 What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today we're going to be looking at the top five non-technical skills for data analysts. Now this video has literally been requested for years and I have just kept pushing it off and pushing it off and I was trying to think of why I didn't really want to or I haven't done this video yet and I think it's really because you know with hard skills and with technical skills there's a very concrete path. I can point you and show you exactly what you need to know in order for you to be successful at it and really help you land a job but soft skills are very different because I think soft skills are very subjective. You know what I think is really important or what I think that you should learn and focus on or like are the top skills that data analysts need to know may be completely different than what other people think. And so now I feel ready to finally tackle this subject and I'm not going to say anything that's too crazy today. I think the things that we're going to talk about are pretty straightforward but I'm going to try to you know give you good examples and give you some actual items on ways that you can improve in these areas. So for the very first one is going to be communication and you probably thought that that was going to be the first thing that I was going to say and you'd be right because communication is just so extremely important. To be more specific for this form of communication because there's you know some other things I want to talk about a little bit. For this form of communication it's going to be about how you present your insights. So you know you go out and you do the work you need to present that to somebody and there are different ways that you need to communicate that. For example I'm going to show and communicate my insights very differently to a senior vice president than if I am showing it just to my manager or to a fellow data analyst. When I'm talking to a fellow data analyst or my manager I'm usually going to talk about the whole cycle of data who we're working with how we obtain that data what systems we put it in what we were able to do to transform that data how we actually visualized it and then what output we were able to get and what insights we gained from that data and I'm telling that entire story that's that story telling part of communication that data analysts often have to do and again that's typically how you're going to communicate your insights like a data analyst or even a client because they're going to want to know that whole picture but if you're communicating with somebody like a senior vice president a president or even the CEO you're not going to want to do that and I always think of like in a movie where somebody is communicating it's like the CEO and like within the first 30 seconds the CEO stops them and they're just like get to the point right and then they just tell it the big picture of what's happening the hard-hitting facts and then the CEO is happy and it's not always like that but in a nutshell you know higher up you get the less information that they're going to want to know because the less involved they are in that process they just need to know how it's going to affect certain things now how do you actually work on your communication honestly it's a lot of practice and repetition you just have to get in front of people and do it and honestly when you're first starting out if you've never done it before you don't even have a job yet it can be really hard to learn that skill I know that I personally thought I was pretty good at communicating things until I actually got a job and I kept finding myself like making mistakes and just doing things that didn't really make sense and I just had to learn it through trial and error and so one of the biggest things that helped me was asking one of my friends who was in the meeting or my boss if I was comfortable with them you know how I did or like asking pointers or tips because I didn't know what I didn't know right and so when I went into those meetings I did my absolute best but they would be like oh you left this out you left this out you know you didn't need to talk about this and that feedback was absolutely crucial and it really helped me understand what was important to the people or the person that I was talking to number two on the list is interpersonal skills and this really boils down to social skills now a lot of you watching this we're probably hoping that this was not something that a data analyst would need to do to actually interact with people and have social skills but that is not the case building relationships and working with others whether that's a client or someone on your team or someone on another team is absolutely crucial to be able to get your job done efficiently and there are literally a hundred different things that could be on this list in terms of like a good interpersonal skills I wrote down just five of them because I didn't want to say like 20 of them but five of them that I thought were really good ones that you should look at and focus on and think about how good you are at them are things like managing relationships understanding and empathizing with others good attitude showing respect and active listening to me those are some of the core things that will help you be really good at having great interpersonal skills now I want us to all close our eyes together I'm doing it with you I want you to think back to a previous job maybe a temp job a desk job Wendy's TCBY and I want you to think of a co-worker who was just the absolute worst now I can feel in myself rage building but why why what characteristics did that person have focus on it hone in on it okay in my scenario in my person I'm focusing on they were just disrespectful they the way they communicated was terrible a lot of attitude just you know did not treat people the way they should be treated you can open your eyes now I can feel my blood pressure rising because you know we all have that example I can't mind read so I don't know who you're thinking of or what scenario you're thinking of but on this list I can list off they were not good with empathizing with others they had a terrible attitude bad at respect and that was three of the five on that list that person did not have and again that's just my example but you know you do not want to be that person you do not want to be that person in in the team or in that department who is known for not having a good attitude or not having good personal skills not being social those things can ruin a career it really can you can survive without having good social skills or a good interpersonal skills but it makes it extremely extremely difficult to even get your work done now let me give you one example of how these interpersonal skills can help you in your job and I'm going to be a little vague to kind of condense the story but this is what happened on a Friday afternoon I got a request from a client who needs something immediately it was super important super urgent not something that I could actually get them directly but something I needed to help with and so I run over to the data engineer who was literally leaving at the time I was like hey man you know I really need some help with this if you could stay that'd be fantastic I know you're heading out you know if you would help me out with this I'd really appreciate it and I had a really good rapport with that data engineer we'd I'd helped him with things he'd helped me with things um and we were just you know we were friends right and he was willing to sit back for 30 or even 45 minutes and help me out with that and it really really helped this client out and it was just a huge huge help um and I don't think he had to do that he did not need to stay those extra 45 minutes but you know it was kind of that mutual understanding of you know I've helped him in the past he's helped me in the past and you were in this together and so building those relationships is absolutely fundamental that's just one example but I could tell you countless times where just me being in a good uh or having a good relationship with somebody has helped me get my work done because you rely on a lot of other people to actually get your data to get your visualizations to get things and push them to production you rely on a whole ecosystem of other people who are data-centered people like data scientists engineers architects to get your work done and if you don't work with those people well if you don't have good relationships with them it will definitely hinder you in the long run now moving on to number three it is going to be problem solving now in my mind solving problems isn't just like one thing that you go and do you know how to solve a problem you go and do it because as a data analyst you encounter a lot of different issues throughout the week or the month or or you know from day to day you know you see a lot of different things either with the data or with the clients or with the visualization or or anything and so it isn't just one thing that you can do to solve a problem so here are a couple ways that you can solve problems the first one is just researching the issue so you know what the issue is you either dig in and you backtrack all the way up to like the source and you have your visualization then you have your data then you have this ETL process and you track it all the way back and it could be a customer issue and you have to reach out and have them fix it on their side or it could be part of the ETL process somewhere in a stored procedure something wasn't working right and you have to fix that and then the entire thing works again and you solve it you know and that takes a lot of in-depth technical skills but the second thing is just being able to google something right and knowing what to google and how to google it and that is a skill in and of itself and people have said that in the past it's 100 true I truly believe that just knowing what to google or how to google things is a skill and so that really is a way that you can solve your problems just by googling something the next thing is knowing your available resources and that just takes time either within a team or a department and knowing what your resources are whether that's going to the data engineering team or the data scientists or you need to go to a help desk so knowing what available resources you have is another way that you can solve problems it doesn't always have to be I know how to do everything I can solve this problem sometimes it's reaching out to the available resources who can help you solve it and then you can take it from there moving on to number four on the list is business acumen now you may have heard this before but analyzing data without context is basically useless and that is 100 accurate I could analyze some data that somebody's given me till I am blue in the face and I may have come up with a lot of insights into that data but it may mean absolutely nothing to the actual people who are going to be using that data so when I talk about business acumen as a whole it doesn't mean you know everything about that industry or for example I work in healthcare it doesn't mean I know every single thing about healthcare but it does mean that I understand what that business needs or that client that I'm working with needs or the stakeholder internally I understand what they need and why they need it because that is absolutely crucial before you start analyzing anything and a lot of this business acumen comes from domain knowledge and experience within a specific domain because there are a lot of times where I have been working with a client and they're saying you know I want this and this and this and I'll say okay you know I understand why you would want that but what about this and and you know I know this industry very well I've worked with clients exactly like them for years and I suggest that to them and it just like completely changes the conversation till that is actually what I really was hoping for I just didn't know how to verbalize it so having that domain knowledge and understanding you know what their need was even if they didn't exactly know what it was really really is beneficial because it will not only help you it'll help the clients because you won't have to do unnecessary work and the client is going to get exactly what they actually wanted even though they didn't or couldn't verbalize what they really needed and so one of the biggest ways that you can help develop your business acumen is to actually get into a domain look at the data and ask why why is this client requesting this dashboard or report why do I need to analyze this data in any way what am I going to deliver to them that is really going to change or benefit them in the long run once you can start understanding why they're requesting things and why they really need to know that that is going to be where you can start adding a lot of benefit as a data analyst now moving on to number five is going to be your organizational skills now again I made this one myself and I looked at a lot of different people's lists and I tried to you know think really think through this and I didn't see organizational skills on almost anybody's list at least not like the top 10 or top 20 that I saw to me this is almost crucial and there are a lot of ways that not being organized can hurt you as a data analyst and I was not very organized when I first became a data analyst it was not something that I thought about or really thought was important I would download files from clients and I would just put it in my downloads folder that's just what I did it never crossed my mind that I need to have a specific folder for clients for you know specific work and have folders within folders it's just not something I'd ever done before but now I am extremely organized because I find it so absolutely crucial when you're working with 20 different clients at 20 different organizations and it's just an absolute mess so working with files just in your file explorer is one way that you absolutely need to be organized and another way that it can hurt you is if you're not organized with your time and this one is one that I personally struggled with again a lot especially in college I just did not have a lot of good time management skills or I didn't organize things or plan things out that really came back to bite me and a few ways that that can hurt you is you know with meetings if you schedule too many meetings and you can't get to all of them and you have to message a client during a meeting that you can't make it or you completely miss it because you're not checking your schedule or and this is a really big one you're not organizing your projects correctly and when you do this and you don't know how much time it's going to take for each project and then you over promise and you take on too many projects at one time and you have specific deadlines for these projects you can overwork yourself because you were not organized with your time ahead of time when I got my first real data analyst job I was just trying to take on everything and anything like any project that came up I was trying to get on it and I became just completely overwhelmed I was juggling too many things and you know there were a few things that slipped through the cracks and I forgot I missed because I wasn't organizing everything properly and I didn't know how much I could actually take on and so just everything around organizing your time organizing your schedule and organizing your projects is extremely important some of the things that I recommend you doing to be organized specifically with the file explorers you need to just google how to you know categorize things and how to keep everything in order just do it find a course find a youtube video I don't care but realize that if you have everything everywhere and you don't know how to find it it is going to make your life extremely difficult especially as you take on more clients more projects and more data more files it becomes overwhelming so you really need to figure out a system and number two with organizing your time one of the biggest things that has helped me is planning out what I'm going to do throughout the day and then looking ahead and looking at projects looking at meetings in that day and making sure that I have everything lined up and that's just on a day to day but I usually also do that for a week sometimes even a month depending on you know how busy I am and so looking ahead and looking at what you have that day that week that month and just being organized around how you were spending your time what projects you're taking in those things are going to be absolutely crucial as a data analyst you're not always going to have a project manager to do all that stuff for you I have had project managers who've helped me with that but that sole responsibility in the end lies on you and so organizing your time knowing what you're doing ahead of time highly recommend so that is my top five non-technical skills list the ones that I think are the most important there are so many that are out there that I just was like you know I don't think that this one really applies to data analysis you know if you just like look up top 10 soft skills or top 10 non-technical skills you know there are a lot on there that I do not think are super useful these are the ones that if you can work on these and you can really get these five down you are going to be set you know there's one like leadership I see that on every single list to me you don't have to be a fantastic leader to be a fantastic data analyst and so I hope that just me explaining those things and talking about how that applies to being a data analyst I hope that that was helpful and I hope that you know you can take this and kind of look at how you do things and how you can improve upon those things to help you become a better data analyst thank you guys so much for watching I really appreciate it if you liked this video be sure to like and subscribe below and I'll see you in the next video