Hiring a data analyst consultant can be daunting, especially when you don’t have prior knowledge on what skills to look out for. To ensure you get the right person for the job, below are some of the qualifications the consultant must have.
Creative and Analytical Thinking Skills
Analysing data requires quite a good level of creativity and analytical skills. This is a great skill that every data scientist must always possess for them to be able to come up with the right research questions to understand the problem at hand better. Some issues also require a high level of analysis to generate viable solutions.
Must Be Proficient In Programming Languages
There are specific languages used in data gathering, cleaning, statistical analysis and visualisation. To perform their tasks effectively, every data analyst must be proficient in languages such as R and SAS. There are more other languages, but these two are the most important.
Communication Skills
Since this job involves analysing data and communicating the findings to executives in a company or even a team of people to help in decision making, a data analyst must be an effective communicator to ensure their outcomes are delivered to serve the purpose they were meant for.
Data Visualisation Skills
To better present their findings, data analysts must know what visualisation tools work better and when. Things such as graphs and charts depend on what kind of information is being visualised, and a great data analyst must understand how to use these tools effectively.
Data Mining and Cleaning
One great skill every data analyst must always have is the ability to mine unstructured data using different tools to ensure every detail is put where is it supposed to be. After they are done with mining, the next step is cleaning the data. They should be able to clean and process it through programming.