The New Social Media Experts?

Data Analyst titles are starting to feel like the new Social Media Experts. Tech/Programming nerds tell me this is not the case at all. Analysts often have legitimate backgrounds in sciences, math and finance. Such advanced skill sets in analysis are much needed in deciding everything from healthcare policy to business expansion. Yet, I do see more people with broader experiences analyzing and creating graphical content for a surprising variety of industry.

Recently, I enrolled in Stanford's online course Introduction to Databases. The forum allowed introductions from students who often explained why they needed the course. Many were older professionals suddenly required to work with data. Thankfully, you don't need to be a programmer to manipulate data and you don't need to be a statistician to create accurate graphs.

photo credit: JD Hancock 

Learning R

My goal this week is to keeping reading Nathan Yau's book Visualize This. I have finished the first chapter. So far, so good. Things have come a long way in the past couple years. My previous work in entry level data analysis (before being sidetracked with children) involved little more than Excel and SQL.

Big data is a heavy buzz word these days that can mean any number of things. I have been thinking about what hard skills are applicable to the data analysis field. While I was fairly decent at and enjoyed math throughout school, but it is not my background. Statistics looks rather daunting. Learning R seems to be a necessity so I am starting there. So my next goal is to install R and find a dataset I can begin to play with. There are lots of R tutorials out there but I will stick with Yau's on Flowing Data since it seems directed at rank beginner's like me.

There is so much to learn. One must begin somewhere!