What are the top skills required for data professionals? You could Google that question, but I was impressed by Luke’s project that resulted in a website you can go to called Top Skills for Data Nerds. Thanks to Luke Barousse for this! These results are based on searching for keywords in job postings for a job title. When you find a job posting for a data analyst, what’s the percentage of postings that contain the word SQL? It turns out that about half of the postings for a data analyst has SQL listed. SQL is the most important skill to have as a data analyst. This study focused on technical skills. You also need to have soft skills such as communication and interpersonal skills.

Where does the data come from? It comes from around the world in sites such as LinkedIn, Trabajo.org, BeBee, Recruit.net, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, Monster, Snagajob and others. Back in 2012, Harvard Business Review talked about data scientists being the most in-demand job. Not any more. It’s second-place now in the data professionals world. Now it’s now data engineer, data scientist, data analyst, and the rest. Why? Perhaps there is a lot of public data out there that companies want to acquire with the help of data engineers.

For the Business Analyst, they are, in order SQL, Excel, Tableau, Power BI, Python, R, PowerPoint, SAP, Word, Azure, Flow, SQL Server, SAS, Oracle, Go, AWS, Alteryx, VBA, Jira, Snowflake, DAX, Java, Qlik, Looker and Outlook.

For the Data Engineer, the most important skills, in order are SQL, Python, AWS, Spark, Azure, Java, Scala, Kafka, Hadoop, Snowflake, NoSQL,Redshift, DataBricks, Airflow, Git, Oracle, Tableau, GCP, SQL Server, Docker, Kubernetes, Shell, R, PySpark and Power BI.

For the Machine Learning Engineer, the most important skills are, in order Python, TensorFlow, SQL, PyTorch, AWS, Spark, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, Java, Skikit-learn, Scala, R, Pandas, Git, GCP, Keras, Airflow, Hadoop, C++, NumPy, Kafka, Linux, Go, and NoSQL.

Learn with YouTube

Check out the YouTube video by Luke Barousse called I analyzed 698,619 jobs to solve THIS. He analyzed job postings. That number, 698,619 is being constantly updated, so you will see a different number. As of June 11 2023, the number is was 963,992. As of August 13 2023 the number was 1,276,337. As Luke says in this video, “How can a site recommend a top skill to a data analyst without providing any evidence to that claim? The whole job of a data analyst is to provide evidence to support a claim. Super ironic”.

Only about 6% of all Data Analyst job postings are flagged for remote work. The vast majority, over 93%, of data professional opportunities are full time. For every 1 in 3 job postings for both data engineer and data analyst jobs there was no mention of a degree. However, for data scientists, it was only 7%.

Here’s a video by Tim Joo called What does a Data Analyst actually do? (in 2024) Q&A. If you are just starting out, focus on Excel, then move into SQL. You will also need some data visualization such as Tableau or Power BI.

Programming Language in IT – Overall

Stepping outside of professions in data, one might ask what are the most popular programming languages. According to Stack Overflow Trends, they are, in order Python, JavaScript, Java, C#, R, PHP, C++, C, Swift, and so on.