 What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. A few weeks back I partnered with Alteryx to host a webinar centered all around data analytics and we brought on other data analytics managers who kind of broke into the field and we basically talked about our stories and we got asked a lot of different questions about skills, tips, and tricks for other people who were trying to get into the field and their answers were phenomenal. I mean a lot of them were just very unique and different than what I had said on my channel and so you know I wanted to share that webinar with you guys because I just really think it was extremely useful. The actual webinar itself was about an hour long and so I tried to trim it to under 20 minutes because I didn't want it to be you know just a really long thing to watch and so I kind of cut it down to just the highlights and I'm going to post the timestamps below so that you can kind of skip around to different questions that you find interesting. Huge, huge, huge shout out to Alteryx. They were absolutely fantastic to work with. Thank you guys so much for putting this all together. You guys are genuinely amazing and without further ado let's jump into the webinar. The first thing we're going to talk about is how we got started in our analytics career and we'll just kind of go around and kind of share our stories and then we'll have lots of other questions and polls later on as well so I'm going to toss it over to Nicole. Nicole if you want to start us off and tell us how you got into analytics. Yeah sure thanks Alex. So as far as how I got started in analytics I think it's going to be a similar story to my guess is a bunch of people on this call today definitely didn't start out on that path. I come from a finance and accounting background then in a series of random you know events I ended up working at a construction company as a project accountant so not typically what you think of when you think of data and I think for me the turning point was really was working with a colleague and he was stuck on something in Excel and he says I'll give a thousand dollars to whoever can figure this out and you know joking around said okay sure I'll take that back to my desk and see if I can figure it out and I actually did figure it out and I did not get a thousand dollars I think I got like a nice ball of wine and a big thank you but for me it was you know realizing that this was something fun like I liked solving these puzzles I liked coming up with these different solutions to things and for me it really just opened up a lot of doorways. I continued in construction for a few more years moving into kind of an IT data analyst role and then eventually networked with some folks from T-Mobile at an altrux conference they were looking for someone who spoke the language of accounting and finance but also had that altrux experience and wanted to help grow the usage of altrux throughout the accounting department and I honestly don't think it could have been a better job for me if they'd said like you have to be named to Nicole Johnson to have this job like it couldn't have been a better fit so for me as able to leverage you know my my finance in accounting background and then also play around in altrux all day long meeting new people working on new projects solving new challenges and so it's it's been a strange journey but really cool to end up doing something I love every day and just getting to solve problems. Yeah that's fantastic I think the biggest thing while I was listening to I was like you know it's really interesting because you still got to use your accounting background but you're using just how you use the numbers and everything in a different way and you know that's fantastic because that's something that a lot of people who are getting started you know they're like I have a degree in this how on earth do I make that transition to analytics you know and using that degree or that background is usually a kind of a good way to go. Exactly helps you find your little niche. Yeah absolutely awesome I'm going to toss it over to Sarah and you know let us know how you made that transition. And so in my time off I decided to get married and have a family and that didn't work out so as a single mom I started working at Blue Cross in customer service. I was scared to make that move out of customer service I had a good stable job I was able to do a lot of project work that kept me challenged mentally so why would I risk it by moving to a different position but I finally had the right people leader who saw all of this work that I was doing I was doing project work such as working on our interweb sites building websites building SharePoint sites doing design work that was not related to customer service at all very technical work and it was all things that I was learning on my own how to do. So she encouraged me to not look at the titles for positions because I was really scared of the title saying I'm not qualified for those within two weeks of that conversation with her I took the position of a project program coordinator that one leader I thank her every year when that comes up in my Facebook memories about getting that position I reach out to her and I tell her that she made that impact and I don't want her to forget that I think of her all the time for the impact that she made in my life. I guess I'll share next so I'm Alex Freeberg and my journey into data analytics is very similar to both of you and the fact that I started out in a totally different field I was in healthcare and so I started off at an internship out in Texas at a behavioral health hospital working with people with like PTSD and severe depression and bipolar and so like you know working with those people doing therapy and it was just an internship and my internship was about to end but I just met this girl and I wanted to marry her and so I was like I got to stay in Texas because I was about to move back to South Carolina and so I found this job at a non-profit doing like caretaker work so helping with their day-to-day needs and I wasn't making much money but I really worked hard and I got an opportunity to apply for this job it was called data collection specialist and analyst had no idea what it was at all but I knew I was good with Excel and I applied and it turned and I got the job later I found out I was the only person that applied but you know I was like I was really happy that I got it it was only working in Excel so no other tech skills or anything like that but I learned about data collection and submitting things for grants and and you know creating like metrics and stuff like that and we were implementing a Salesforce a Salesforce data collection a process over there and the guy who we brought in to consult us was like hey you're the data guy over here you must know SQL and I was like what is SQL I've never heard of that in my life and he looked at me like I guy it was just I didn't you don't know what you're talking about which he was right but I went home that night I looked up what SQL was and I started just like obsessing over SQL and I learned it as quick as I could and after about six months after that I took my first job as a data analyst and using my healthcare background I got a job at a healthcare analytics company and so much like both of you I kind of stayed in a similar I used that background knowledge that I had from my previous careers and I use that to my advantage I don't think any other industry would have taken me at all I was mostly brought in for a little bit of my healthcare experience but if I had tried to go into like finance like like you or accounting ready thing they would never hire me so yeah that's that's you know kind of my story it's very unconventional but the same thing with all three of us is none of us started out in analytics none of us have a degree in data analytics or data science or any of those things and so I like that because I think most people or there's a large majority of people out there who are wanting to become data analysts but they have those unconventional degrees and they're like how on earth will I make that change I'm going to start it off with Nicole again but what has been like the biggest factors that have helped you been be a good analyst as it's question is always a little tricky for me to answer because I feel like so much of it was really just right place right time or maybe even more so like right attitude right time but I think for me it was a little bit of just being willing to take on a new job even when I love the one that I had and so I think you know along with that really just the willingness to learn new things answering you know do you know how to do this with not yet not no you know so like I I definitely didn't know a lot about you know SQL or big data systems or or really just you know corporate processes and that was okay because I was willing to learn it and really interested in making it fun along the way and I think that fun element is important too I love all of that that's fantastic I mean you're hustling you're grinding and you're you're not giving up that kind of attitude it's definitely definitely a big factor what about you Sarah you know having that one manager was was a big thing for me because you know she she believed in me and she gave me the confidence to move forward some of the things that really helped kind of fuel my career though is that passion that excitement loving what I do and that really does keep you going even when your job isn't the most fun it's that you can find the fun in what you're doing yeah and I don't want to sound like a broken record because I'm gonna say a somewhat similar thing to what you guys said but but I'm just I glanced over at the results and I know we're gonna look at these later I shouldn't be doing this but there is zero percent for formal education and so you know as as our stories we just talked about about how formal education wasn't really the biggest factor of getting into it that's just really interesting so so like when I was first starting out I hadn't I didn't have anything right I didn't have uh any background any information I just had to hustle and grind every single day um and I fell in love with it luckily um and so I think that passion and that just absolute willingness to continually learn and and just um you know study as much as you can and learn the new skills and and find things that will solve the problems that you're trying to solve you know those are the things that I found to be the most successful this question is how have you saved time learned new skills or had greater impact you know really good at taking that formal path and saying I'm going to sit down and I'm gonna learn Python and then they'll go find the course and then they'll go take all the the lessons and they'll figure it out and I have just not ever really been great at that um I think probably like 95 percent of my on-the-job education is probably from Google uh and so for me it's about asking questions because I like to connect the dots between things and so for me I asked a lot of questions from people that I'm working with about things that probably don't have any real bearing on what I'm trying to build for them in Alteryx or what I'm trying to um do as far as a project goes um but what I do get from that is understanding how like this process impacts something upstream or downstream um how do these these different pieces connect together um have I learned something from another project that might help this team out or can I take something from this project and help another team out and so for me it's about connecting the dots and and asking questions to learn more about like what people are doing. Any process that I have found that works that is a good process or um lately well for the past few years I've been doing a deep dive into our new claims processing system and the data involved with that working closely with the business to really um identify the data definitions. It saves time not only when it comes to building new reports but also when bringing new people into the business that we can share those resources. I completely agree and there's that's something that I think is really um I don't want to say undervalued it's just not as talked about in the data world is documentation so like creating data dictionaries and and and processes and procedures and document this thing crazy important but they don't get the love they deserve. I like to to learn from somebody whether that's in person or course or something so I'm kind of the opposite of Nicole. I like to like take a course learn it quick but you know things like things that I found the most helpful and most impactful in my career at least are things like the data prep and the data cleaning like the ETL side of things. That has been like my bread and butter you know so like learning those skills and um you know taking those courses and doing those things that's kind of where I think I would I would say like where I've been learning the most um or have had the most impact on my career. This next question is what advice would you give someone just starting out in their analytics career? I'm excited for this one because I think you will have some pretty good answers on this one. Nicole I'm gonna toss this one over to you. Focus on um learning things and finding your finding your niche finding those you know ways that you can take your background whether you know you used to be a circus performer or whether you used to work at a bank or whether you used to walk dogs for a living. I mean you can find so many connections between your passions and the things that you've you know done in your your prior life your prior career and find ways to turn those into you know advantages when it comes to your analytics career and um and then I think that the other really important thing is to find your people and whether that's the people who are going to mentor you and support you and and help lead you in the right direction but also the people that you can show and tell stuff to that are going to be really stoked about what you build. So it's less about the skills you'll get those practice makes perfect um but how are you going to really leverage your other strengths and the people around you to really push yourself forward? One of the things that uh one of the male managers in the room was telling us was that we needed to advocate for ourselves more and I had no idea what he was talking about. But after it was explained to me I started looking at what I was doing on the service desk and I started looking at the reporting I was doing and I was like wait a second reporting isn't in my job description and I went to my boss and I said hey I'm doing this this and this that has to do with data and that's not in my job description and he's like you're right and I got my first promotion start looking for things that you could do to push you in the direction you want to go with your career. If you're interested in data and analytics look and see if there's something that you can add to your current job that might allow you to move more towards that direction. I absolutely agree I love that last one that's where I tell a lot of people as I'm like I'm like look you know you do this obscure job over here but I guarantee you can find a way to leverage that or use that to become more data analytics focused like I know you can. I think my biggest piece of advice is to really focus in on domain knowledge. I think domain knowledge is something that a lot of people don't think about they think oh if I just if I know SQL and I know Python or I know Alteryx or Tableau like if I know the tools I can get a job and that that is true to some level but you know for jobs that even I hire for or I've hired for in the past you know I really focus on the domain knowledge. I need somebody who knows the health care industry well. If you don't know it if you don't know it it's really hard it's I find that that's harder to teach sometimes than actually teaching the technical skills. You know first one off the bat how hard is it to enter the market for data analytics and should fresh grads worry you know what's the market look like today for jobs. I think it's pretty competitive. I think that a lot of people are trying to get into this career because you can work remote. There's usually pretty good pay. There is the ability there's a lot of flexibility usually and so there's a lot of good factors of trying to get into the market and so I think right now is a unique time where there's a lot of people who are trying to get into like you said there's a large increase in demand and there's a large increase in people wanting to get in and so you know take that with a grain of salt every area and every place and different domains have different demands but as a whole it's it's more challenging than it was five years ago. I think there are a ton of jobs. I think we're lacking in a lot of senior level people right now. What's more important maybe to put on your resume or to look for in a job. Certifications are great but it's sort of that same argument is like do you really need to go to four years of college and get a degree in the field that you're going to end up in and if that was true then none of us would be doing what we're doing right now because we didn't go to school for those things because some people are just really good at taking tests but that doesn't necessarily mean they can apply those skills and that they can actually use them to make an impact in that business. Don't get me wrong I love learning and I love school but I don't have a college degree. I don't have a bunch of certificates. I don't have any letters after my name but I am very marketable and I can tell great stories and I have spoken at many conferences and I do a lot of webinars necessarily the same resume as somebody else. For my secure it's a big worry for many is that their college education and whatever else they have simply can't compete with computer science graduates. From what you all are seeing how flexible is the market for self-taught people with a well-built out portfolio. I know Alex mentions it on his YouTube channel you know that that might be important to have but what are your thoughts on that? I think you can be just as competitive as somebody who has a degree in data science, data analytics, something like that with a non-traditional background. You know I've interviewed a lot of people and typically the education is something that really is not a huge factor in the end. So the person with the portfolio is going to be a lot easier to sell themselves because they can point directly to the actual work that they've done and talk through it and explain it and if you can do that you know it it makes you much more hireable than somebody you can just say I know how to use this skill or I have this degree it's I know how to actually solve the issues that you are facing in your in your company. So I don't think the formal education is as big a thing as I think a lot of people think it is. I'm 43 is it too late for me to start into a new role or a different industry? It's like yeah so you're 43 but you don't you don't want to spend the next you know 20 something years of your career doing something that you don't like doing so it's never too late. You know you have a lot more industry knowledge I'm sure in some specific area than everybody else who's applying so you know don't look at it as like my age is the bad thing look at it as your experience and domain knowledge is going to be a huge upside. Yeah I really appreciate the panel for their time today and also all of our attendees.