What I am seeing are a lot of new graduates in this field. For over 30 years, I have been a strong proponent that this was going to be the profession of the future.
Understanding and telling a story with data is not as easy as it looks. In fact there are a few things missing when being taught the skills.
This is what happens. You are given a data set and told to create a variety of reports. This seems to make sense but it doesn’t. First of all how can you create if you are brand new to the company or industry. You don’t really know what is important without a lot of guidance.
The second thing that is wrong is that the data set you get is small and clean. These are two things you will rarely get from your new company if they have never done business analytics before.
Which skills do you need to invest in? I tend to use pivot tables in Excel to determine how many times the same company is listed with different supplier numbers. I create a lookup name so that I at least have only one Bell Canada versus 8 or 10.
I know that the address field is always going to be used for other types of information (telephone number, email and notes).
Postal codes can and will be missing which is why I have used directworx to help fill in the blanks.
Emails are often in a different file and I use Microsoft Access to match the files while others use Vlookup.
I have other ways to speed up the data cleaning process but I will keep those a secret that my QCsolver Inc. and Cambridge Solutions Inc customers can leverage.
Vineet Jolly created this must do list and I would like to suggest that these are lessons you should learn and practice.
Categories:
Tags:
Comments are closed