Get Real-World Data Analyst experience
By: Jean Claude De Villeres
Tags: Tableau, Data Science, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Data

Get Real-World Data Analyst experience

More hands-on opportunities allow future analysts to practice their skills and truly understand the task at hand.

Introduction

For aspiring data scientists and analysts, it can be nerve-wracking to attend job interviews. Having little to no idea of what the job entails makes it quite difficult to have a meaningful conversation during an interview with managers or potential team members. One of the things that eliminate this anxiety is to get real-world experience however this is where the chicken-and-egg problem starts. Before you get experience you need to get hired, but before you get hired you need experience (seems familiar?).

One of the things that you need to have in order be confident in discussing data analytical topics is still to actually get the real-world experience, however for you to get that experience you need to pass the interview.

This is where internships help a lot. I am currently working as an analyst but getting additional hands-on experience never hurts, I heard about Forage [formerly KPMG] virtual internships and how they helped aspiring analysts get great real experience and be more confident in having discourse on the topics of data science and analytics.

Internship Process

During the virtual internship, you will work with the customer and under an analytics supervisor. First, you will work on assessing the quality of the data. Next, you will set out to plan and detail the steps that need to be taken to derive insights from the data. This involves things such as data exploration, model development, and interpretation. During the final phase of the client project, you also get to create a self-service executive-level dashboard that will be presented to the client.

We will discuss these steps in detail and I will share the result of my work in the succeeding paragraphs.

One very clever thing about the internship is that the model work of senior consultants can be viewed. They can be used to gauge how your work compares and gives you an opportunity to update your own.

Task 1 — Data Quality Assessment

You will be given the customer use case and their data. You will have to do an assessment of the data, this task includes identifying areas of concern and giving recommendations to mitigate those issues.

Task 2 — Analytics Approach (2-week plan)

For this second task, you are supposed to give a detailed two-week plan to outline your approach. You should include steps for data exploration, model development, and interpretation. A good introduction will prove useful for the client.

Task 3 — Dashboards

Finally, you will be asked to create an interactive self-service dashboard which the client can use to answer questions such as:

How can we target new high-value customers using existing customers and census data?

Which of our current customers contributed most to our profit?

What does the census say regarding our high-value customers?

Summary

In addition to self-study and entering Kaggle competitions, getting work experience from internships helps guarantee your success as a data analyst. Some of the skills you will get from doing it are solving a business problem using your analytical skills, ensure data quality, making interpretable and accurate models, and communicating those insights to executive leadership. These are all key skills for any aspiring data analyst or scientist.

In terms of analytical tools, you will also get tons of practice using Microsoft Power BI and Tableau. As well as following and implementing an industry-grade data quality assessment framework. This means that you will measure the completeness, consistency and validity of your data using pre-existing company guidelines.

One of my most favorite things as an analyst is that you can use external data sources to unlock patterns that would otherwise not be obvious using the main dataset. For instance, I integrated the Australian census data with the customer data. This helped me with my insights and I suggest you look into it too.

Let me know how it goes. If you need any support or if you want to share your internship results. You can reach me here.

Good luck! Make sure to get your hands dirty and more importantly, enjoy.