A recent graduate reached out to ask how to get started in data analytics, so I put together a learning resource list for those just getting started and looking for non-coding suggestions. (I have another list of learning resources for programming.)
Here’s what I recommended
🎧 Podcast: Analytics Power Hour – water cooler conversations that you actually learn from.
📚 Data viz fundamentals Anything by Nathan Yau
📚 Storytelling with data: Lea Pica’s podcast + book – perfect for those who want their key analytics takeaways to land with stakeholders.
📚 Quick wins: Chart Spark by Alli Torban – One of my favorites! It’s inspirational and provides practical exercises for creative thinking and problem solving for data visualization
📈 Applied learning: Coursera course on data visualization for business with Tableau – great way to learn what metrics are important, how to define and calculate them quickly and easily in Tableau and visualize them. It’s a super efficient way to learn all of these skills at once, and produce some nice examples of the kinds of data dashboards you can build.
📚 Big picture concepts: Becoming a Data Head by Alex J. Gutman & Jordan Goldmeier – excellent book/audiobook for learning key terms + mental models
📚 Interested in a no-code path: How to Become a Data Analyst by Annie Nelson – low-cost, practical roadmap
🔍 Career building: Reverse the Search by Madeline Mann – her approach helped me attract inbound offers when I pivoted careers
💼 Building a portfolio of projects based on real data and business questions – great application of AI. Ask it to give you a novel project with realistic business requirements and a link to real or realistic datasets. Here’s an example prompt:
Please provide a business intelligence 2-4 hour project prompt that is novel and that will provide a good case study to present the benefits that data analysis offers [specific industry] . This project should [what you want to show]; one possibility is [ex: marketing channel performance analysis.]
Please also provide a link to an existing data set that can be used for this analysis. Include all the questions the client would like to answer, important context about the business and business requirements for the project that would normally be collected during the requirements gathering stage. Please also indicate how the results should be presented. The tech I’ll use to conduct the analysis includes [your tools/languages].
If you’re on this path, feel free to reach out or drop a comment. I’m always happy to share what I’ve learned.
