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What is Data Analytics? A Complete Guide for Beginners
BY EMILY STEVENS, UPDATED ON MAY 26, 2023
27 mins read
In this guide, you’ll find a complete and comprehensive introduction to data analytics—starting with a simple, easy-to-understand definition and working up to some of the most important tools and techniques. We’ll also touch upon how you can start a career as a data analyst and explore what the future holds in terms of market growth.
A great start would be trying out Career Foundry’s free 5-day introductory data course to see if working in data could be the career for you.
Want to skip ahead to a specific section? Just use the clickable menu below.
What is data analytics?
What’s the difference between data analytics and data science?
What are the different types of data analysis?
What are some data analytics real-world case studies?
What does a data analyst do?
What is the typical process that a data analyst will follow?
What tools and techniques do data analysts use?
Data analytics techniques
Data analytics tools
What skills do you need to become a data analyst?
What are some of the best data analytics courses?
What does the future hold for data analytics?
Key takeaways and further reading
1. What is data analytics?
Most companies are collecting loads of data all the time, but in its raw form, this data doesn’t really mean anything. This is where data analytics comes in. Data analytics is the process of analyzing raw data to draw out meaningful, actionable insights, which are then used to inform and drive smart business decisions.
A data analyst will extract raw data, organize it, and then analyze it, transforming it from incomprehensible numbers into coherent, intelligible information. Having interpreted the data, the data analyst will then pass on their findings in the form of suggestions or recommendations about what the company’s next steps should be.
You can think of data analytics as a form of business intelligence, used to solve specific problems and challenges within an organization. It’s all about finding patterns in a dataset that can tell you something useful and relevant about a particular area of the business—how certain customer groups behave, for example, or how employees engage with a particular tool.
Data analytics helps you make sense of the past and predict future trends and behaviors; rather than basing your decisions and strategies on guesswork, you’re making informed choices based on what the data is telling you.
How businesses use data analytics
Armed with the insights drawn from the data, businesses and organizations are able to develop a much deeper understanding of their audience, their industry, and their company as a whole—and, as a result, are much better equipped to make decisions and plan ahead.
Understand better by watching? Learn more about the basics of data analytics from Will in the following video:
2. What’s the difference between data analytics and data science?
You’ll find that the terms “data science” and “data analytics” tend to be used interchangeably. However, they are two different fields and denote two distinct career paths. What’s more, they each have a very different impact on the business or organization.
Despite their differences, it’s important to recognize that data science and data analytics work together, and both make extremely valuable contributions to business.
You can learn more about the differences between a data scientist and a data analyst in our guide, but for now let’s cover two key differences.
Key difference 1: What they do with the data
One key difference between data scientists and data analysts lies in what they do with the data and the outcomes they achieve.
A data analyst will seek to answer specific questions or address particular challenges that have already been identified and are known to the business. To do this, they examine large datasets with the goal of identifying trends and patterns. They then...
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