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I crunch data for a living. What's My Job Title? (Might be time to find a new one)
HadjiQuest
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hello H/A,
Once again I'm back with a job related thread. This time, the position I've been in for awhile does not at all match what I was initially hired for, and I need to know how to classify myself and what position titles I should be looking at once I leave my current job.
For quite some time now I've been working in a vaguely defined office position that was originally presented to me as a typical office admin role, but turned out to involve very little typical office admin work (reception, faxing, filing, etc). Instead, I've been doing tons of minor data crunching in excel, which eventually resulted in me building a number of connected templates with some pretty sick nested formulas to automate all the typical work I do (however, I still know nothing about Macros). Most of the info I crunch comes from a number of simple out-of-the-box gui-based database engines, both internal and external, and their basic built-in exports. However, more recently I've been learning to use ODBC and SQL server functions to pull data through more efficiently, and I've been creating a number of queries and views to determine things like outage periods that aren't directly stores in the databases but can be figured from transaction logs. Then I combine this with other related data to create pivot reports, etc. in excel, access and SQL Report Builder/Reporting Services.
Additionally, I do basic help-desk IT type stuff, imaging PCs, forwarding ports, remote assist, troubleshooting various Windows Server roles. It's nothing crazy, and I'd be lost of there was a major network issue, but for the most part I do just fine as the only daily in-house tech.
That is definitely not stuff a basic office admin does. And that is kind of my problem, because in spite of the wide variety, quality, and quantity of work I do, I'm constantly encountering negative changes in the terms of my employment. So I'd like to start looking around again. The only problem is... my inclination is to look at admin jobs again, which don't pay as well as what I've been doing, and would likely result in me doing totally different work. I have no idea what the job title for this kind of work would be at a different company, so I don't know where to start looking even, or even what I should label myself as on my updated resume.
What are some titles for this kind of work? What sort of specialty is it? Office? IT? Systems?
Also, how do I know if my skillset is solid, or should I work on other areas to really meet the standards for whatever kind of field this is?
Once again I'm back with a job related thread. This time, the position I've been in for awhile does not at all match what I was initially hired for, and I need to know how to classify myself and what position titles I should be looking at once I leave my current job.
For quite some time now I've been working in a vaguely defined office position that was originally presented to me as a typical office admin role, but turned out to involve very little typical office admin work (reception, faxing, filing, etc). Instead, I've been doing tons of minor data crunching in excel, which eventually resulted in me building a number of connected templates with some pretty sick nested formulas to automate all the typical work I do (however, I still know nothing about Macros). Most of the info I crunch comes from a number of simple out-of-the-box gui-based database engines, both internal and external, and their basic built-in exports. However, more recently I've been learning to use ODBC and SQL server functions to pull data through more efficiently, and I've been creating a number of queries and views to determine things like outage periods that aren't directly stores in the databases but can be figured from transaction logs. Then I combine this with other related data to create pivot reports, etc. in excel, access and SQL Report Builder/Reporting Services.
Additionally, I do basic help-desk IT type stuff, imaging PCs, forwarding ports, remote assist, troubleshooting various Windows Server roles. It's nothing crazy, and I'd be lost of there was a major network issue, but for the most part I do just fine as the only daily in-house tech.
That is definitely not stuff a basic office admin does. And that is kind of my problem, because in spite of the wide variety, quality, and quantity of work I do, I'm constantly encountering negative changes in the terms of my employment. So I'd like to start looking around again. The only problem is... my inclination is to look at admin jobs again, which don't pay as well as what I've been doing, and would likely result in me doing totally different work. I have no idea what the job title for this kind of work would be at a different company, so I don't know where to start looking even, or even what I should label myself as on my updated resume.
What are some titles for this kind of work? What sort of specialty is it? Office? IT? Systems?
Also, how do I know if my skillset is solid, or should I work on other areas to really meet the standards for whatever kind of field this is?
HadjiQuest on
0
Posts
Play up the Excel/SQL.
Get Paid.
What kind of skills should I be working on, beyond the stuff I already have down like basic SQL Select Queries and Excel functions and ODBC datasources, etc. etc.? Do I need some knowledge of stats? What about macros? I've been winging my current position and learning as I go, but I figure it's time to start learning a little more if I'm going to prepare to step to something new.
Also, where should I look for job postings for "Data Analyst"? They seem to be few and far between on craigslist.
I actively participate on Linked-In, and admittedly, I don't look for jobs, people come to me with them. I've been approached by lots of digital media companies, bigger names like Linked-in, etc. The important part is having a solid profile with keywords that recruiters will use to find people. However, I recommend thinking about which companies you would like to work for and targeting them. For example, Valve Software regularly recruits Data Scientists and Analysts to crunch the data they collect via the store and their games. Sometimes other companies (such as OKCupid) will recruit data scientists to manage their online ad inventory operations. None of these jobs were posted via job boards to my knowledge...I just follow the companies and saw them.
For next steps, I think learning VBA would be a big help for writing macros and streamlining processes.
I learned tricks primarily from VBA for Dummies, which is a pretty solid resources...
I also think basics in stats would be invaluable. Coursera is offering a free class from Princeton starting in September.
https://www.coursera.org/course/stats1
There's also a few routes you could take this knowledge towards. There's text mining, predictive analytics, data mining, etc. I find predictive modeling infinitely more exciting.
To that end, some tools you might consider are called R (just R) and SAS. If your company is awesome and is willing to send you to conferences, there's also http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/ which has tons of workshops.
Hope some of this helps! It's a really exciting field, and the skills gained can be applied across many different industries.
o_O
Yeah. Don't use craigslist for career moves. Try monster, career builder, or a recruiter.
I'd recommend boosting your SQL skills so you can turn those simple selects into more advanced awesome queries that utilize updates and sub queries and other fun not so difficult to learn stuff.
I'm not disagreeing with Sky though, VBA is also an awesome approach.
Agree with Deebaser...I'll fully admit the only reason why I didn't bring up SQL is that I (sadly) don't have much experience in it, but know that it is also an invaluable skill to have.
Speaking of which, I should probably get on learning more about it since it's so key to database related work.
Anyways, Hadji...
Since you've got the ODBC stuff down, I'll assume you can also use filters, concatenate, vlookup, and make a pivot table. If not, learn how to do those things (all of them are super easy).
Then make up a resume showing that you're an ADVANCED excel user, you may think this is a bald faced lie/exaggeration, but it's not. You're well above the bell curve of Excel users if you can do those things.
Take that resume to a recruiter or better yet several recruiters as recruiters are mostly total scumbags. You won't have to look for a recruiter, those dickbags post a lot of the jobs on the major job sites.
Good luck!
PS You have a bachelor's or at least an associates, right? Most doors will be closed to you otherwise despite your skills.
No idea what your presentational skills are like, but make sure you're up to speed on the various different ways of representing your data, chart types, formatting etc. in Excel - the people hiring you are more likely to be non-techy manager types who care less about SQL and more about whether or not you can communicate your analysis clearly.
And yeah, I do all that excel stuff. That is the core of my job right now. And I have VBA for dummies, but I haven't really cracked into it yet. Guess I will do that soon.
So, LinkedIn? I only ever got offers for pyramid schemes/primerica scams off Monster and Career Builder.
And yeah, I have an associates degree in Sociology, so I have a very limited stats background. I plan on getting my masters in the next couple years (Soc is sort of my dream field), with a lean heavily on practical social stats rather than case studies and more abstract types of field work.
Sometimes I wonder if they knows what they're doing at all, so a lot of times I'm left alone to make my own interpretations and changes to reflect them. And a lot of what I do is price generation, shipping fee generation, etc. So I'm creating a lot of new data even more than I'm analyzing the old.
So I'm wondering if you guys can give me some practical examples of what kind of stuff you analyze, what you look for when you're analyzing it, etc.
Analysis is really a subjective thing, both in terms of audience and data area. I work with litigation analysis for an ins. company, and what we look for are trends in case increases, severity increases and firm routing changes. Basically run through various scenarios until I find one thing that isn't like the others, then I run through the rest of the scenarios to see if it's an outlier or part of a general trend. I then validate that the data is good (big question mark sometimes) and drill into potential reasons from every potential area. Samples may be increased claim volume, catastrophes, litigious environment (Fuck you Texas), or many other factors.
As a data analyst, it is up to you to tell the emperor he has no clothes then advise on how he may obtain some, in between bouts of finding needles in haystacks.