Data Analysts — Jr. Data Scientists or Different Role Alltogether?

In my last post I went over the differences and similarities between data engineers and data scientists. In this post I’ll go over the same in regard to data analysts and data scientists.

Data Analysts

In short, data analysts sift through data and try to find trends. They try to extract stories from the numbers and come up with possible business decisions from the insights they derive. They also are more likely to create visual representations to showcase their findings and interpretations.

A data analyst can be thought of almost as a junior data scientist.

A typical data analyst job description usually requires an undergraduate degree, but may not be required in lieu of strong coding skills. Most require experience in mathematics, statistics, economics, or some other major with an analytical focus. However, they may not be required to be as proficient in coding as a data scientist and certainly not as much as a data engineer.

The responsibilities of a data analyst vary depending on the industry, but all require analyzing and interpreting data. They focus less on programming skills than data science positions.

Typical skills include:

• Conduct consumer data research and analytics
• Work with customer-centric algorithm models and tailor them to each customer as required
• Extract actionable insights from large databases
• Perform analysis to support day-to-day decision making
• Support reporting and analytics, such as KPIs, financial reports, and creating and improving dashboards
• Help translate data into visualizations, metrics, and goals
• Write SQL queries to extract data from the data warehouse

As we can see from the Venn diagram above, there is a significant amount of overlap between the three roles. Data engineers require more software engineering and coding skills. Data scientists require a mix of coding, stats and math, and the ability to present their findings. Data analysts require significantly less coding and programming but focus on communication and presenting data to a non-technical audience.