The Ultimate Data Analytics Career Plan for 2023 | CareerFoundry Webinar

welcome to another Foundry pro event tonight with Alex Breberg, the

ultimate

data

analytics

pro blueprint for

2023

and I know we have a great crowd tonight. If someone joins a big marker, it's lovely to see where they're joining from, so just let go. your name on the right side you know why you are interested in

data

analytics

and you know why you are interested in data analytics and a

career

change in analytics today we would love to see all the comments and those watching on YouTube and the Alex crowd, we've done quite a few of these before so welcome everyone, we always love your energy and commitment and check out Alex's YouTube channel, Alex the Analyst, for anyone who doesn't know.

Foundry

career

allow me to introduce myself. I'm William, Events and Communications Leader here at career Foundry and career Foundry is the online school for your career move to technology, so we guide you from a complete beginner to a professional ready to work in data analytics and help you to land. your first job in the field uh, we're not old school, our programs are so flexible that you don't need to leave your day job to change careers, you get regular one-on-one mentoring, not one, but two industry experts, that's a mentor . and a tutor and if you don't get a job within 180 days of graduation we will refund your full tuition, that's our job guarantee for anyone watching YouTube and interested in Foundry's career program, just click the description below and there is a link to book a call if you would like to schedule a call with a program advisor and ask questions about our curriculum or anything we offer.

I recommend doing it. Just a couple of house rules. Tonight we will do a live question session. at the end, so if anyone has any questions for Alex, now is the time to answer them, just leave them in a big bookmark, on YouTube or on LinkedIn. We're shouting on numerous platforms tonight and we'd love to get answers to his questions, um Alex. I think that's it, uh Senegal, it's a super international crowd and I'm going to give it to you, Alex, thank you so much for joining us again, thank you, thank you. I saw someone from North Carolina, Jermain, I just want to say hello to that person.

That's where I grew up, so I grew up in North Carolina. I love seeing when people say where they're from because it's pretty wild. I mean, we have people from Guatemala. London Bromwich in the United Kingdom. Just amazing, thanks guys. So much for joining, thank you all for hosting this Foundry race, a big thank you, I love this topic, it really has a special place in my heart because I remember six years ago, let me see, yes, six years ago, now, wow, in 2017. At the time I was trying to make this transition to becoming a data analyst and I had no idea what I was doing.

There are a lot of resources online now on YouTube and as you know, posts and blogs and all that stuff is focused on how to get in. analysis and tick tock and things like that I don't do, but there are a lot of resources now and when I started, it seemed like there weren't a lot of resources, which you know, as many of you know, that's kind of nice. of why I started my channel, um, so let's talk about how to get into data analytics. I have a sort of step-by-step manual for what we're going to do and we have a lot to cover.

I always like to ask the question last, so I'm going to try, um, you know, no, I could talk for hours if you know me. I could literally talk for three or four hours about this, but I'll try to keep going. it's concise uh and we'll make sure to cover every step let me see what's next oh yeah, that's me uh we don't need to read this uh but I like data analysis so let's jump right into it so we're I'm going to talk about that We'll just start with creating a career

plan

because you have to start somewhere, you have to create a

plan

.

What do I like to do with people? Because I do it. I had a mentoring program for a long time. before I started my analytics consulting company and what I always told people was that you can be at any step of this process, you can be anywhere, you could be from the beginning and I had never heard of what the data analytics and you're trying to figure out that you want to join this path or you might have already learned all the hard skills and now you're trying to get a job so you can really apply this anywhere, so I'm going to start from the beginning . from the beginning, but you know, realize where you are and what you need to do, hopefully that will help you a lot, so yeah, this is what we're going to do: identify where we are in the process, create an action plan and then at the end I'll talk about timelines, how long you should try or how long it might take you to do each of these steps, so let's move on to the first one.

The first thing that I always recommend to people is to learn the skills, it is really very difficult to become a data analyst if you do not have the data analysis or data analysis skills, it is really difficult, these are the skills that I recommend to people start now, while you read it while you read it. Looking at it, you don't have to learn them all, that's not a requirement and in fact I don't recommend that you try to learn them all because that would take forever. I would really recommend what you would start with. starting with SQL, I think it's so fundamental that it's where the data will be stored, it's in some kind of database and you can query the data.

I always recommend that you start with SQL, learn things like Excel in a Power Bi and Power Bi tool. or Tableau, so these bi tools are just meant to visualize the data, so with SQL Excel and something like an API tool you can go a long way. In fact, when I got my first job as a data analyst, I only knew one SQL which is really all. I knew I learned on the job a lot of the things I know in Excel, now a lot of Tableau that I know, and then at my next job I learned cloud platforms like Azure and I learned Python, so I didn't learn all of these things.

At first, I learned on my own over the years as they became more relevant to my work. Last on this list are the GBT and AI chat tools and I want to take a second to highlight this because you know these AIs. the tools are not going away, they are speeding up a lot of these things, they are making them much faster to use, so let's take, for example, something like Tableau. Tableau just had a conference and then announced that they are going to integrate AI. in Tableau and this will be a big part of analytics in the future just having these AI tools built into these different types of systems.

This is what I will say. I don't recommend diving straight into AI right away, although it's on this list. I highly recommend learning the basics first, learning the basics of SQL, learning the basics of Tableau power bi Excel, learning the basics because what will happen is these AI tools will go from 0 to 100 very quickly, and then, if you dont do it. Know what you're doing, if you don't know what it's telling you, it's going to be very difficult to put it all together and do what a data analyst does, so first learn the basics, then start using the AI ​​tools and you'll be able to. . even using some of these AI tools to teach you how cha gbt can be a really good mentor so that's the first thing you need to do to learn the skills the next thing is to learn these skills because I can only say learn skills but You know it doesn't really help if I don't tell you where to go, so let's take a look at this.

The first is self-study, so you can do it on many different platforms, such as YouTube or I Teach. data analysis, you can learn from gbt chat Khan Academy and some others, you can do paid courses, so I usually talk about places like Udemy or Coursera where you can go and buy a course or buy a subscription, and you can really take to measure that you advance, you can go at your own pace, uh, within a personalized course, then there are training camps and online schools. Now this is where something like Care Foundry falls into place, where you're going to pay for a boot camp and what I've always done.

Telling people about this is that I always recommend someone find one that has a work guarantee like Care Foundry. You know, I don't accept sponsors very easily. It's a very specific process that I go through. Career Foundation is one of the few. I like that just because it's a good price and, you know, they also have a job guarantee, so some of these other ones look into them, but there are a lot of boot camps and a lot of online schools that you can check out, but just make sure that They have good mentors because that's really what you're paying for and they have a job guarantee, that's something you should look for and then the next thing is to get a college degree.

This is by far the largest investment in both times. and money, but it can have a big reward, because you're getting more and more accredited, you know it's taking you a long time to get your education, but this is what I'll say and I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few years. months, you know, in three, four, five years, college degrees will be up to speed with a lot of these new AI tools and advances that are happening in analytics right now, probably not and you might get a degree and you might that you are not as prepared for the job as some. of these others, like if you took a self-study course or a paid course or a boot camp that has newer information, you really need to look into those things because that's a problem with higher education as a whole right now.

They tend to fall behind, so those are your options on where to learn and this. I'm going to present this actually has multiple reasons why um and build projects is so important now, what does it really mean to build a build a project just means that you as a data analyst, you know that you work with data, but you have to extract information from them, you need to make it actionable, so you take this data and then you tell it to a stakeholder or an employee. or your boss or whatever you're saying, hey, this is what you need to do based on the data and that's what it means to build projects.

Basically, it gives you some experience without having experience, so you're practicing these data analysis skills that I just learned and now you're building projects. Why do you need to build a project? There are three different reasons. First you will move up the ladder, you solve problems, you encounter problems, you solve it and then you work. and you say, man, I'm better because you know I built this project, the next one is to show your skills to potential employers, now this number two and number three because if you look at number three it says that you will have something that talks and talks during your interviews, for which has two different pieces, one of the projects, it's really great to put on your resume to help you get into an interview because it can show that you're working on this stuff, you can show the tools that you're using um and honestly, I've I've seen a lot of resumes in my day, when I was an analytics manager, where I was like, man, this is a really interesting project and I went to their portfolio website and checked it out.

This is really good, the next thing is, especially if you don't have any experience, what's going to happen when they ask you something like uh, you know, tell us how you know SQL. That's a difficult question to answer when you're a first-timer. Getting started was hard for me, so you know I would do it. Well, you know, I've been practicing and I took a course, and you know, I think I'm good enough at SQL and they. "That's a terrible answer, um, and it was, but what I learned is that when I started building these projects, I could say, you know, they'll ask me the same question, you know how, what do you know about SQL?" I'll say "good." You know, I know how to do joins and window functions and all this stuff.

I just built a project taking this data set and I built this project and I can walk through it and I can point to it as some experience as I built it from data. using real data and I built this project, so those are the three reasons why I recommend someone to create a project and then put it on a website that is also really good, so this is the portfolio website I was talking about once. you build a project that's great, but it doesn't help if you don't put it somewhere, so what you need to do is take several projects and put them somewhere where you can do it for free in many different places I have a whole video on how you can publish it on GitHub so you can do it you can publish it on Wix on kaggle medium LinkedIn all of these are places where you can put your projects and Linkedin even has a place where you can go to their home page and you'll be able to add projects to your known profile.

Someone, a potential employer or a recruiter, goes to your LinkedIn and they can see those really cool projects and I'm a bigLinkedIn fan, so I definitely recommend that The next thing you should do is create a resume. Now creating a resume is always difficult and give me a second while I take a step. I woke up with a sore throat, so I apologize. Creating a resume is always difficult. I probably found it. One of the most frustrating things about work in general is that you have to apply for a job, you have to have a resume and resumes are extremely difficult when you have no experience because then you have like half a page full and you're I can't send this like this, this It looks bad so you need to fill it out and you also need to convert it into a data analyst focused resume now how do you do that?

The first thing you want to do is highlight your skills, so highlighting your skills means you want to include SQL Excel Tableau python on your resume, whatever skills you have, often and you want that at the top, especially if you don't have any experience, like I have a degree in recreational therapy, so I don't want to put my degree in recreational therapy at the top because then you'll see that it's going to be like this degree is worthless, which it is for this field, so I put it at the bottom and I just call it a Bachelor of Science.

I'm not even saying it's recreational therapy, it's just kind of medical care. title, but I put my skills at the top and then I have, if you have experience, you put experience, then you put at the next level, you can put your projects, so this is another place where your projects will be useful so that you can You have your projects in two different areas and I just want to highlight this because I strongly believe in it. Your projects can be an actual section where you say this is what I did and then underneath you have bullet points of here are the tools.

I used and here is the analysis or insights I got from it. You can also place a link to your portfolio website in your header. I highly recommend it because then an employer can go and see the actual code that you're writing or your visualizations that you're creating can go and look at it, so it's pretty awesome, so they're two different ways. Another thing I want to mention is that if you come from a different field, let's say you're a nurse or you're an accountant or it could be anything, a teacher. It's really helpful if you can repurpose your experience to focus more on data analysis.

What I mean by this? I've worked with that a lot because I come from healthcare, so I worked in healthcare for a long time and then I became a data analyst. What I did when I started and learned this over the years is that it's actually a valuable experience that I didn't know about. At first I thought it was pretty useless, but it was actually very valuable, so what I started doing was, you know, I've worked with, what are they called HRIs? No, healthcare database systems, they're called something. I can't think about it off the top of my head, but I would say I have experience with these databases on the healthcare side, so when I come in and I'm working as a data analyst on the back end I can say I already have experience. with those systems, I know how to use them and that's really very useful information, so you can do it with a lot of different things.

Typically you have to sit down and think about what this relevant data analysis looks like and then try to use it. It may be difficult for some jobs legitimately, but a lot of jobs have some trans in them. Now let's move on to the next one, which is the certifications. I'm going to mention certifications and I put this as optional here and I just want to touch on. On this, personally, I don't have any certifications, or I don't have any certifications that I'm talking about because I don't think they're 100 relevant or have ever helped me get a job, so I took the Microsoft power bi analyst certification, which is . one that I actually took when I was at my job my job paid for that certification I don't put it on my resume uh because I don't think it was that useful three years ago when I was um as a data analyst I didn't think it was exceptionally useful in helping me find a job, but some of you may really want certifications.

This helps and could help build some credibility. They have a real certification. I'm just not a big proponent of it so if you like it go for it you can get that certification if not you know it's not very important but these are three that I think are really useful and really worth getting , although there are thousands of certifications. They're just not that good, so take it with a grain of salt, next step number five is to start applying and this is a very difficult part, when I started, when I had I was trying to get my first data analyst job.

I don't remember the exact number, but there are over a thousand jobs that I applied for and I was doing it mostly on zip recruiter. I'm trying to contact zip recruiter and Linkedin I think. mainly where I applied um and I applied for over a thousand jobs, I think it was like 1200 and I got callbacks for 20 of them and they offered me a job at one of them um and that was a process. I had a whole spreadsheet. It was a very dark time in my life, very disappointing, if I may say so, because it took me months and months and months to get there.

Now there is a better way to do this. Don't be like me, the youngest, who did worse. in any way possible and I'm sure a lot of that is what a lot of people do because it's very inefficient. Most of these job websites where you're just applying and applying and applying, they get thousands of entries, some of which they don't even look at. Some, they just automatically scan your resume and you say no, you don't have the experience, they throw them out, so it's very, very difficult to get a job without experience or you know, if you're transitioning from a different career.

Tough, that's how I would do it if I were you. The first thing I would always do is work with a recruiter. Now recruiters are interesting because most of the time they work in metropolitan areas and they don't go to work much. in these rural areas where it's like farm country, which is where I grew up in Minnesota, near the middle of nowhere, you know you're not going to find a lot of jobs there, now you can find remote jobs. which is great, but still, a lot of these jobs want you to be somewhere close to a metropolitan area, so if you don't want to do that or if you don't want to stay where you are, you can look around. for remote jobs, there are many companies that you can search online, just search, you know the remote recruiters for technology and what you have to do is be on their radar, you have to talk to them, you have to hunt them down. and you need to find them now.

I'm going to tell you what I did when I first found this trick called recruiters. I went and worked with all the recruiters that worked with me at the top of the job with recruiters after my first job, I had a year of experience after that first job. I worked with about seven or eight recruiters and I messaged all of them every week. I called each of them once a week just to see if there were any vacancies. I was a little ruthless because I knew they weren't going to do it for me. I had to do it myself.

I couldn't trust them to message me out of the blue with a job offer. It just doesn't happen. so I took it upon myself now, you don't have to be like me, although I think it's a very efficient way to be on people's radar constantly and get new job updates when a new job becomes available, so what if no I don't know what a recruiter is. I'm going to break it down real quick. A recruiter is usually someone who gets paid by a company so let me see where I am on my camera so here is the company this recruiter is paid to look for an applicant now this recruiter only works with the company normally they don't work they're not inside the company they're not part of that company they're just a third party um a third party now they're going to come to you and they're going to say, hey, we have this job at this company for an entry level data analyst position. .

Would you be interested and you say yes, of course I would be interested, so you go and apply and get paid? say fifty thousand dollars the recruiter is not going to take any of your money the company is going to pay the recruiter let's say 10 or 5 of your salary as a lump sum saying hello, thank you for getting us an employee we needed, we didn't You don't have to do that and that's what a recruiter is: you can save email and you can cold call as many recruiters as you can. I recommend doing it. I think it's even more efficient than just blindly applying on LinkedIn and postal recruiter.

Another thing. you can do and this is kind of a Second Life trick that I found later, maybe two or three years ago, that uses LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been like one of the best tools for job seekers. That is the correct word: Work. search for people who are looking for jobs, it's one of the best tools because you can go and find recruiters through Linkedin just by searching for recruiters at this company and I actually have a whole video on how to do it. It's amazing because you can search for any company. I can go to Amazon right now and I can find 10 recruiters who work at Amazon.

I could send them a personal message with my resume attached. I can say, “Hey, I saw this specific job and you put the job there.” I found this job. I think I fit in very well here's my resume, you know, let me know and you can do it with hundreds of recruiters online. It's amazing how much access you have to recruiters, so all of those things are what I would be doing supplementing also applying on LinkedIn and zip recruiter and those other websites. I just wouldn't just be doing that because it's a difficult path to follow, okay, let's go to the next step, now we're going to look. on time frames, give me one more second, so time frames are really important because you don't want to be doing this process, all the things that we just discussed for the next two years, that's a long time most of the time. what are you looking at. you hope to do this within three to six months, um, and it seems like a long time, but if you really think about it, you'll know that I've been in this field for six years and it's worked out really well, like it just took me to a lot of places even before YouTube, um, and you know, long term, you have to think six months of my life, you know, really do these things to get to where I want to be for the rest of my life, so there's you know, it's a big reward, the first thing is to learn the skills, that is, I think it's going to take longer, or probably take longer for most people, if you just focus on the ones we talked about.

SQL Excel and a visualization tool and you're starting from scratch like you know nothing. I've been there. It's hard. It may take between two and three months. It's really nice. Good handling. There are many courses. practice websites that you can use, you know they're great places to look and use and use if you're trying to learn all those skills that might take you like six months if you're trying to learn Python or R um. or if you're trying to really learn how to use gbt chat or some AI tool, those things can take you all to be really good at um, so you know how easy for yourself, but about three months to learn. all the skills um and start applying the next thing is to build projects.

I don't think you need to spend two or three months building projects. Most people can do one project a week. I generally recommend having at least three projects, five is perfect, so if you can. do one project a week, um, and they don't have to be when you're just starting out, they don't have to be complex, keep it simple. I have a lot of guided projects on my channel, you can just watch a guided project and put it on. that, um, doesn't have to be like a project worthy of a high-level analyst, it just isn't, so keep it simple, keep it, you know, keep it small and then you can build from there so you know it should take about three to six weeks one week for three to five projects about three to six weeks next, we're creating a portfolio and really what I mean by this is just getting all your projects in one place so you look really good having a website, um, if you have I've never done it before, it can be difficult, so you know, just find a tutorial, find somewhere where you can create it and then develop it.

It should take between one and two weeks and the next thing we have to do is create a resume, hopefully this will win. It won't take you long, you don't have to start from scratch, just take your current resume and sort of revamp it for data analysis. You should be able to do it in about a week, but two weeks max if I know resumes aren't your thing, the last piece is the job search and the job search is like a huge variable. I could have seen people and have worked with people who literally got a job within the first month.

I learned that they did all the things I told them to do, then they started toThey applied and within a month they got a job. It happens, but it's not great, it doesn't happen all the time, that's super common. I usually see that Three Months to Get a Job now I put one to six months because sometimes it takes people six months, sometimes even longer, it depends on where you are, if you're in the middle of nowhere and you're looking for very specific jobs, remote only. You know you have to be within this salary range, you know that the very specific jobs that you're applying for are going to take longer, but if you're willing to move, if you're open to taking positions that don't pay as much, right? away to get some experience, which sometimes you may have to do.

You know you can get a job a lot faster so you know there are a lot of different variables and sometimes I live in Dallas which is really beneficial for me in getting some of my first jobs. because there is a huge business center and need for career data there, so I was in a good location to be able to get that job, if I were in the middle of nowhere today, I think it would be a little bit harder to get that first job, okay , let's move on to the next one. uh and that's it so I'll be back here in just a second and I'm sure he'll come but I know I went through that quickly but you guys can ask me whatever you want.

Questions that may occur to you and you want to know and at least I will have some answers. It may not be good, but I will have an answer. Thank you very much Alex for introducing me tonight. Let's go back to this slide. Yeah. I think for starters, I know a lot of people watching tonight are thinking about taking their first steps in the industry, you know, Junior Data Analyst positions, you know, how do you think the industry has changed in the last six years since you worked in the industry, that's a good question, you know, I'd like to start with one, you know, I want to answer your questions, yes, that's a great question, this has changed a lot, you know, it started six seven years ago it was very different it wasn't as remote of an approach um I think it was a little bit of a lower barrier to entry right now um it's a really interesting time to get in because um you know we've seen some layoffs in the majors. tech companies, but what I will say is that overall, job hiring hasn't slowed down that much, except at some of these big tech companies, which is not where most of the data analysts, most of the Data analysts work in a lot of Fortune 500 companies, mid-sized companies and even small companies, that's where I started and that's where 90 of the details work, they don't work in big tech companies, so I think for a lot of junior people Yes I'm starting now the difference between when I started and now is that it's more competitive there are more remote people trying to get jobs where I was when I started there wasn't a big push for remote work so there's just a little bit more of competition at the entry level because a lot of people just want to work remotely, so if you're in person, if you're in those metropolitan areas, I think you even have a bigger advantage in getting those jobs. because you're in person or you can work remotely, you have that flexibility so you can actually work.

You know where they need you, which many companies like incredibly and I also want to go back to the portfolio, one more question from me. side and talk about portfolios um, if a portfolio lands on your table for a junior position, what are you most excited about when you see that portfolio land on your table, what would you like to see, yeah, so I've worked with them a lot on entry level people like me was an analytics manager, so when we were hiring and I heard from a lot of consultants and some full-time employees, but when I saw one, I looked at their portfolio, there weren't many that had it. there, um, I prefer them some people don't care, some people really care, I just prefer them, I hope they have them.

I specifically remember there were some that came across, uh, you know my table that I'm at like that. It's a really interesting project. I go to your website. I look at this project. It's like I've never seen a project like this before, like it's really unique on some niche topic. I thought they were super interesting because it showed passion, um, showed. like a curiosity to just dive into Data um and then you know, I would watch some like Fantasy Football and so, I remember this guy specifically because we ended up hiring him. He had a very deep portfolio on Fantasy Football statistics um as part of his process, everything was in Python, so part of his process was also determining the best position for fantasy football drafts, what positions to take first based on of different factors, everything you know, data analysts, uh, uh, using data analysis tools and so on. it was really interesting, I love it, I thought it was super cool, it's actually interesting, you said that because also, in previous career Foundry events, we've had it in the past, where a student took a Foundry career project and actually he changed it and they did their own thing and then got a job off of it, so I think that's great advice too.

This is the time to get your questions answered for those watching on the big LinkedIn YouTube leaderboard. I'm going to apologize if I voice anyone's opinion. incorrect names that's not intentional I think Mia has a great question on the big scoreboard um Alex any thoughts on how AI could impact this industry in the next few years yeah um I'm just a lot of what I'm going to say I just posted a video yesterday that lasts about an hour and 15 minutes on this exact topic and goes very in depth, but here I will give you the final notes.

I think AI has enormous potential, something not like that. unlimited but huge potential to transform the analytics and data industry in general, for job seekers like you and me who work as data analysts or want to get into data analytics, some of the potential concerns I have seen are things like are. Really good at automating things, it can work at a really fast pace, a thousand times faster than a data analyst and it's very cheap. Those are three things that I think worry me the most. This is what doesn't worry me. These are the things that I think are positive for people like you and me trying to get a job.

I think AI still makes a lot of mistakes. It is getting better. But those hallucinations are very real and you wouldn't do it because I. I've been a manager, so I'm adopting a business mindset. I wouldn't want to blindly trust anything the AI ​​tells me. I will almost never blindly trust it. I'm going to need someone to delve into. the data, make sure what they're giving me is correct, look at the code again, make sure the code is correct, the data cleansing process, you know the whole spectrum, which is one of the biggest pieces that I would say it's um.

What makes data analysts extremely useful and very relevant is that as a business owner, I can't put in multi-million dollar projects, which is what I would do. I would work on a million or two million dollar project. I don't trust the AI ​​to do it. That's not right now and probably not in the foreseeable future the next thing I think I'm talking too much. I need to stop. I know it's great. I think this is great. I think because I want to say that AI is the buzzword at the moment, so I think please explain more about this topic, okay, I talked about it for an hour 15 before I could.

I could talk more than that, so I don't want to, um, I'm going to try, I'll try to keep. It's more concise than I think it was going to be. The other part is that you have to think about the majority of companies and companies that integrate AI into their world. When I was managing a team of six and seven people and you know I'm thinking about AI, how I would have integrated it because it really wasn't a big thing when I was a manager. I would take a lot of precautions because you know we had a lot of important data making important decisions and so on.

I would be very careful about implementing it and that could be a more than a year process, so I think just in terms of implementing it in many workplaces at the enterprise level it's going to take a long time, I think the GBT chat has done that. . It's a pretty good job of integrating on a personal level to speed up workflows, but I think integrating these AI tools into a real business is going to be a lot more complicated than I think people understand, especially if you're not a person who it handles data, right? you don't understand how these tools work, how the data flows, the data infrastructure, all the nuances of the data and you just try Plug and Play like you don't see it working, well then I guess that's it. some of the biggest things that I think will keep a lot of data analysts very busy some of my predictions for the future of AI I think freelancing in AI, freelancing as a data analyst is going to become really important, and I said that and then , a day later, Tina Huang, if you know her, is a data scientist.

YouTuber made almost the exact same prediction. I sent him a message. I said, Hey, you just made the same prediction I made. I recorded that video a week ago. We did not have. idea, but we had exactly the same prediction: a lot of smaller companies will need to start using these AI tools and they don't have the data infrastructure developed, they don't know how to use AI tools, there is some joshimo in a company. and they say I need to use this to stay afloat, so I think freelancing as a data analyst and knowing how to use these AI tools is going to be a big deal.

You'll see a lot of things on Fiverr and upwork or small niche businesses like mine pop up and people will just start their own businesses, so I think freelancing is going to be a big thing, because a lot of small businesses that have never used these things will want to use them. . I'm very much like hundreds of thousands of companies, you know, around the world are going to start having to use them to keep up, so that's one of my predictions, another one of my predictions and let me look at this. very quickly because I have it in front of me very quickly, so I work freelance data, I think this was another interesting one that I had thought about, which no, I don't know if anyone else is talking about it, but I think it's cool, I think that as AI tools enter different departments within a company, you will see more nuanced data professionals, something a data analyst would do, except now they are nuanced in that specific department, whereas before they would not have been nuanced .

So something like me, I wrote this and, you know, it sounds a little strange, but something like an HR AI analyst or an hrai specialist, something that maybe doesn't even have the word analyst, but that does a similar work in which human resources data is taken. and you're finding ideas that maybe they've never done before, but now they feel like you know we have to get into this, so you'll see, I think you'll see a lot of that popping up a lot within companies. more data focused AI, people, so that's one of my predictions is that the title of data analyst will change in the next five years, you'll see more AI analysts, you'll see more data analysts.

When using AI, you will even see people as AI professionals or AI data. I wrote it the other day, but you will see a change in job titles as these tools become integrated and I think it will come slowly. Actually, I don't think it's going to happen that quickly. You'll see one or two pop up from time to time, but I think in five years it will be a pretty good combination of just one data analyst business. analyst, you know a marketing analyst and then you also like data AI analysts. You need to know how to use this AI tool or know how to use these types of AI tools to work in that position, just predicting AI.

Alex, the analyst who appears on YouTube. in general, but there was an interesting point that I think he mentioned about having experience before and this is something that came up in some skills workshops that we've done as well is that, for example, you could type something in the GPT chat. Do you know what nuclear fusion is? What is this? What is that? To me, without experience, it seems right, but you need to have experience in the field to be able to reflect on what the answer really is. knowing what is the truth and what is not the truth, so I think you've brought up a very important point: you actually need to be a little bit ahead to see what's wrong and what's right, so I think it's nice .

A lot about that, actually, um, because what's really interesting is that now you see people like developers who are using Chat GBD to create products. It's super interesting here. I've been seeing it everywhere, everyone says I could be a developer tomorrow and they can't. that's wrong and here's why, because you can ask Joshua to create something, you can plug it intowhatever ID you are using and you just need some basic knowledge on how to use it and you will be able to visually see that your product is working. now if you want to go further and you want to make modifications and know, add a backend database and do all these other things, you have to know what you're doing right, but at an entry level or not even at an input, but at a very basic level, a lot of people can plug and play and build something like a developer, but once you start getting to the more complex things, chat can only recommend things, it can only help you, you can't build that database for you. and connect it to your um to your interface and create the whole UI, you just can't do those things yet, maybe you will in the future.

Analytics will be very similar in the fact that you can build something, but something that's different even from development work is that the developers can see it, they can see it visually, this is correct, it's working, the analysis is very, in my opinion , it's a little more nuanced because, there's a lot of different business use cases, so we're going to see people will be able to generate a lot of things, but is that right? That's when you need someone who knows how to dig into that data to be able to use gbt chat and these different AI tools to validate that these things actually work and are correct.

They're not just giving me random information that doesn't make sense, it doesn't help the business at all, so, yeah, there's going to be a lot of that going on, it's, but yeah, knowing the basic tools, how they work, how analytics works, understanding that process. It will continue to be extremely important and, especially at the upper secondary level, you will have to know those things that you can. Don't just rely on GPT chat or an AI tool and if that's not an inspiration to learn how to analyze data, I don't know what is, so Alex, you're totally convinced that it's a future-proof career, so, I do not do it.

I don't want you to know that I don't want to make that statement. I don't think it's future proof in very nuanced areas. I think there are some data analyst jobs that should have been automated a long time ago. they're just super simple, they didn't need to be a data analyst job in the first place, there are tools that ten, five, ten years ago could have automated that, so I think across the broad spectrum of data analyst jobs, of Very realistically, I would say there are probably between five and ten percent that have a high probability of being automated in about 10 years.

Where an AI tool will do most of it, they will just need someone to do the maintenance. I think 80 or 90 or more will still require data analysts will be practical, I am doing this job only because there is something that I only with my domain knowledge in my knowledge of the industry that I have worked for the last seven years, practical. I couldn't imagine any business like my old company. It's called amerisourcebergen, my old company, if they tried to implement AI right now and did it, it would be an absolute disaster. I can only imagine how much money we would lose with this whole business we were working on using Ai and making a mistake and leaving it and relying on it like I would would be a horrible move, so integrating those tools and then knowing how to learn how to use them and scale it up.

It will be a multi-year process and there will be a lot of jobs that emerge, so I think five to ten percent of the jobs that disappear will actually be heavily reused in different jobs in the future, so between the five and the ten that disappear, I think it's going to be about 20 on the rise with all these smaller company freelance jobs and everything in the future, so I don't want to just say it's foolproof, I just think you need to know the skills, know the tools and know your audience and your market to align yourself correctly. with that, so you have a job and a place to work in the future, great answer and also I think I'm just talking about the AI ​​conversation we had earlier, for anyone learning about data analytics, it's worth staying up to date. day. up to date with everything that's changing in the industry, you know, reading blogs, like the Foundry career blog, just the Shameless blog, but also, you know, just staying up to date and looking at AI as a kind of something you know how to work with rather than something you just ignore because it's not going away, so it's good to get started and for anyone who was inspired tonight to start their own journey in data analysis, I'm going to post a link to Foundry career short. course um in big marker if you're thinking about taking those first steps, it's a free five to six day short course that will take you to those first steps uh, back to the questions, there was a great question here from Allen in big marker um for For those without a technical background, what do you think are some of the most important transferable skills that lead to your success as a data analyst? um so I worked um uh uh Sorry I blanked out for a second I worked with a guy named Sergio um and if you follow me on LinkedIn you may have seen Sergio Ramos um I love the guy I worked with him was my mentor worked in a warehouse um using forklifts and stuff like that and he was like I really want to be a data analyst.

I thought, "Let's do it," so he became the first apprentice I had and now works at PayPal as a data analyst. This is what I and I say because it is a very similar story. and this is what I recommend, this is what I did with it. I said first and foremost you have to learn the skills, so he's fine, so he busted his butt just trying to learn those skills, he learns the skills really well. I was really impressed. It was like hey, you learned, you learned this really well in two or three months, great job.

I said, "Okay, build the project," so he rushed to build those projects and then I said, "Apply," this is where he really stood out. He did exactly what I told him. do and what I wish I had done and what I talked about before, which is reach out to as many recruiters as you can, pester them until they help you find a job and you just have to be like a little a little Shameless and he did it and he literally said every time every week he was like, hey, just message all my recruiters, just message all my um uh or just call my recruiters and all that and he finally got his first job at um like just a um, a consulting job. , then six months after that job, you applied for another job, got another six months, had a year, and then applied to PayPal, got a job at PayPal, all using recruiters, so if I were you, if I was just getting started , you don't have any relevant technical experience and he literally didn't have any he didn't even have a college degree he literally just got out of high school he started working in a warehouse um it's that your passion and your drive and your.

Your ability to keep going and follow these steps is really important, so he had a very positive outlook on it, he didn't let himself get beat, he just kept pushing and when he got that first job, I mean, he just worked and worked. he was a hustler, as I call Sergio, he's a hustler because he kept pushing, um, so I think part of him is like, um, you know, I think learning the skills is a good resume, working with recruiters, super important. The other thing I will say is a good personality someone who is good at interviewing or practicing you can practice interviewing having a good personality that helps a lot especially with recruiters when you work with them to make sure they don't know you blacklist um or get interviews and I like talking to a hiring manager, your personality helps a lot, so those are the things that I think are most important, they are those things that I did and Sergio did that made him really successful, even with almost no qualification, it was not the same.

Sergio Ramos, who used to play for Real Madrid, was no different. Sean has a great question about the big score. If you are thinking about becoming a data scientist, being a data analyst would be a good starting point. Yes, they ask me this. a lot, I think it definitely can be and in fact, in my third year as a data analyst I was working at amerisourceberg and they have Fortune, they're like the Fortune five in the Fortune 500, they're a huge company and I was working on this data analytics team or I was a data analyst on a data science team and I was very good at what I did and I started working with the data science team and after about a year there they asked me if I wanted to transition to become a data scientist um and it's absolutely possible now I turned it down because I saw the work they were doing and I just wasn't interested.

I was like I don't want to do this for the rest of my life um and it wasn't my thing, but a lot of people love data science so I know for a fact that you definitely can do it, you have to do it. I want to, I don't know if I want to say upskilling, but you have to change your skill sets as you go, it's like analytics is very focused on you, you know data collection, data cleaning, preprocessing, uh and then visualization as well, while data scientists do some of the data collection and preprocessing for their stuff, but they also need to know some of the machine learning models, so you need to get skills in different areas, but definitely It can be a good springboard.

I've seen a lot of people do it and message me and say hello. I was a data analyst and became a data scientist after two years. I thought it's amazing, you know, if that's what you want to do, do it and there are some people who become details of life like me. I don't see myself changing. I thought. about becoming a data engineer because I was working closely with data engineers and database developers and I really loved building pipelines, but you know it wasn't something I was that interested in at the time, so you can definitely start with analytics. and from there, there are people who have been data scientists and have become data analysts.

You know it's different, it's different highways that you go on and off and you can choose what you want and the skills you want. learn amazing just by reading some of the comments on YouTube uh Hi everyone watching on YouTube also Alex's audience, we love seeing that you always bring great energy Mandy said she just saw a chatbot data analyst role, for which shows that there's a lot there's a lot of rules, it's already happening um, great question I think, um, here from Salma um, and it goes back to the recruiter questions that you're answering before, um, how do you find really good recruiters? for recruiters to be? a very quick, very quick story, and then I'm going to answer that question when I first became a data analyst.

Someone told me to work with a recruiter. I had never heard of a recruiter. I didn't know what he was. As if perplexed, I thought: what the hell is this? Then a guy tells me that he has a job offer or job interview form for me. I think it's a data analyst job. I thought, "Okay, great, it pays pretty well that way." It was like and he said, Meet me in this garage that's next to the building and I was like, "Oh my God, they're going to murder me." And I told my wife where she was going, what time she was going if she didn't listen to me. of me within an hour from that moment to call the police, that's really what happened.

I looked back and it was really fun, um, but I didn't know anything about recruiters, they scare me so much, it was like a different world. I wasn't in the tech world, I was in healthcare, so it's a different world, so you have to understand that you have to be careful with recruiters. There are a few that you should make sure are legitimate, but recruiters can be anywhere. find a lot of recruiters I found a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn, so there are a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn um, like I was saying before you can connect, look at a company and search for LinkedIn or search for recruiters on LinkedIn, find them and message them.

So if you find a job, um uh, a job posting that you really like and you're like, "Oh, this would be my dream job." For this, please attach your resume. I think it would be very good for the feds. I'd love to chat about this if you have time. Just a quick note and that may put you on your radar. They will have 50 other people to apply, you may be on their radar and no one else is. Another thing I did that you can also do is search for your area, so I lived in Dallas, so I Googled data analysts, recruiters in Dallas.

Now I quickly found out that sometimes They are called different things, they are called Technical Recruiters, they are called um uh, what was another term for this, but a lot of them were called Technical Recruiters for the Dallas area, is what I found and then I started to communicate with them and that works too and you can send them an emailto him when I worked at Fortune 500 company when I was just a data analyst, it just came up. We work on a larger team, so at the small company that I was just reporting to as a guy in the um at Amerisource Bergen, I was working as a team. of about 12 people, so our team would get together and I usually present it to the whole team because we were part of a long process of collecting data, the process of cleaning the data, transforming it, doing all that, creating the visualizations, we had a person. for everything, database engineers, database developers, visualization specialists, we have the whole Gambit, uh, data scientist and then we would report to the program manager, who would then report, we would present it to them first and then we would present it to them to my manager or my manager's manager who was the senior director of data science and after that we never went higher than that now in my last job I was an analytics manager.

I reported directly to the CIO and SVP of IT, so I guess it depends. like a data analyst, normally you're in a small company reporting higher, in smaller companies you're reporting as one or maybe two levels above and then as a manager I was reporting up to the highest level and then all the ones in the middle because of how my role was, so I was informing everyone or presenting it to everyone. Awesome thanks Alex. um I'm quickly going back to the Foundry data analytics program because some people asked about the duration, um, if you can put in 30 to 40 hours a day. week um you can complete the course um the programming four months um and if you can dedicate 15 to 20 hours you can complete it in eight months just to clarify um for anyone who would like to know that Alex um thank you very much for organizing another fantastic presentation tonight also many thanks to the Alex crowd and I would also like to quickly say to anyone watching from his Foundry career to subscribe to Alex's YouTube channel, it's Alex the analyst, he currently has 470,000 subscribers and we want to take it to 500 so go there and subscribe we need to get to 500 by the end of

2023

uh it's a combined goal um but yeah thank you so much for all the great questions all the engagement tonight for anyone who is. he is watching and is interested in data analysis.

I would also recommend checking out the race fan country blog. I'm just posting a link on Big Marker. There are some very specific topics about tool salaries, but there are also some more general topics about transferable soft skills. skills and jobs in your locality that sort of thing, so check it out. We have a great team of editors working at Care Foundry writing these articles and they would love for you to read them. Also check out Care Foundry's YouTube channel. You can see previous live events we've done there, but you can also see team members who have been interviewed and people we've interviewed, alumni, check there are some familiar faces. especially in the data analysis section, so I would recommend going there, especially to watch the videos from Tom Gadsby, who is the senior data scientist here at Care Foundry.

He has some great introductory YouTube videos so check them out and last but not least if anyone. is considering a career change and is thinking about a career in foundry. We are currently offering scholarships for career change worth up to 1125 or 1125 euros discount on the total price of the program. To get it or apply, simply book a call with the program advisor if you are on YouTube, click the link below in the description or if you want a great market, click the sticky note and speak to one of our advisors from the show, the lovely one I know the most personally and can also answer any questions you may have about the Dual. mentoring model the work curriculum guarantees all those kinds of things and they are waiting for the calls now um Alex, thank you very much, we will see you again this year, I probably hope so, we will find a topic.

We're going to find a really interesting topic, so we'll bring you back to the channel, but thank you so much for taking your time tonight and it was a great presentation, and thank you to everyone who joined us from all over the world. Great international audience and a great evening, so thank you all and until next time.