What is the job of a data engineer? How is it different from the job of a data analyst? What does a data scientist do? Confused? Let us put all the different aspect of data analytics jobs into different buckets and make it all easier for you.
If you are looking to migrate to data analytics from any other branch (technical and non-technical) then read this article till the end to comprehend the different choices available for you. Please go through this article even if you belong to the field and are looking for options to upgrade your career and earn some better pay from the field itself.
The field of data analytics is a constantly changing one, and the roles mentioned here are defined loosely. Below are the four major roles under data analyst responsibilities.
Data Engineer
A data engineer is the one who designs the platform and the structure which gathers and stores all the data from the users such as what item they are buying from an online store and what are the contents of their cart currently as well as on their list. Data engineers ensure that all the data are stored in an efficient manner and are easily retrievable.
Data engineers are adept at working with a range of sources and framing ETL queries to collect data from them easily. They then organize all the data in databases for the companies and individuals or others to use it from there.
You will need to acquire knowledge of various languages such as Java, Python, C++, SQL, Hadoop, Spark, Ruby, etc. on top of data analytics certification. It should be noted however that there is no need to learn all these languages as the requirement varies from company-to-company.
Being a data engineer provides you the rare opportunity to work as both a software engineer and a data analyst.
Data Analyst
Data analytics jobs expect you to prepare insights from the available data which directly impacts decisions in businesses. There is direct involvement of data analysts in everyday business activities. A data analyst or business analyst is expected to perform a great amount of ad hoc analysis every day. For instance, data analysts help an e-commerce’s marketing team to identify the customer segments for the marketing or the ideal time to market any product or the reasons of the failure of the marketing campaign and how to avoid the mistakes in future. A good understanding of business, statistics and data manipulation is thus required in a data analyst.
The languages and tools which are required to be known by a data analyst includes SQL, R, Excel and Tableau for some cases.
Data Visualizer
Every kind of company or organization in today’s time possess a data visualizer or a business intelligence professional who is/are responsible for creating and presenting weekly insights and chart boards informing the management about the various metrics. The metrics may include the weekly sales of products manufactured by the company, the average time required for the delivery, or the total number of cancellations of orders and the reason for them.
Data Scientist
A data scientist is a person who utilizes the data in possession of the organization in order to design business-oriented learning models and machineries.
For instance, data scientists go through all the available data of the company and look at the buying patterns of the consumers, identify the popular items and more frequent users. Then they design algorithms based on that to automatically recommend the more popular products to frequent buyers on the basis of their navigation histories, purchasing histories or other similar parameters.
As you can see, there are all kinds of great data analytics jobs out there and so many ways to make a positive difference in the industry. So why not dive in?