Breaking into Data Analysis Careers

Key Takeaways

today we're going to talk about getting jobs in data so if you do want a job in data then obviously you need to have some data skills but there's more to it than that because you also need to be able to demonstrate to employers that you have those skills and you also need to be able to find a suitable employer and also get through the interview process so today we're going to be looking at jobseeker skills start up with things like how do you create a portfolio how do you do networking what does the inter interview process for a data anal this job look like and how do you actually get through it and succeed Our Guest is Annie Nelson she's the author of the bestselling how to become a data analyst and she describes her journey from being a nanny to a data analyst so uh these days she is a data analyst at gitlab and she also runs her own Tableau consultancy Annie analytics so uh she's living the dream and uh we're going to find out how you can too so please take it away Annie great um thank you so I'm going to start out by just telling you my story of how I got into data analytics I think most people who start out and tell you their story they say well my journey was a little bit different so it tells me that maybe everybody's Journey was a little bit different but I used to be a nanny I got my bachelor's in psychology and my master's degree in occupational therapy um but then I decided I wanted to work remotely so I could travel the world and so I tried I just figured I would I would give it a shot um so I just just I learned the like there was it was kind of a three-step process so the first step of it was the fun part just learning the different skills and um I was a little bit random because I didn't really know like what to learn because there wasn't as many resources back then um or at least I couldn't find them about what you needed to know to become a data analyst um so I kind of jumped around learned a lot of things um some things more helpful than others the SQL the Excel and the Tableau were the definitely the most helpful things um and then from there I moved on to building my portfolio which at the time I didn't understand how important building a portfolio was and so I didn't put as much stock into it initially um but I did make my own website and I built some projects using free data there's a ton of free data that you can find on the internet um and that's where I started and then I actually jumped into job searching a little bit and then I realized as I was searching for jobs that I didn't have very good projects and it was hurting my job search so I kind of went back into the portfolio building um and I focused on like can I find Opportunities to do things with like real data or like data from like my life or get like a Consulting type project so the job searching part which is what a lot of people are the most interested in hearing about um initially I just cold applied to probably hundreds of jobs and I was really frustrated because it wasn't going very well I wasn't getting very many responses if I was I was getting maybe a phone screen where it's like a 15minute call and they ask you like what skills you have and they would say have you used SQL before and I would say I have in projects and then they wouldn't call me back um which is around then when I started to realize like okay maybe I need to change up my strategy because just cold applying to jobs doesn't seem to be working and that's when I went back and I found um actually a Consulting project that I could do there was this this guy who was making these um visualizations online just using like the most basic like Excel spreadsheets and I was like What if I turned this into a tableau project for you um and I started creating content on LinkedIn about the things that I knew how to do the skills that I was using actively and I also started the jobs that I was applying to I started looking for um somebody posting a job like in my my feed or like who was posting the job if I saw a job on LinkedIn and I started messaging them directly and around then is when the whole process really shifted for me and so instead of like not getting calls and getting ghosted I was suddenly actually getting a return on investment some people were reaching out to me because of the content I was creating which isn't entirely um reproducible unless you have a following but I've seen some people just like create a really good project and get attention from that even if they don't have any followers um and the interviews were going better and the phone screens were going better but a large part part about this was actually this portfolio part um when you get to your interviews become a data analyst if the first time you're ever talking out loud about writing SQL queries using Tableau using Excel whatever it is is in that interview you're not going to do very well and so I realized that once I started doing more projects and and talking about them online and talking to other people about them um and getting that practice and just making friends who were get trying to get into dat data analytics and talking to them about it um then when questions would come up in interviews about SQL or whatever I could say oh yeah I actually uh wrote this thing in this project that you can see and it links to this thing in this project and they were like okay it actually sounds like you know what you're talking about not just like yeah I took one course and now I know this skill if that makes sense so that was kind of a big part of the the pivot for me and I try and emphasize to people the of like a portfolio and like talking about your work because it made such a big difference for me so some things about interviews there's different types of interviews and you may go through some of these stages or all of these stages it just depends the job market right now is very competitive and so they're more likely to make you go through more of these stages so pretty much every single job you do you would every interview you do you would start with a phone screen which is someone's goingon to call you it usually isn't a zoom call it's typically an actual phone call but um every place is different if it is a zoom call A lot of times actually the interviewer will have their camera off so you can't bet on that but it's just just a little piece of note and it's just like a very high level them being like I think just kind of checking against like what's on your resume and just saying like Okay you say you know SQL you say you know Tableau just kind of getting like a high level overview of like would you be a fit usually it's a recruiter but if it's a small company might be somebody in the company performing that um then the next one that I've seen is a behavioral interview and a lot of times these are like those classic questions that you see for interviews it's like you know tell me about a situation when you handled uh a difficult challenge at work and how you overcame it and um there's something called the star method and it I thought about it it doesn't make spend doesn't make sense for me to spend a long time on the star method but if you write it down you can look it up it's on Google um I actually put a whole I wrote a book about becoming a data analyst and I put a chapter into my book about you can use chat gbt to help you prepare for interviews and it's it's pretty good um you can you can say like you know give me I'm applying for this data analyst position here's the job description can you give me three behavioral interview questions for this position and then like keep responding to me as I give the answers and then give me feedback on the answers and surprisingly it does pretty well even the the free version of chat gbt does pretty well so that's a behavioral interview tip um another one you might see is the technical or the take-home project so the technical is to actually test your technical skills usually it would be either in a bi tool powerbi or Tableau or in SQL I've never heard of anyone doing one in Excel and for an entry level position I've never heard of one in Python um most entry level positions don't focus a ton on python they focus on SQL Excel and a bi tool so powerbi or Tableau so the technical can be live if it's live you might be going onto like a website that has like there's a website called hacker Rank and they have practice questions you can do but they also administer interviews um and you just go in and like answer SQL questions online and you can put things into the chat into the like thing and like actually run a query and then it'll return results you can go back and forth with it to see if you're correct sometimes a hiring manager will just say if you needed to find the top 10 customers from this data set how would you write that query and you just write it and you don't even run it um and sometimes it's like not entirely live like they're like okay you need to go on its website Within These like five hours and take it um sometimes it's like recorded so they can see all the answers that you put down so there's a lot of different ways that this this technical can go if it's SQL if it's Tableau or powerbi it's almost always going to be a take-home project and so you might have like 24 hours or you know 12 hours maybe which is a shorttime window to go and create a Project based off of a data set that they send you um I did have like two of those that I had to do in my first job search and um it I was able to just use the free version of Tableau public to get those done um and then with the take-home Project A lot of times you then meet with somebody to follow up to present your work and so um it might be just one person it might be a group of people but you usually have to present this project that you've done another one is the panel interview and the panel interview can kind of be sometimes a combination like I said sometimes you present your Technical and then that's your panel or sometimes your behavioral interview is wrapped into your panel interview and so you'll meet with like three people at a time and they'll all ask you questions or I've experienced this more than once you'll meet with one person one person one person so not them all at time but it's like an hour and a half where you're like back to back to back um those interviews are a lot like a lot like emotionally it takes a lot out of my social battery and um the last one is this cultural fit one and so the cultural fit could be really I think any one of those other ones or could be on its own and usually those are like okay here's a person on the team like this is our senior developer and we want you to meet with them and just talk to them and then they would give a download on like how well they think that you would fit within the team and you know how the interactions went and um those ones I have heard a lot of complaints online about those ones because they're not super friendly to like people who are neur Divergent and have like different ways of thinking and stuff because it's kind of like I don't know to be looking for a cultural fit is usually looking for like one way of doing things um but it is the reality it is the world we live in and we have to we have to you know either interview or not interview so some general tips for interviews is any interview you go into you should have an idea in your mind of some questions you can ask and I remember when I was first job searching I got asked about like some general questions like some people told me like oh this would be a really good question to ask I think one of them was like um do you have any concerns with me as a candidate right now and like ask the interviewer like what their concerns are and and the advice that I saw was like oh yeah this is great because it really puts it out there and really just gets all these concerns um out in the open and I remember seeing that and being like Oh I I hate that like do I do I really have to ask that and so you don't there's no perfect question a lot of times really what they're looking for when you're asking questions is just to know that you're engaged with the job because a lot of people will apply for like a hundred jobs and job posters want to know that you're actually excited to be working at their company and at that job so the way that I approach asking questions is I actually look at the job posting as if I'm a consultant and I'm there to solve a problem and so I ask questions as if it's my first day on the job and I'm trying to get an assessment of like what needs to be done and I didn't do that as much the first time I searched for a job but this job that I have currently that I searched for last year I approached all of my interviews like the questions like I was a consultant and I got really good feedback from my interviewers that they really felt like I was engaged with the job and the posting one thing I didn't mention on here is sometimes you will have a VP interview with like an executive or a vice president or something um I honestly don't know the purpose of those but sometimes they'll just be like yeah we want you to meet the CEO before you can start here so I wanted to put this in just a disclaimer the job market I got my job first job in 2022 and the job market was kind of on the decline by then I think like even a year earlier it would have been easier but it was definitely better than the market today and you should know that getting a job if you don't already know which you probably do getting a job is really hard and so um I just try not like when I make these presentations I try to put this out there because I see a lot of people online being like Oh yeah just learn these skills and then you can get a job in data analytics and I just don't think that's fair to you as someone who's sear searching for a job because then you feel like well I'm getting rejected to all these jobs do I suck you don't suck um the job market is just really hard and in order to be competitive you can't just learn the technical skills you have to go beyond that so these things that I've been talking about so standing out as a candidate like finding out what makes you unique and leveraging that and finding projects you can do with real data instead of just fake online data fake online data is a great starting point but if you still haven't gotten a job try an up level to solve real problems with data having a strong portfolio um I put the link I think they're going to put the link in the chat you can look at my portfolio as it was when I got my first job in data analytics but if you go on LinkedIn and connect with other people who are looking to get a data analy itics job they are all probably going to have a portfolio and so I looked at other people's portfolios a lot when I was trying to get a job just seeing what other people were doing and getting inspiration from them um also networking if you can is amazing and so this is like you can go sometimes there's online conferences or in-person conferences that are free for people who are new to the field um there's lots of networking events like I know that New York City has a low-key data happy hour where you can go too actually a lot of cities if you look it up on like LinkedIn or whatever lowkey data happy hour I think San Francisco London Boston New York City I think Charlotte um it's like a growing movement of these low-key where you just go show up everyone buys their own drinks it's like a very like chill weed Network going to these is really helpful because you get to meet actual people you get to talk about what's going on in the field you get to talk about being a data analyst you get to ask your questions and if you're lucky you could end up networking with somebody who could get you a job you don't want to be too forward about that and so you don't like every single person you meet it's not like can you get me a job um like never send a first message on LinkedIn can you get me a job because the answer is no none of us can get you a job um even if we're hiring that's not a super impressive way to start out the conversation but instead just talking about what you're interested in asking questions and just like saying oh well I'm I'm looking for a job or I'm going to be looking for a job soon soon do you have any advice for me and that kind of like plants a seed that you're looking and so if they do have opportunities then they can send them your way um this one reaching out directly I've mentioned before but on LinkedIn instead of just cold applying to jobs try and find jobs that have actually been posted by a person and reach out to that person so something you can actually do is go into the search bar on LinkedIn and you can search like data analyst job or I'm hiring for a data analyst or something like that and see if you can actually search through posts and cut the timeline down to within the last seven days you can actually search that text and then find within the last seven days oh five people posted I'm hiring a data analyst I'm hiring a junior data analyst um and so try and reach out to those people directly um so that's just being able to get connected with an actual person makes a huge difference I know that can feel a little bit discouraging if you don't know anybody and I didn't know anybody was when I was trying to become a data analyst I totally understand understand but these are some strategies for where you could potentially meet someone um some quick questions that I get asked a lot does age matter not in my experience a lot of people who are in their 50s will ask me this question just leverage your own background okay I was a business owner for 30 years or I was this or that for 30 years I'm a professional I'm G to show up to work every day on time I have my act together I know how to be organized like you just have to leverage what it is at your own skills do you need a degree no you don't need a degree like a master's degree in data analytics or a bachelor's in data analytics or something but it would be a lie if I told you that it wouldn't be helpful to have a bachelor's degree um and I do have a master's degree I don't know how much that is influenced because there nothing to do with data I don't know how much that influenced like the hiring process so degree doesn't hurt but I've seen plenty of people who have data analytics jobs who don't even have a bachelor's degree so um can I get a remote job as my first job probably not anymore more I think a couple years ago you could but now I think when you're looking for your first job and what salary should I expect a lot of influencers online sell that you can make like six figures in US dollars in your first data analyst job it's just not true um I know that in the United States a lot of entry-level positions start around like 60 to 70k a year I don't know any other countries what their kind of starting salary is but you should be looking for probably hybrid or in-person jobs and not expecting a high salary in your first job because anything you can do to get yourself get a foot in the door into the industry is is really what you're aiming for don't be aiming for super like lots of money the perfect remote job whatever is your first job and the last one I get a lot is do you need an industry to focus on when you try and get a job like oh do I need to pick that I want to work in the environmental space or whatever I don't think so um I've never focused on one specific industry but I do think that if you have an interest in one specific Area sports fashion whatever do projects on those and post about them and try and post about them think about posting in clever places like in Reddit threads or something hey I did this really interesting analysis of these things posted on Reddit um you never know where a random job lead could come from so if you have a passion go for it focus on that but um I don't think you need to focus on a specific industry in order to get a job in that specific industry so that is all of my slides I'm going to see if I can stop sharing because Richie was going to have some things that the right button yeah uh thank you any that was very cool like so many insights there uh so we're gonna have plenty of time for questions for everyone in the audience please do uh ask you questions in the chat we'll get to those later in the meantime Annie I've got a few questions for you myself uh so uh just a begin with um you started talking about the different skills you'd learned on uh various platforms so is there a particular order you need to learn things like what are the first skills you need to learn and what are the sort of harder things you need to learn later yeah I think what what I suggest to people is like the key skills you need to know are Excel SQL and a bi tool so I suggest starting with Excel especially if you've never worked with Data before understanding the way that that data Works in different things Excel is really nice or Google Sheets does not matter um because you can kind of see the format and structure of data because it's all on screen where when you move to the other tools the data is hidden um after that I think it's nice to go into um SQL or SQL simply because that's just like the bread and butter of the data analytics industry and there's a lot of common functions that share between Excel or Google Sheets and SQL um and then after that tacking on a bi tool and trying to do if you could do a project that goes like from SQL into the bi tool but it doesn't really matter um just don't like I had taken a course on python for like a month and then when I applied for jobs literally nobody cared about my my course on python I did a course on git git nobody like nobody even mentioned it um so those things I think are like you can do those down down the line but just it doesn't really matter what order you do them in but I think the ideal one is start with Excel go to SQL then do a bi tool okay uh that's a that seems like a sensible approach and um those are kind of technical skills so are there any soft skills that you felt are important for being a data analyst yeah I mean I think that like my career I've been really S I work at at gitlab which is um our biggest competitor is GitHub and it's like a pretty well-known tech company and it's also really wellknown for having a really good company culture and um I landed this job because of networking at a conference and I think my social media profile and everything but the skills that I exhibited in talking with I happen to meet the VP of data and analytics at a conference and just the skills that I exhibited and then she saw from me when I was like creating content um really impressed her and then now at my job I'm doing really really well and my boss is always really happy with me and I always get really good feedback because of my background working with kids working with people I was a lifeguard I was a barista all these things so I actually think that really the key to being a good data analyst is the soft skills so being able to communicate with people being able to communicate ideas concisely a lot of people will just put this like wall of text um and it's like no actually you need to be able to say all that information in a much shorter bite-sized piece for people to be able to digest it um being likable and being able to form relationships and similarly like critical thinking so it's not necessarily that you're really good at SQL or you're really good at Excel or whatever especially with AI coming out I think within five years there's going to be a lot of bi tools where you don't even need to know how to use them you can just say hey make me a line chart make me a bar chart so then the emphasis is really on writing SQL now you can use chat gbt or whatever to help you write SQL but you need to know what you want it to write and what you want it to do so that's all kind of the critical thinking um and being able to kind of you know independently search things a lot of people will will message me and be like what is data analytics and it's like buddy if you need to ask me what data analytics is I don't think that you're on the right track like you need to be able to Google things like that so I think that actually the key to being a good data analyst is the soft skills and not the technical skills but because people don't know the technical skills when they start learning that's where they put all of their focus okay that does make a lot of sense and I have to say yeah uh Independence is kind of underrated uh just if your manager is having to tell you what to do all the time it's going to get very tight for the manager you're not going to last very long in the job so just having being able to self start and just think well okay maybe I can look this up myself that's going to be a very valuable skill um okay uh so you also talked about um the value of uh projects and having a portfolio to just demonstrate that you have got some skills so uh K you can do a project data analysis project on pretty much anything how do you go about choosing what to include in your portfolio the advice that I give to people is that any of the core skills that you list on your resume you should have at least one good project using that skill although I don't think that Excel skill Excel projects are really all that important important I've never had anyone look at them so really if you're listing SQL you have to have a project in SQL if you're listing Tableau or powerbi you have to have a project in there and python if you're going to list python you should have at least one python project um but I think the best way to do it is if you can if you like I almost never have a data analytics project at work that's just one tool they usually connect to each other and so if you can show that you can do that you know like you can do something in SQL or you can do data cleaning in Excel or whatever and then bring that into a bi tool I think that's really helpful but honestly I think it's just like whatever you can find like a friend of mine is trying to get a job in data analytics right now she's on maternity leave and um she said that actually the place that she did leave her last job but they have a four-month position opening up for just like a contract data analytics position to do like stuff in Tableau I was like that's perfect that's perfect because you already like know inside the job and you can't put that into your portfolio but being able to say look I actually did this thing um even if you're not interested in it is perfect so just like finding these real world um I wear this ring and this watch which both track like my heart rate and my sleep and stuff if I was doing projects now I'd probably do a project on bees because I have a lot of Health Data which I didn't wear them at the time when I was looking for my first job but I have a lot of Health Data that I could um and people like to see oh you were actually like asking questions with data and answering them that's pretty cool okay I like that so um really you can do something personal doesn't have to be something targeted at the job that you're going for necessarily uh just Fitness tracking data pretty simple and you can ask a lot of interesting questions about it get get some answers just to demonstrate that critical thinking skill uh okay um so uh you also mentioned that um you did some consultancy work in order to get some real world experience how do you go about starting that I so the the main one that I had actually was not paid um I didn't necessarily mention that in the interviews but I didn't not mention it you know um but I had just there was there's this guy Nick Powers some of you might follow him on Tik Tok and he has these spreadsheets about the United States and other countries and stuff about like all you know of all the 50 states which one has the worst maternal Health outcomes or whatever and he was just posting these videos with these just like conditional formatting on these s spreadsheets and I was like there is an opportunity so I reached out to him I he has his data available to download I downloaded it I did a couple sample projects in Tableau and then I reached out to him and I said hey I think that it could be really cool if you could use Tableau to actually do like bar charts and stuff instead of this conditional formatted Excel spreadsheet and then you can get your data into a different format and everything um and he said yeah that would be great and I said okay cool like we can do a meeting we can see like we can scope it out initially I just treated it like a Consulting project we did like initial scoping call I did some work I brought it back to him and when I was interviewing for Physicians I interviewed for a couple Consulting Physicians and they loved hearing that I had already driven my own because kind of like how you said like you know your bosses won't have to hold your hand through everything they loved hearing that I had driven my own Consulting project I'd gone out i' found it and I had driven all the way through it all the steps that's cool so as well as demonstrating your data skills you're also demonstrating that initiative Independence again because you've gone out and sort this out um and in general are there any good places to find consultancy work I'm sure there must be websites for this sort of thing but I don't know what yeah I mean there's like websites called Fiverr two hours at the end and up work um I was not super impressed with those honestly like it like just take the price off like it doesn't matter if you get paid just like find something in your in your life you know like find someone that you can do some Consulting project with maybe you want maybe your friend is like curious about their Spotify data and you could like do a download of all their Spotify data and then do like a project on it you know or maybe you know somebody who owns a small business and you could actually do some data analytics and make them like a simple like dashboard or something um whatever it is like it like take the idea of like this official it's a business you're getting paid and just look around in your life for opportunities to just use actual data yeah I'm sure like if you find any local business it's like a family run business business probably their data analysis is terrible they need some help so uh yeah uh ask ask around your neighborhood seems like a great strategy okay uh so I'd also like to talk a bit about uh networking because you mentioned uh that was incredibly important for just finding employees now uh I know you make a lot of use of social media so how important is it to have a social media following in order to uh get a job I don't think a following is important I have heard from some recruiters that they want to see that you have some connections on LinkedIn so you're not just some Rando um I think what's important is having a good LinkedIn pretty much every job will ask you for your LinkedIn profile so have a good clear well-lit photo um and your privacy settings will sometimes prevent your recruiters from seeing your photo so like make sure the privacy settings they can see it um having some kind of like a banner on your page is silly but I think worthwhile and just having a really good your headline do not say aspiring data analyst just say data analyst in your headline um and then list your skills like in your your bio and stuff is essentially like an extension of your resume so make sure that looks really good and then your projects that you've been working on make a post where you link to your project and then pin that to your profile you might have to I think there's something on like ding called like Creator mode I think they're doing it by default for everyone now but like make sure you turn that on so you can pin posts and so then it doesn't matter if you've never created any content but when someone comes to your profile to look at it they see here's a project that I did in SQL here's a project that I did in Tableau you can include screenshots of things even if they're like basic screenshots um it's very eye-catching so less important is the actual creating of the content I think if you want to create content go for it it's been super impactful for me and other content creators but if you don't want to create it's a lot of work like a lot of work so if you don't want to create content don't just have a really good LinkedIn profile just keep it clean make it easy for employeer to find out who you are are and what you're good at and uh demonstrate your skills okay uh so uh you also mentioned um that you make you of uh meetups things like the Loki uh Happy Hour in order to um meet people how do you go about uh chatting to people at these things how do you go about Job seeking at these events yeah um so I like to do like kind of a funny thing if I can to break the ice so I actually have like a lot of like t-shirts now like one of them like has this like muscle duck that says you mess with the honk you get the Bonk it's just dumb but like wearing stuff like that is like immediately an icebreaker because someone will compliment your shirt and you will get to have a conversation when I went to the Tableau conference I brought laffy taffies with me actually think I have some here um and they have jokes on them and I would hand people a laughy Taffy and I would say I got this for you but you have to read me the joke and then they would read me the joke on it and it would be awkward and we would laugh but then it would break the ice um so just like finding some kind of funny quirky way to break the ice understanding that if you go to a networking event everybody there feels just as awkward as you do and just as uncomfortable as you do and so if you can be the one to break the ice they will like be forever grateful for it um and just genuinely being curious I mean you know people don't necessarily want to like talk about their day job all the time outside of work but just like you know hey I'm new to data analytics and I'm just curious like what do you do every day um people are really nice in the data community and they'll almost always be really happy to answer your question questions absolutely agreed that and I'm a big fan of the uh wearing clothes that people will comment on uh strategy yeah got my fancy shirt on today uh because I'm in fact going to a meet up later on uh all right uh so uh and the the Taffy idea seems pretty good uh just a nice little ice Breer there all right so we're gonna switch to some audience questions I see you got you've got a lot of questions in the chat well done audience uh all right so uh this first question comes from uh Canan uh so Canan says um I've got a question about python versus R python is uh known to be the sort of more popular language how important is R these days in my experience um almost no entry-level positions actually need you to know those two things those are kind of more towards data science python is especially more towards data science R is in the like medical field is used more often um so I tell people like unless you like know positions that you want are generally needing python because you like actually want to be a data scientist or like work in a medical field don't focus on them too much because I just I don't I just don't know any data analyst that actually uses those things at their job and so um I think like learning python actually was helpful for me and are both of them I learned both of them learning both of them was helpful for me because then I returned to SQL and I was like wow this is so much easier um it like gives you a good way of thinking Pro programmatically but in terms of one of the one versus the other it's like kind of splitting hairs at that Point meaning it's not super useful to focus on uh yeah from a career point of view I get kind of sad that R isn't as important anymore because my background was in R um and I had to switch to like python seel just because nobody cares about R anymore uh it's not quite true that nobody cares but it's it's uh dying out a little B my mom uses it because she works in in the biomedical field nice I have to say if I have to do uh any analyses if it's just for me I'll do it in art and then if someone else has to look at it I'll have to use a different tool because no else is going to understand what's going on uh all right so uh next question uh from uh Miguel so Miguel says uh how do I transition from data analyst to data scientist I feel like there a whole separate uh webinar we need to run but uh Annie do you want to take a shot at this um I think I actually know a couple people who like hire in the data science Industry and they say they don't hire people without a master's degree in data science so I think it's a really common narrative that you can transition oh become a data analyst so that you can become a data scientist I think increasingly so that's not true in a lot of places don't care if you've been a data analyst they won't hire you as a data scientist um because you just need to know like so much stats and math however some places you can and actually ironically to my answer my company gitlab does do cross department internships so I could do an internship with the data science uh team and probably transition into data science so there are some ways you can do it kind of the internally at jobs and stuff but as a general rule don't expect becoming a data analyst will get you to be a data scientist um probably getting a master's degree or a PhD even in data science seems like it's actually the way like the right way to do it just from my perspective yeah you need uh a lot of Statistics knowledge and machine learning knowledge so um make sure you focus on those skills I guess while you're working as a data analyst and yeah fingers crossed uh okay uh so um uh another question from Canan so can ask um uh what are the best resources for a take-home project to experience in resume okay um so yeah how I think that is how do you have you got any actually I'm not quite sure how that question uh is pH so okay do do you wantan to you can you can if you it's essentially like a take-home project is basically just a data analytics project but in a shorter window of time and so what you can do is you can go onto so Maven analytics is a course platform but they have a free they have a library of free data sets that you can use there's a platform called um real world fake data and they also have good free data I don't send people to kaggle k a g GLE e because I find the data sets on there to be really overwhelming and hard to use so moven analytics real World fake data uh and there's another one but I don't I'm not remembering they have data sets so challenge yourself to go on there find a data set and do a SQL project what I like about Maven analytics is that they have guided prompts and so they'll say here's the data set but here's questions like a pizza uh place they want to know about like you know what was the most popular pizza and what times of the year were most popular so challenge yourself to go in answer those questions and do a project using that data set and time box yourself give yourself like a day to do it um that would probably be the best way to simulate it and then if you can present it to somebody in your life or at least take a video of yourself presenting it because um yeah the first time I had to present my work on an interview I like blacked out meaning I don't remember it at all I I literally don't remember it I was so nervous uh yeah uh those things are very stressful uh actually since you mentioned Maven um so the data frame podcast uh I quote an episode with wcow one of the founders of Maven so that's coming out uh later yeah Maven analytics and Maven are two different platforms ah oh okay that's very confusing okay gone all right wrong Maven uh but uh yeah okay never mind uh all right so uh let's go to the next question from David so David says is AB testing related to data analysis or data science it is both kind of in between right I have a friend who's a senior data analyst who has worked with some AB testing some people in my at my work who are senior in staff level so the levels are junior intermediate senior staff principal generally um and so when you get to the higher levels you start to crossover do some Crossover with data science so you might use python as a senior or staff level data analyst you might be doing AB testing which can be done in python or other tools as a senior or staff level but as an entry-level data analyst um knowing what AB testing is great but you're not going to be able to be expected to run your own AB tests as a junior level data analyst unless it's a really small company that wants to hire a senior level data analyst for a junior level salary and that is I've seen a couple people do that where they've been like oh I got this first job and they're you know I'm a senior data analyst is my first job and within six months they were like that was terrible and it was awful and they they left or they got fired so uh yeah pretty brutal it's like oh I'm running a data team my first job uh yeah um uh but yeah uh AB assessing very very useful skill for a lot of data positions uh well worth learning how to do that AB usually don't know what AB is but AB testing is I don't know what to say but like a you have like a control group or like a another group like you have you know like all right let's see if we put the logo here or if we could put the logo here you know are people more likely to actually respond to the product and that's your a and your B absolutely uh and yeah uh we got we got a course or two on that on De Camp if you're interested in learning more uh all right so uh next question comes from Derek what have been the challenges in your data R next Journey yeah uh what went wrong the hardest part was getting a job it sucked and I almost gave up I genuinely was I remember laying on my couch one day and being like I hate this I suck and I had been documenting my journey on Tik Tok so I had about 20,000 followers and I was like I'm going to have to tell all 20,000 of those people that I failed and I could didn't get a job um and then my friend encouraged me to go back to what it was that I was enjoying and I focused on projects and that's one kind of the turning point that I mentioned but um being a data analyst has been awesome and all of the hard things about being a data analyst have been like interpersonal like managing navigating corporate and like giving a status update on a project where your collaborator isn't collaborating with you but you have to tell the VP why the project is behind like that's that's the hard stuff like I said like that's the hard stuff and like the important stuff about being a data analyst is absolutely not the technical stuff um but in terms of becoming a data analyst job searching and just learning how to do it you have to learn how to do it interviews and your resume and your LinkedIn and it's it's just hard um yeah lots of things to uh to focus on so but it sounds like um once you get the like the basics like projects that's kind of sorted you know you figure out you're LinkedIn that's just a one-time task everything is kind of you C you can break it down and and hopefully uh the thing everything will come together in the end uh all right uh so next question from Leo Leo says do you feel like your career in time wanting to become an occupational therapist formed in your mindset some way I guess it's about like career transitions like things you learned in a completely different field helpful to being a data analyst yeah really um I think that you know kind of this how I've been talking about this interpersonal skills are are super important um going through the process of becoming an occupational therapist I had to to write a lot of essays where I had to take a lot of information and say it in less words um I had to learn how to research I had to learn how to think and then working with people working with kids um parents of kids like really those skills that I learned are the reason that I'm a good data analyst today um I'm a prly fine technical data analyst I'm actually really good at learning and so I can learn new skills but that's not what sets me apart it's it's all of the things that I learned from being a nanny and an occupational therapist and getting a degree and all of these things you don't have to get a degree to do those things I'm just saying those things helped me tremendously in learning how to think and learning how to be with people uh yeah I mean there's always something you're going to learn in in your jobs and sometimes it's going to be transferable so uh that's kind of cool just that sort of uh some of those softare skills being transferable um all right uh so next question is from Theo oh man we've got like 20 questions from the audience may maybe we're not gonna be able to get through them all but uh we we'll go through we've got time for a few more so Theo asks any opinions on powerbi versus Tableau I know you're a tableau person so don't know how unbiased you can be in this answer I don't think it matters I think that Tableau has done a really good job at providing Tableau public which is a free resource that you can download to your computer and then you can publish your dashboards to Tableau public which is very explorable it has a great Community around it there are tons of blog posts on how to do things in Tableau so I think um that's what brought me to tblo because there's just so much Community um but in terms of like actually the tools one or the other it's like a common debate and like I think being able to produce a good dashboard is about the skills that you have in understanding how data works and how people work and it does not matter the tool so it just to me it doesn't matter I just found tablet to be an easier your way to go uh yeah definitely uh if you got skills in one then it's a relatively straightforward uh proposition to get trading in the other one like translate your skills so yeah I don't think many companies care too much about one or the other uh all right so uh next question from RT here um where did you find out about uh in-person conferences I just go on LinkedIn honestly um I I every conference or things that I have come to have come from LinkedIn there's this girl um Maggie wolf on LinkedIn I think she's the data Storyteller on Tik Tok um she does a really good job posting about a lot of like free resources like that um but once you can find one there's there's just I don't know any off the top of my head but there's just like a lot of like Discord communities and like uh especially like for women there's a lot of like specifically like women in Tech communities and stuff and there's just a ton of like communities and resources and sites and platforms and all these things for entry-level data analysts and they tend or data people in general and they tend to then share oh there's this conference coming up there's this networking event coming up um you know because conference organizers want people to come to their conferences absolutely um speaking of which uh there is going to be a data camp conference on November 13th uh next uh radar uh uh conference so it's all going to be about uh trends data AI in Cloud uh so I think re can post a link to it uh in the uh in the chat but yeah please do come along to that and in general I think uh Annie your advice on if you want to find out conferences just F enough data people on uh LinkedIn or Tik Tok or whatever social media eventually someone will tell you about most of the events coming up um all right nice uh so uh to um so uh Noob for high uh actually I wonder whether that works as a job seeking name uh so uh this person wants to live to hear more about the Consulting side of things do you enjoy it and do you think that's a viable career in itself my first job was as a tableau consultant but working for a company so I worked for a small company that um I would consult essentially on their behalf and I loved it because I learned so many different things from being able to you know see so many different organizations in the way that they worked with data and everything um but it was Consulting is tough because um you know you don't have a steady paycheck you know like if you don't have enough work you don't get the paycheck um and you know if you if you drop below a certain number of hours maybe you don't get the health insurance and PTO as a consultant is is usually not very existent it's usually just whatever um so Consulting is hard I think it's put Poss I used to think that oh in the future I'm going to go off and I'm going to have my own own Consulting business and that's where I'm going to make all my income but now I've seen a lot of people do that because I'm friends with a lot of content creators and who have become consultants and stuff and I'm like oh that looks terrible like you are sales you are marketing you are Finance you are all of the things and so not you can't just focus on doing the Consulting you have to be constantly focusing on bringing in new business and I'm not a sales person and I don't like selling um so I don't see it in the cards anymore it's possible um but I think I would rather have an organization that pays me a paycheck every week yeah uh it's definitely an acquired taste and if you're the sort of person who doesn't like to be managed you want to be in charge of everything and do everything then uh yeah it's a great uh business being but uh yeah data consultancy for another company that's a whole different thing I guess um if you want to work for you know one of these big consultancy firms then yeah that's a a different prop position to being your own uh uh uh boss okay um all right so uh Lou asks um if I want to transition uh into machine learning or data engineering um oh you've sort of answered this a bit but like um K you mentioned going from data analyst to data scientist is pretty hard can you go from data analyst to data engineer or other data positions no I think you actually can I think uh contrary to the data science thing I actually see a lot of people who who are like I'm gonna become a data analyst and then become a data scientist there's like a meme about it where like there's this like shiny like staircase up to heaven and then they end up just going down to data engineering it's like down like it's you if you see the meme you'll know what I'm talking about but it is a really common pathway um I think to go from data analytics to data engineering and again I think that like it's possible that having a degree or a boot camp in data engineering would be a helpful transition but um it I think it's there's just a lot more overlap um between the two especially if you can there's this new emerging position analytics engineer um and especially if you can go towards analytic engineering then the next step to data engineering is is even smaller so that one I think is realistic um but you might change your mind because you know like everyone data analytics is a good launching pad into a lot of other different types of careers account executive or you know project manager or whatever so absolutely yes a lot of data position where it doesn't necessarily have data in the title but you are going to be working with data um at some point during your job okay um all right this one from SNY uh is it considered ethical to use gpts to do work now I guess there's a difference between um portfolio stuff and actually have a good job as a data analyst I don't know yeah really quick though in the in the chat I'm seeing that someone linked to someone named Maggie Ma on LinkedIn her name is Maggie wolf on LinkedIn not Maggie Ma so if you're looking for the the woman that I talked about with the free wish Maggie wolf is her last name um but is it ethical to use gpts um yeah absolutely I use chbt like all the time at work you just don't feed it any of your company data right so like the code that I'm writing like the SQL code that I'm writing isn't confidential company information but I'm not going to feed it a data set or even a sample of my data set and say like oh well I I ran this query and I got this data and then I ran this query and I got this data can you help me troubleshoot sometimes I'm like oh I really wish I could do that but you just can't feed it in but otherwise use GPT use it to help you write emails use it to help you write stakeholder updates I use it to do I keep a a list of all the things that I've done that week and then I feed it into chat gbt and it gives me a nice little summary like newsletter style so which I keep in my personal email by the way this is a tip keep record of every when you get a job keep a record of everything you've done in your personal email so that if you get laid off unexpectedly you have that later and when you need to go work on your resume you have access to all those things so I do that every week um us it to help you write code use it to help bounce ideas off of use it okay uh yeah that's interesting the idea of like recording all the things you've done I struggle to remember what I've done like earli this morning so uh never mind something the project I worked on several years ago uh okay um actually fortunately a lot of the stuff I do is public so I was like oh yeah I did that webinar it's publicly available uh okay um so um Leo asks have you changed your habits or lifestyle to learn to self-learn that's the tricky one getting that motivation to learn all those skills get and go through this process yeah have you had to change your life to do that um in the chat you guys got the right Maggie wolf there thumbs up um I you know if I had to change my lifestyle when I was learning data analytics um so I started learning in February of 2022 and I got my first job in July of 2022 I was also finished my Master's Degree at that time so I was working full-time um in a clinic with people um and it was exhausting I literally my so my boyfriend is an amazing cook and he's more tidy than I am and I'd say it took me um a month to take the Google certificate course where I learned Excel and SQL and R and Tableau basically um and then I did a bunch of portfolio stuff so the first three months of that I wasn't watching Netflix um I wasn't reading books I wasn't seeing friends I just moved to a new area so I didn't have any friends anyways I wasn't going to the gym um I was just every single day coming home sitting down and learning I loved it I like great like I was having a great time but like my boyfriend was cooking meals for me he was doing a lot more more of the cleaning and the laundry um it's it it was this really concerted effort of learning and um it definitely burned me out and if I hadn't gotten a job when I did I would have had to like take a break and like touch some grass because it was really hard um but I I love to learn so when people ask me like do you have any advice like if I'm struggling to motivate myself to learn data analytics because maybe they're learning because they want a salary or a remote job or whatever I don't have good advice because I just love to learn and so for me I just suspend any ideas that I need to be good at something or need to have a finished product and I just go and I learn um and if you if you don't work that way then I don't have a lot of great advice I've seen plenty of people still make the transition I just maybe you need more structure than I do because I just love to learn okay yeah um if you're not finding the data side of things interesting and you're not you just you st it for the money then it's going to be a much more difficult proposition than actually oh dat is kind of interesting um and then you can be a bit more motivated but hopefully uh everyone here is is going to think the data is interesting so uh hopefully that's why you're here uh all right uh so uh we've got time for I think two more questions um okay so this is a good one from Josie um did you have any mentors and did you get any good advice I didn't have any mentors I just didn't know Soul who was in tech at all when I was trying to make the transition and it sucked um I had a friend who had given me the advice when I was like gonna quit and I was like I'm done with this he was like think about what it is that you enjoyed about like why did you start this journey of trying to become a data analyst what you know what did you start with and go back to those roots and that's when I I focused on the projects and stuff um but I genuinely just felt like like I just felt like I was feeling my way through the dark with all of it um now I can say that I've turned around and I try and give good advice on my LinkedIn if you are following me on LinkedIn you'll probably end up you know finding a lot of other creators in the data space there's tons of people now I think who are giving out really really good advice but I think almost everyone has started like since I started and so there just wasn't much then but if you um if you want to find there's some programs that you can look for that do mentorships um but if you want good advice go on LinkedIn and substack also has a lot of good uh which is like a newsletter thing um there's people on Tik Tok YouTube Instagram LinkedIn substack like so many people just want to share actually the market the the um space of data analytics content for entry level is so oversaturated that I've stopped focusing on entry level content and started focusing on Career progression because there's just too many people talking about entry level stuff okay uh yeah certainly plenty of people handing out advice uh if you go almost anywhere uh all right uh so um a question here from someone you called draft how do you package up and present your portfolio so is it a case of like here's a list of projects on your resume or do you do something fancier yeah so Maven analytics has a free course a free portfolio hosting platform which I love because it takes all the work out of having to build your own thing um I have always made my own website so you can use Wix Wix or card c a r r d are two places that I've used you can make your own website um which is like drag and drop you don't have to code it's just like drag and drop I personally liked that more personalized approach but I think using a portfolio hosting platform like Maven is fine so you have that as your home base where you'll say like give a blurb on the project what you were trying to accomplish with the data was like whatever and then you would link to your Tableau public portfolio or your you know where the code is um I think actually keeping your SQL code in a notebook and I I don't want to spend like I don't want to derail us with talking about what notebooks are but if you look it up like a notebook where you can run blocks of code I actually think is a really cool way to do it um I put I had more than one chapter in my book about this conversation so it's like a pretty big conversation of how to do it but the basics is start with a port portfolio hosting platform like Maven analytics and then if you want to you can transition to hosting on your own website and then linking out but either you know both of these like link out from the main site to GitHub or gitlab and Tableau public and whatever all right uh super yeah I should also mention that uh if you register with uh with data Camp you do get um a portfolio hosting page as well so you can show off all your data projects and show off all the courses you've completed and things like that so yeah uh uh do make use of that if you are already a data Camp user and if not registered with data Camp make use of it all right uh last question uh then comes from uh the mestina saying uh is an internship a good idea or not yeah I mean I think that's if you look at it like like how I was saying find a project that you can do um I mean I wouldn't do like a yearlong internship that you're not paid for but if you're looking at it as a you know experience to boost your skills and you actually have experience whether or not you can put it on your portfolio being able to just say yes I have done this thing um come to it with a clear like I'm GNA put it on my resume that I've done this you know um getting exposure to being a data analyst is always a good thing absolutely yeah uh any kind of experience is GNA stand you in good Set uh all right super um uh oh before we go uh we've got a session tomorrow on uh uh for leaders on how to build out a learning program we've got a break from webinars next week and then I think October the 22nd we're coming back uh there's G to be a code Along on uh machine learning with an executive from Amazon so that's going to be uh some cool retail use cases there all right so uh thank you so much Annie like just tons of insights there um yeah I'm I'm hoping everyone in the audience gets a job now based on your advice so uh fantastic stuff yeah thanks everybody all right brilliant thank you D for moderating thank you to everyone who ask for questions so many great questions today uh sorry we're couldn't get to them all there's uh so many brilliant things going on uh so well done audience thank you everyone for joining uh maybe see some of you tomorrow if not I will see you all uh from the 22nd uh yeah