This blog is part of Aryng’s Analytics career transition path series for individuals.
Time and again I’m asked the same question by recruiters and job hunters alike: What are the hallmarks of the “analytics hero”—the person everybody pings when they have critical questions about their products or customers that will shape key business decisions?
If you are an analyst, a professional looking to transition your career to analytics, an HR professional recruiting analysts, or an executive looking to assemble a fine analytics team, rest assured that these heroes aren’t science fiction.
Heroes are out there, and you can hire one or become one yourself, by focusing on some key traits. A successful analyst will exhibit these five top characteristics:
- Strong analytics aptitude: The analyst demonstrates strong logical thinking, verbal and quantitative reasoning proficiency and the ability to zoom out and see patterns. These skills are innate qualities, but everyone is somewhere on the continuum. A good analyst tends to be on the high to the medium-high side of the range. It’s easy to find out where you fit on the scale by taking the analytics aptitude test to learn about your strengths.
- Curious as a cat: The best analysts are often immensely curious about what customers want, what works, what doesn’t, and why. They don’t know all the answers, but by being curious, they draw out knowledge from colleagues, then use the data to prove/disprove and quantify the insights. They are truth searchers who know analytics is a journey, not a destination.
- Hypotheses driven: How would a treasure hunter go about looking for gold in the Pacific Ocean? Would they dive right in and start exploring with the hope of finding gold? Not if they are any good at what they do. They start by being a detective, using the knowledge of shipwrecks, trade routes, ocean depths and more to identify the most likely spots for finding the treasure. This is akin to looking for golden actionable insights from the data ocean. The good analyst finds actionable insights not by randomly exploring the data but by first narrowing down what they are looking for (business question). Then the analyst uses collective knowledge as clues (hypotheses) to determine where to drill to find the golden insights that inform the answer to that business question. New or not, a good analyst never embodies the great explorer Columbus, but instead follows in the footsteps of the great Sherlock Holmes! My book, “Behind Every Good Decision”, has an entire chapter dedicated to busting the myth about undirected data exploration.
- Motivated by impact: Good analysts are not motivated by technology, tools or cool algorithms and methodologies. They are singularly focused on solving problems using data; that is, they are focused on moving the dial, making a change, and driving an impact using data and insights.
- Structured problem solver: Good analysts are, first and foremost, problem solvers. They like to find solutions to issues and thus often come from engineering or science backgrounds. They are efficient problem solvers because of their ability to take a problem, break it down into pieces, find solutions to the subparts using a hypothesis-driven approach and pull it all back together.
Now the rest is up to you. Keep in mind these five characteristics and you’ll see becoming the “hero” analyst or find one to help solve your business problem isn’t a myth.
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