Data Analyst
You’re the person who finds the story hidden in a pile of numbers, the “wait, that’s why signups dropped” moment when the data finally clicks. The tools can write the SQL (the language for pulling data out of a database) and build the charts now, so the part that’s really yours is knowing which question is even worth asking.
Related: Quantitative Analyst, Journalist, Product Manager
The day in the life
Perch · new accounts / week
last 6 weeks · down ~30%
Fewer people are making an account. Where do you look first?
Try a day as a data analyst
A short, playful taste of the real work.
Lots of work for people who can find the story in a pile of numbers, but the simple tasks you would start on are the ones computers now do by themselves.
No strict degree rule, but you need to be good at asking a company’s stored records questions, using a language built for that called SQL.
The top number is what data scientists earn. That is a different job you can move into, not the next step up in this one.
What you’d do all day
The picture is cool insights and storytelling. The reality is mostly cleaning messy data, writing SQL (the language for pulling data out of a database), and rebuilding the same reports each week for whoever asks.
The tools can now draft those queries and build the dashboards. So the part that stays yours is judgment: asking the right question, checking a draft didn’t quietly get it wrong, and turning the result into a decision someone will act on.
- Data gathering & cleaning50%
- Analysis & modeling15%
- Dashboards & charts20%
- Explaining what it means5%
- Meetings & admin10%
Half the day is tidying up messy numbers so they can be used at all, plus building charts. Nobody asks you what it all means yet.
The tools stay similar; what you’re analyzing changes everything else.
- Business analyticsfiguring out what’s happening inside a company right now.
- Marketing analyticsfiguring out which campaigns and channels are working.
- Product analyticsfiguring out how people use a piece of software.
- Financial analyticsfiguring out where the money’s going and what it means.
A typical early-career day
- 9:30Take the request
A stakeholder asks "can you pull X." Figure out what they actually need, which is half the work.
- 10:30Pull & clean the data
Get the data and wrestle it into shape. Messy, missing, and inconsistent is the normal starting point.
- 1:00Write the query
Write the SQL or analysis that answers the question. A tool can draft this now, but you steer it.
- 3:00Check it’s really right
Sanity-check the result. A query can run fine and still be quietly, confidently wrong.
- 4:30Draft fast, you judge
The queries and dashboards get drafted fast; your value is the question it can’t pick and the error it can’t catch.
The repetitive parts are real, and as those parts get automated the work shifts toward framing the question and judging the answer.
The outlook
Where it’s going
Demand for data skills is strong and growing: data work is one of the fastest-growing skill areas around. But the role is being rebuilt from the bottom by AI: tools now write SQL from plain English, build dashboards, clean data, and generate reports, automating exactly the entry-level tasks the job was built on. So the work is shifting up, from running queries to framing the question and judging whether the answer holds.
Right now
It’s a growing field, but the bottom rung is eroding: the routine SQL, dashboard, and reporting work that used to be how juniors broke in is the most-automated layer, so a pure "I can run queries" profile is weakening even as overall data demand rises. The field isn’t shrinking, but the easy way in is narrowing, and the analysts who do well use the tools to skip the busywork and get fast to the judgment.
Would you like it?
Worth a look if chasing the why behind a number sounds more fun than tedious.
Tap any that sound like you.
In practice, people realize it’s their thing when…
…and it probably isn’t their thing when
How people get in
- 4
- Years it takes on average
- $48K
- Average cost
- None
- Licence or exam you need
Every way in
A degree with math in it
About 7 in 10
Four years · About $48K over four years
An online certificate
About 3 in 10
Six months at 10 hours a week · About $49 a month, under $300 in all
Nearly 4 million people have signed up for the big one, and nobody independent counts what happens to them afterwards.
Both of those are real, and plenty of people take them in order: a degree in something else first, then the certificate on top of it.
How your first job gets decided
Nothing stops you starting and there is nobody to apply to. The whole thing turns on one question: can you sit down in front of somebody and do the work already.
What employers check
- What you can do, ahead of what you studied. Nearly 7 in 10 employers now hire that way, and they say it is more than last year.
- Whether you can work with AI tools. About 1 in 10 starting jobs asks for that now, and that has nearly tripled in a year.
- Working with other people. Around 85 in 100 employers look for it on your resume, which is more than look for almost anything else.
Nobody assigns you a first job here and there is no season for it. You apply, and what you can show them decides it.
- A statistics degree earns about $92,400 four years after you finish, and a quarter of the people who take it are over $125,400.
- There is no job called Data Analyst on the government list of jobs. The two closest ones are Data Scientist, at about $112,600 in the middle, and Operations Research Analyst, at about $90,000.
When to apply
There is nothing to apply for and no season to miss. The dates that matter are printed on the certificates themselves.
- In high schoolNothing to decide. Take as much math as you can stand, because all of this runs on it, and there is nothing else you are required to do.
- Before you pay for any courseMake them hand you their own results first: how many people finished, how many are working, and what those people earn. Nobody publishes that for you, so if the course will not say, that is your answer.
- Before you start oneCertificates get switched off. Microsoft retired one of its data science certificates on June 1 2026 and another on January 30 2026, both on dates it had published in advance. The list of what is going is public, so look yours up before you spend six months on it.
How long it takes
There is no licence, no exam, and no job title the government even has a name for. Most people doing this work took a four year degree with math in it, and plenty of them did not.
Six months of a course is a long time to spend before you know whether you like it. Pulling a real story out of a real spreadsheet takes an afternoon, and that is the whole job in miniature.
Try finding a story in real dataThink Like a Data Analyst: Find a Story in Real Data
Pick a question you care about, find real numbers anyone can download that could answer it, dig in, and write something people can read that argues what you found, with a couple of charts. The hard part, and the whole point, is asking the right question and checking the answer is real, not running the code.
Or try one of these
Where these numbers come from
Written by the Sidequest team, from the sources below.
- Pay: No standalone BLS code; closest is Operations Research Analysts (median ~$90K, May 2024); Data Scientists (SOC 15-2051, median $112,590); Glassdoor / Levels.fyi 2026.
- The outlook: BLS OEWS (Operations Research Analysts; Data Scientists +34% 2024-34, May 2024); WEF 2026 Future of Jobs (AI + big data top skill area); BI-copilot / text-to-SQL coverage (2025-26). Dated June 2026.
- Getting in: How many people take each route is our own estimate, rounded. O*NET OnLine occupation search across the full taxonomy, read August 2026, which returns no occupation titled Data Analyst; the nearest are 15-2051.00 Data Scientists and 15-2031 Operations Research Analysts. O*NET OnLine 15-2051.00, Job Zone Four, SVP 7.0 to under 8.0; site updated May 19 2026, read August 2026. O*NET publishes no education response percentages for this code and says on its own page that collection is still under way, so none are stated here. National Association of Colleges and Employers, Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, surveyed February 12 to March 17 2026 across 185 employers, read August 2026, for the near 70% using skills-based hiring, the 85% looking for teamwork on a resume, and the 10.5% of entry level postings requiring AI skills, which nearly tripled from fall 2025; the survey is across industries rather than specific to this work. Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate, Coursera program page, read August 2026, for the 3,783,351 enrolments, the nine courses, the six months at ten hours a week, the $49 a month after a seven day trial and the under $300 total. Microsoft retired certifications register, read August 2026, for Azure Data Scientist Associate retired June 1 2026 and the Fabric data science Applied Skill retired January 30 2026. Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (cirr.org), read August 2026: the standard and its methodology are published, and no school report was reachable from the school data page, the reports path returned 404 and the map subdomain did not resolve. U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, field of study data, CIP 27.05 Statistics at bachelor level, 217 programs and 2,476 graduates, read August 2026, for the $92,400 median four years out and the quarter over $125,400. College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025, public four year in state tuition and fees of $11,950 a year, for the $48K four year total. BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Data Scientists (SOC 15-2051, median $112,590) and Operations Research Analysts (median about $90,000), May 2024. Dated September 2026.