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My Experience Changing Careers to Become a Data Analyst

How to decide if data analytics is the right career for you

Photo by Dale Brooks from Pexels
Photo by Dale Brooks from Pexels

I graduated with a finance degree and naturally gravitated to my first job working as a financial analyst. Since then I’ve changed Careers multiple times and have had roles as a data engineer, data scientist, and now as a data analyst. My career changes weren’t smooth transitions and it was tough to adapt to my new roles. Today I want to share the challenges I faced along the way and my advice if you decide to switch careers to become a data analyst.


Overcome your imposter syndrome

Imposter syndrome is "the idea that you’ve only succeeded due to luck, and not because of your talent or qualifications". As a Data analyst, stakeholders looked to me as the analytics expert but often times I felt like I was an imposter trying to demonstrate expertise in a subject I didn’t fully understand. I learned to overcame my fears by identifying areas where I felt my knowledge was weak and I took courses and read up as much as possible to improve my understanding and become the expert. Don’t feel you have to know everything in the beginning. Just don’t stop learning because that’s how you become a great data analyst.

What’s important will change

When I was a financial analyst every number had to match our accounting system down to the penny. As a data analyst I’m happy if the answer is within 1% vs. other sources. Spending hours trying to track down that final 1% is not important as data analyst but it’s vital as a financial analyst. Don’t take the same rules you applied in your prior job to your current role because it may not matter.

Find the right fit for your personality

Transitioning to data analytics may be easier for some but harder for others. If you’re curious, love problem solving, and detail oriented then learning to become a data analyst may come more naturally to you than others without those personality traits. Being curious will help you come up with questions to ask about a business problem because your stakeholder may not even know where to start. Problem solving will help you debug SQL queries and troubleshoot data pipelines. Attention to detail will help you catch bad data and wrong answers before you present to the stakeholder. Even if you don’t have these personality traits it doesn’t mean you can’t be a great data analyst but do explore other career options that may be a better personality fit for you.

Learn to communicate with others

I’m an introvert and my favorite forms of communication used to be email and instant messaging because I didn’t have to physically talk to others. This model didn’t work when I became a data analyst. I had to learn how to interact effectively with stakeholders and other groups I worked with often like product and engineering. You need to have good communication skills to explain the results to stakeholders for them to make decisions. If you like to work in isolation and rarely talk to others you’ll need to learn how to work with people and improve your communication skills to become an effective data analyst.

Practice makes perfect

It may be overwhelming having to learn new technical skills but it gets easier with each skill you learn. When I first learned programming, I had to spend time upfront to understand basic programming principles but every additional language I learned only required remembering a new syntax structure because the principles were the same across languages. If you don’t know which technical skill to start with, I rank knowing SQL as the most important to become a data analyst. SQL may be hard at first but as you practice more you’ll no longer need to look up the syntax and it’ll become instinctive.


It’s not easy to change careers and while there were challenges along the way I’m glad I made the switch. If you’re still in doubt about becoming a data analyst, I hope reading about my experience has helped you decide if data analytics is the right path for you.


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