Want to Embark on a Career in Analytics?

Undergraduates are always spoilt for choice when it comes to up-skilling. They have a wide variety of options to choose from.

These days, there are numerous cross-functional competences that are available to students, such as programming, management, leadership and more- but the most promising choice has to be data analytics.

Analytics as a skill is being highly sought after and companies are looking to colleges and universities for filling in their requirements. New comers in analytics have a much higher salary than new comers in any other field.

There is a dearth of analytics skilled people, in general, and companies make up for this with attractive pay packages and present employees with a better scope of growth.

No wonder you can scale to a senior data analyst position in just about two years, which is quite unheard of in other domains. Data science and analytics is something that can be taken up by anyone, irrespective of their educational background. A bit of practice and a knack for numbers is what is needed to step into the analytics sector.

Where to begin? Which skills to gain? What concepts to learn? Are there any further specializations in analytics? These are the common questions that are asked by many students who are thinking about a career in analytics and these are the questions I aim to answer in this article.

Taking the Leap

Begin with exploring what analytics and data science actually is. Take your background into consideration.

What is your current course of education – is it engineering, commerce, arts, science, or something else? Have you had any exposure to statistics and high level mathematics? How good or comfortable are you with number crunching? How strong are your analytics skills? You will have to do a personal evaluation of your interests. It doesn’t have to be anything concrete, just uncovering your intent and interest will do the job.

Running With It

Now that you know which direction you might be headed in - here are our course suggestions and learning paths that will make the most sense when it comes to being skilled and job ready.

1. Analytics with Beginners

This is the perfect course for absolute beginners. It walks you through the basics and helps you get a glimpse of what analytics is all about. This will build your foundation and help you get ready to take on the more complex concepts and practices in analytics.

2. Data Science with SAS and Data Science with R

Both these courses lay the foundation for a career in data science. SAS & R are two of the most popular and widely used data science software out there.

The courses have similar curriculum, but the big difference is the tool which you will be learning and working on – SAS or R. While SAS is usually employed by larger companies; start-ups and smaller companies chose R (since R is open source). 

However, now the lines are blurring and companies are employing the software based on the project and client needs.

3. Big Data for Beginners

Big Data is the buzz word and is a rapidly growing field. This course is the best push start you can get to step into the Big Data part of data and analytics. Crafted for newbies, you will explore the basics of Big Data and how it can be used to extract business insights.

So, there you go. These courses are your best bet when it comes to beginning a career in big data and analytics. They carefully build your analytics proficiency and expose you to the concepts and skills needed to begin your career.

Written by Sarita Digumarti, COO & Co-Founder, Jigsaw Academy, The Online School of Analytics