In this age of advanced technology, business growth depends on accurate forecasting and prediction of business models. Your ability to examine data and emerging trends to tell what is achievable in business is a big part of business intelligence.
A business intelligence analyst works with companies to research competitors and understand market seasons through data analysis. So, it is a plus if you understand business models and have strong consulting skills.
Although there are variations among the exact job description of a business intelligence analyst, it all comes down to these.
- Break down key business data models that help in data visualization.
- Interpret data to find key patterns and potential growth points.
- Share views, findings, and analytics reports that recommend a business direction and key investment opportunities.
If you want to improve yourself, here are six skills you can learn as a business intelligence analyst.
- Data mining
- Data structuring
- Thinking capabilities
- Programming
- Data analysis
- Data visualization
Let’s understand some of them more.
Data mining
Data mining skills help you understand where you can get information relevant to your business. Data is usually always available in large volumes. Data mining skills allow you to extract, clean, and provide useful information. The three main methods of data mining are classification, clustering, and association.
Data classification divides large data sets into categories that include public data, confidential data, local data, and internal data. Another part of data mining is creating a data cluster. By combining the data, you will discover the relationship between the extracted data and what makes them so similar.
However, you can understand why data mining skills are important for business intelligence because they are the foundation of business intelligence.
Data structuring
Although data mining involves combining similar data, you still need to organize and structure the extracted data. Data structuring transforms raw data into analytics-ready data as you can only use organized and structured data in business analytics. Managing business data requires programming skills.
As part of your data preparation skills, you must learn how to filter, clean, and transform data. These processes help you identify errors and capture and store data that enables you to validate data so you can make informed business decisions. It also saves your company from unreliable analysis results.
Thinking capabilities
You must have critical thinking skills, which is the responsibility of a business intelligence analyst. Collecting data, analyzing it, and drawing useful conclusions for your company also puts you on the pedestal of success as a business intelligence analyst.
Analytical and critical skills will help you look at data properly and build something useful from the collected data. Critical thinking will also help you identify weaknesses in the company’s system based on the information you gather.
