Data Analyst Career Paths

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SQL Developer. Good money. Can work full time or as your own consultant business. Writes SQL code.

BI Developer. Better money. Can work full time or as your own consultant business. Writes whatever code is needed to produce the required report. Can get better money by also advising on what are good and bad metrics for a dashboard, but not advising on what to the company should do with the numbers you present.

Report writer would be lower pay and just work as an employee. You are given the data and the required output and you just make the dashboard.

Maybe an ETL / ELT developer. Good to better money. Can work full time or as your own consultant business. Moving data from one system to another. Either one time moves, ongoing scheduled jobs, or real time. Lots of SQL code, but also using other tools to transform and move data.

Data Engineer. Top pay. Requires good understanding of many database systems, data tools, and programming languages. Not necessarily being fluent in anything, but basic knowledge on how to use them, and pros/cons to picking tools.

Data Architect. Top pay. Requires good knowledge of the internals of one/many database systems (depending on what they need) and how to properly lay out tables, fields, datatypes, and scale performance.

BI Analyst would be close to a Data Analyst. Trying to figure out how to save the company money, the effects of campaigns, insights on consumer desires, finding new markets...

Data Scientist. Top pay. Having the insight/intuition to design new systems to capture the data that the data analyst uses. Very high level data analysis.

Excel is useful for a lot of this and it is a great intro to analytics and it's always available (which has been a problem in the past for me).
However, it has a whole bunch of problems including; slow, has problems with different devs having different version of a file, limited number of rows, bad data formatting and more. However, if you want to learn more

https://www.excel-easy.com/data-analysis.html

Get a copy of pycharm https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/#section=windows

Download a copy of python 3 - https://www.python.org/downloads/

You might not have to do that with pycharm but it's worth doing anyway

For in-browser python coding/open analysis, try jupyter notebooks https://jupyter.org/

Useful libraries

Pandas - processing data
SQLalchemy - collecting from SQL
seaborn - data visualization https://seaborn.pydata.org/