From the course: Learning Data Analytics: 1 Foundations

Understanding types of data job roles

From the course: Learning Data Analytics: 1 Foundations

Understanding types of data job roles

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- People that have worked in IT have suffered for years because they are in IT. They must know everything about technology. I'm here to tell you, people who are server and database administrators have been forced to query and provide data to business users because they were the only people to have access to data and software to work with it. However, someone who enjoys learning, setting up and securing servers is probably less than interested in building dashboards or visualizations. Technology has so many specialized skills that there is no such thing as a catch-all tech, no matter how often we try to force it in our organizations. I feel confident that if all of us in tech had our brains dissected for research purposes, they would detect some very vast differences between the ways we think. With that being said, we all have a role to play. I work with a multidisciplinary research team, and I provide them structured datasets. That's my role. The team is composed of economists, public health experts and education experts. They're a guiding voice in all of our datasets and methods. Every research team, of course, will be different because they have different objectives. However, everyone on my team works with data in different ways. My role on that team is providing them data from multiple systems that's cleaned and ready to go. I serve as sometimes a data architect, sometimes a data engineer and sometimes data analyst. The data guides the roles I'm required to play for my requirements on this team. Let's address the roles that require more than just a little experience, roles that you might want to strive for, like data architect. Just like it sounds, a data architect typically will define how data is stored, consumed, managed, integrated at the organizational level and within IT systems. I think CIO.com really sums it up best with, "Data architects are senior visionaries "who translate business requirements "into technology requirements "and define data standards and principles." Everyone thinks they want to be a data scientist, and I think it's important to understand that the world needs more than just data scientists. They have a role to play. It requires data, coding and stats analysis. I think that organizations are investing in data scientists, which is great, and if they don't have the other roles like data architects and data engineers, then those data scientists have to fulfill those roles before they can ever get to the data science. A data engineer serves an immensely valuable role for an organization. Data engineers can sometimes be found building databases or working within data warehouses. They eat, sleep and breathe the transformation of data. In the end, they're tasked with dealing with data and making it meaningful for others to work with and consume. The role, however, is as broad as data itself. Data engineers are typically less concerned about the stats and more concerned about creating systems and datasets that can be turned over to further research, stats analysis and or data science use. I think you may commonly find that database administrators, database architects, data engineers and data security are traditionally under the umbrella of the technology department. I have said for years that one day, all end users will be technical. And today, you will find business users, or as IT refers to them, end users, using tools that years ago would have only been used by IT employees. As data has grown and the need to dig deeper into business intelligence has increased, you will find many data roles inside the business departments and the back-office operations. You may find titles like system analyst or business analyst. And in both of those roles, they're dealing with processes, systems, and you guessed it, data. You're likely to find system analysts are going to be aligned with the IT department, and business analysts will be aligned to the business unit or business department. You will see roles that are for business intelligence analyst or specialist. These roles are traditionally going to people who work with the data to visualize it or report on it to improve the business. As you try to determine where you fit into the future of your career with data, learn a little bit about everything. The library is full of amazing different data-related courses for you to explore. And when you find your lane, learn everything you can. And guess what, you'll never stop learning because it changes all the time.

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