 What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today, we're gonna be talking about how to become a data analyst without any experience. Now, when I say no experience, that can mean a few different things. You could be right out of college and so you've just never gotten a job. So of course you don't have any experience or you could be somebody who's trying to switch careers like you were an accountant or a therapist or a teacher and you're trying to become a data analyst. Now, speaking for myself, I switched careers. I used to be working at a behavioral health hospital where I led group therapies. I have a degree in recreational therapy. So as you can tell, I made a pretty big career change and I have an entire video dedicated to talking about that entire process of how I was able to switch careers. And so I'll leave a link right up here in case you wanna watch that. But everything that we're gonna talk about today are things that I actually did in order to become a data analyst and I had absolutely no experience at all. In fact, six months before I got my first day to analyst job, I did not know what a data analyst was. I mean, I was really, really new at this and I was kind of piecing everything together. And so if you are trying to become a data analyst and you have no experience and you are trying to piece it all together to figure out how to make that happen, this video is for you. And so we're gonna walk through this process from the very beginning to the very end and I'm gonna give you my best advice as well as some tips and tricks that I learned along the way when I was trying to get my first job when I had no experience. Without further ado, let's jump into it. And like I said, I'm gonna start from the very beginning. And so you need to have the right skills that a data analyst has. The ones that I recommend focusing on the most, especially when you're first starting out are SQL and then you need a BI tool like Tableau or Power BI and then Excel and then lastly, Python. I would learn those skills in that order. And there are so many places that you can learn these things. Two places that I recommend are Udemy and Coursera. I've made videos for both of those platforms talking about courses that I have taken and I recommend. And of course, both of those videos focused on these skills that we were just talking about of SQL, Tableau, Power BI, Excel and Python. Now the very next step in this process is to build a portfolio project. Now, I was not smart enough to actually do this. I just sent scripts along with my resume and it worked. But if I had a portfolio, I'm telling you it would have made a huge difference. A portfolio project is a way for you to demonstrate your skills to a potential employer. And so if you're learning SQL or Python or Tableau or Power BI and you make a portfolio project, you can then show that to the employer and they can see your skill level in that area. The goal of this is to create three to five projects that you can put together either on a website or in GitHub. Then you can put that on your LinkedIn or your resume so that if a potential employer is looking at you to potentially hire you, they can see your skill level and feel a lot more confident in hiring you. As of right now, we're walking through a data analyst portfolio project series on my channel. And so if you want some ideas on projects and you actually want to be guided through and walk through every single step of the way, then be sure to check those out. Now you don't have any data analyst experience at all. So your last job might be something like a cashier or a teacher or a consultant or something completely random that has nothing to do with data analysis. My biggest tip by far is to put everything that is data analyst related at the top. The last thing that you want to do when you have no experience is to put your work history at the top because a potential employer or a hiring manager is going to look at your resume and see that your last job was a cashier or a teacher and they're going to say, well, this guy doesn't have any experience. I'm not going to hire him and they throw your resume away. But if the first thing that they see on your resume is your skills section and it says SQL, Power BI, Tableau, Excel and Python, they might just move on to the next section which would then be your portfolio project section and they see everything from data exploration, data cleaning, data visualization. And at that point, hopefully they'll click on the link that will bring them to your portfolio website and they can see all of your projects and they can see the skill level that you have and all these skills that they actually want. And then at that point when they get to your job history and they see that you have no experience, they may just give you a shot because you have all the skills that they're looking for. Now, of course, that's not going to happen with every job that you apply for but that is the general idea of formatting in that way. Again, I have created an entire video dedicated to creating a data analyst resume so I will leave a link here as well as down there if you want to check that out. Now, everything that we just talked about is preparing you to apply for jobs. And so we are at the part of the process, we are going to start applying for jobs and I think the very first thing that we need to look at is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has by far been the best place to look for jobs especially when I was starting out with no experience. And so the very first thing that I would do is optimize your LinkedIn profile. Be sure to add your resume to your profile, also add your personal projects that you've created and your portfolios that people can check those out and then at the very bottom in the skills section be sure to add every single skill that you know that is related to data analytics. One other thing that I would recommend that you do to your profile is at the very top where it says show recruiters you're open to work that you click on that and add all the job titles and the locations that you're looking for jobs. Now, after you've updated your profile you are ready to start reaching out to recruiters and that is the very next step. Now, I say reach out to recruiters but with LinkedIn profile that we just set up there's a good chance that you'll have people reach out to you who are recruiting for data analyst positions. And if so, that is the best case scenario because you did little to no work and they're reaching out to you for you to get an interview. Now, why would you want to work with a recruiter when you can just apply for jobs yourself? Well, to be honest, there are so many reasons but one of the biggest ones is that a recruiter is literally there to help you find a job. I mean, they get paid for placing people in jobs. And so when you have no experience and you're just applying on Glassdoor or a zip recruiter a lot of times your resume is getting filtered out because you don't have any experience whereas when you're working with a recruiter you can talk them through where you're currently at and then they can help you find a job that is best suited to your current skill level. That's how I landed my first data analyst job and that's how I also landed every single other data analyst job I've had since. So how do you actually start working with a recruiter? You can do it in one of two ways. You can reach out to them or they can reach out to you. When we were talking about our LinkedIn profile earlier we have that show recruiters you're open to work and you put some job descriptions in there. That is a way that recruiters can find you and then reach out to you for a potential job. The other way to do it is to reach out to recruiters and so you can also do this on LinkedIn. If you find a job that you like in the jobs section you can click on the company. You can actually search for recruiters who work at that company and message them directly. The other way to do it is just to go on Google and search for local recruiters and you can give them a call or you can send them an email with your resume and then hopefully they will call you back or email you back and that's how you get in touch. After you work with them a while hopefully you're starting to get interviews and you really need to prep for interviews as well as the technical interview. The technical interview is a portion of the interview where they want to test your technical abilities to make sure that your skill level is good enough for what they are wanting. After you nail your interview hopefully you get a job offer and you get your first job as a data analyst and congratulations because that is a huge accomplishment and after you land that first data analyst job it makes it 10 times easier to get your next one. I highly recommend going back and checking out a lot of the videos that we talked about in this video. They go a lot more in depth into the topics that we discussed and hopefully they'll give you a much better picture of what you should be doing. So to everyone who is still watching who's trying to become a data analyst I wish you the best of luck and I know you can do it and I know that it is hard work but it will absolutely be worth it. Thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate it. 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