Nitin Goyal was our guest speaker this week. He is a Bachelor of Commerce graduate, and has spent several years working as an analyst. Since 2018 he has been working at Hootsuite as a Data Analyst (Hootsuite is a social media software company).
When we hear the profession analyst, we tend to think “oh wonderful, math”. And tho math is a very important part of being a data analyst, it’s not calculus. Nitin put our worries to rest going over his typical day involving math, which included just the basics: addition, subtraction and basic formulas on excel. You’re use tools such as, tableau and Amazon redshift. Which this tools essentially does the calculations for you. But Nitin does go on to say, you do still need to have strength in math so you have a better understanding of the tools and technologies you’re utilizing.
A primary role as a data analyst is to be able to take all of these numbers and present them to the stakeholders or whoever you’re working for. They may not be strong with math and what the numbers mean. So your ability to communicate what the graphs and charts your tools have made is extremely important. You can’t just show a chart and have/expect everybody to understand. You will be required to still explain what it is in analysis.
Data cleaning was another important topic Nitin touched on. To put it how Nitin explains it, it’s like getting water from the lake, but the water is dirty and you need to filter out the impurities before it’s able to be served to anybody. Essentially you’re cleaning up the data, and getting rid of and fixing any incorrect information within it. For example, incorrect emails found in documents. A took such as tableau has features does most of the cleaning for you, so you don’t have to do as much manual work.
