get started with today.
- Put together a story in Tableau Public. You can download the software here. It’s free, and lots of companies doing exciting work are currently using Tableau right now. And even if your eventual employer uses something else, there’s inherent value in learning the basics of data visualization on any tool. Just go with this one for now. You’ll be able to transfer that knowledge to something else later if you need to.
- Publish it. Get your work out there. It’s not real until someone else can find it in the world. If you followed 1 and 2 above, then you can publish your analysis to the Tableau Public Gallery. Then add it to your LinkedIn profile, share it on your blog, and add a link to it on your resume. Just get it out there. Very few people do this, and you will set yourself apart.
This phase of your career switch is very important because again, you need to show that you have the initiative to make a career in Analytics for yourself and that you’re capable of coming up to speed on your own. You’ll have this experience to lean on and talk about in your interviews.
5. Go get hired
You’re ready now. You’ve put in the time, learned the skills, talked to other analysts who do the job you want, and shown that you can do this.
Go back to LinkedIn and Glassdoor and start applying to the jobs most interesting to you that you’re getting alerts for. Even better, reach out to the contacts you’ve made at meetups (and any other data/analytics professionals you know) and let them know you are actively seeking an analytics role. They may have openings at their companies or know of other people that are actively hiring.
While you’re doing this though, make sure your LinkedIn profile and your resume are up-to-date with all of your new skills and links to your analytics projects so that recruiters have a complete picture of you. Recruiting searches are done based off of keywords, so if you’ve learned SQL make sure it’s on there. If you’ve learned Tableau, make sure you’ve added this as a skill.
BUT know that if it’s on your resume or your LinkedIn or your resume, it’s fair game to be asked about in an interview. So make sure you’re prepared to speak to exactly what you know and what you don’t know. It’s ok to not know things, what’s most important is that you’re curious, ambitious, and ready to learn.
Getting the first job in your career switch to Analytics is just the beginning. It doesn’t happen overnight, but my hope is that the advice above helps you get there faster!
