FASTEST Way to Become a Data Analyst and ACTUALLY Get a Job

from the day i started messing around with  some data in Excel it took me about three years to land a data analyst job at Heineken and  another two years to land a job as a freelance data analyst at a big bank in Europe and another  two years to quit that job and travel the world full-time but more on that later can you become  a data analyst way faster? 100% i've wasted too many hours watching youtube tutorials and i've  spent money on Udemy courses that didn't add any value so i often ask myself if i could start  over with data analysis knowing what i know today how would i go about it? and that's exactly what  this video is about i'll remove all the fluff and give you the fastest path to go from zero to  a full-time data analyst and throughout this video i will share the three major mistakes almost  every data analyst makes so stay tuned for those the first thing every beginner data analyst needs  to pick is a tool or programming language for data analysis i personally started off with Excel is  that the best tool there is for data analysis no if i could go back in time would have started  with something else also no because apparently getting good at Excel was enough for my first  data analysis job and i personally recommend every single data analyst to start off with  Excel it's easy to learn used in almost every company and it has a wide range of applications  for data analysis but this is also it's pitfall although you can do a lot of different things  in Excel it's not designed specifically for data analysis meaning it has its limitations  you want to work with a very large data set well good luck not punching through your computer  screen after Excel crashes for the 27th time Excel is perfect for starting out but once  you've mastered excel it's time to move on to the more serious tools and the most logical  tool to learn next is SQL next to Excel it is apparently the second most requested skill in data  analyst job openings huge thanks to Luke Barousse for actually scraping a lot of Linkedin  job openings to come up with these facts you're a legend man thank you what up that nerds  and the reason SQL is so in demand is because it doesn't have the same limitations as Excel  why is my accent suddenly changing to southern i don't know what with SQL you can extract  transform and load very large data sets but the best thing about it is that SQL has its own  very easy to use programming language it's a great tool to add to your skill set as a data analyst  while also being a great stepping stone to some more serious programming but before we get to  that every data analyst needs a visualization tool there are dozens of BI tools out there but  having worked for multiple companies and projects and having looked at probably hundreds of data  analyst job openings i've come to realize that the majority of companies are looking for people  with experience with Tableau Power BI and Qlikview here's the pros and cons of each so you can decide  which suits you best Power BI is part of the Microsoft stack so it works smoothly with Excel  and Sharepoint besides that it has a free version and even the paid versions are relatively budget  friendly compared to the other BI tools next up is Tableau Tableau is a BI tool with more extensive  data visualization capabilities than Power BI it seems to be just a bit more in demand in  the job market than Power BI it comes with a much higher price tag though making it harder  to learn if you're starting out by yourself and then there's Qlikview using in-memory technology  making it a super fast and responsive way of doing business intelligence but also a pretty high price  tag and also it's less in demand than Tableau and Power BI i personally picked Power BI as my BI  tool although it might not be the fastest BI tool out there or the one with the most extensive  capabilities in my opinion it can give you the most bang for buck when it comes to becoming a  full-time data analyst before we move on to how to actually get good at data analysis and land that  first job there's one more thing we need to do as a data analyst after you've mastered a BI tool  it's time to get into the more advanced analytics i'm talking about which programming language  to use when it comes to data analysis or data science software developers and programmers get to  choose between java javascript ruby c-sharp python r c c++ and many more luckily for us data analysts  we only have to choose between two programming languages r and python so which one should you  pick i chose python but if i could go back in time i would choose python why well even though  they're actually very similar r is a programming language focused more on statistical analysis  well python is a more general purpose programming language that also happens to be very good for  data analysis and although r might be a little bit easier to learn i would still go for python as  it's the probably probably probably the number one programming language in the world meaning if you  get good at python for data analysis it might also open the door to a lot of different job  opportunities so the path i took is Excel SQL Power BI and Python this is the path i would  recommend as it worked out great for me but you can start off with any language or tool that  suits you best because whatever you pick your first language or tool will definitely not be your  last so now that you know which tools to learn let's talk about how to actually learn it and  this is where beginners make the first major mistake the mistake most beginners make is that  they try to learn by watching others this is how most people learn data analysis some people go to  Udemy and watch multiple 20 plus hour courses and probably not even finish all of them or they watch  youtube videos watching other people analyze data but without actually writing code or analyzing  data themselves they give themselves a false sense of progress because analyzing data in your  head is very different than from actually doing it data analysis in your head is very different  from actually analyzing data stumbling upon faulty data and debugging for hours so what is  the right way to do it?

the answer is very simple: learn by doing you just need to get the  reps in and start coding and analyzing data by yourself for Excel i would recommend  a website called www. excel-practice-online. com a free website where you learn to use Excel  by doing from the basics to the most advanced functionalities for SQL i would recommend the  website www.

w3schools. com/sql for Power BI i would recommend Datacamp there's free courses  and also paid ones for python you can go to this free website called learnpython.