If you’re looking to start or transition to a career as a Business Intelligence analyst I’m going to talk about 7 steps that I would take if I were looking for my first job as a BI analyst, knowing what I know now, having been in Business Intelligence for over 10 years.

This is not an exhaustive list and everyone’s journey will be different. But, if you’re serious about landing that job in front of the chasing pack, then these 7 steps will give you a great chance at success.

1. Start looking now

If you’re reading this then you’re probably right at the beginning of your journey and aren’t at all ready to start applying for jobs. Nevertheless, I think the first thing you should do is to start looking at job listings.

This will give you an idea of what’s out there and, more importantly, what employers are looking for in terms of qualifications and skills. Also the kinds of roles you’ll be asked to fill.

This will, in turn, give you more focus as you’re going through the next 6 steps. It’s all well and good for people to tell you, “you must learn this”, “you must learn that”. But, by actually looking at the job descriptions, you’ll get a real picture of what skills are the most sought after for a Business Intelligence analyst. 

One quick piece of advice I can give you, which might sound pretty obvious and not worth mentioning, but I will anyway, is to not aim too high when it comes to the jobs you’ll eventually be applying for.

If you’re looking for your first job as a Business Intelligence analyst then, no matter what qualifications you have, if you have no experience on the job, you’ll more than likely not get a job ahead of someone who has.

Sometimes it’s good to aim high but I'd set realistic expectations. Look for junior roles or roles in smaller companies that are perhaps just starting on their BI journey as well. You’ll need to pay your dues before landing a job with a bigger fish.

2. Learn SQL

Whether you’re looking for a job in BI, data science, or just really any job where you’ll be required to work with data, having a good knowledge of SQL is a must.

When it comes to being a Business Intelligence analyst, you’re not going to need to be a SQL expert but there are certain things that you’ll need to learn how to do.

Here’s what I’d recommend. You’ll need to learn, most importantly, how to write queries to select, aggregate, and join data from databases; this would include knowing how to write subqueries as well.

You’ll also want a good knowledge of different text and arithmetic functions that will allow you to manipulate the data in fields and conduct calculations to create new fields from existing ones.

Then you’ll need to learn basic syntax for creating and deleting databases and tables, how to insert data into tables, and then how to update or modify data in tables.

That is a great starting point. Then you’ll find that you’ll learn everything else you’ll need on the job. I taught myself SQL and don’t consider myself an expert at all.

But anything I’m not sure about can often be solved with a quick Google search.

So don’t worry about mastering SQL, a good basic knowledge will suffice to begin with.

If, however, you’d like to become a SQL Jedi, I recommend LearnSQL.com that has a comprehensive set of 57 hands-on online SQL courses for teams and individuals.

3. Improve your Excel skills

If you’re thinking that moving into Business Intelligence will mean you’ll be done with Excel for good because you’ll be working with fancy BI tools, then think again.

Pretty much every business, whatever their size, works with Excel. I’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the world and I can confirm that they all do.

Just think of Excel as a tool in your tool belt that you can use for certain tasks that, although you could do them using other tools, it might actually be quicker to do them in Excel

So, if you don’t already know how, you’ll need to learn formulas to not only clean data and write calculations. But also how to do things like conducting regression and segmentation analysis.

Your new employer might not even know what these are so if you can suggest them, it makes it look like you know what you’re doing.

4. Master a BI tool

Step 4 is to master a BI tool. Just one. You can be familiar with a few but I’d suggest mastering just one. And when I say “master”, I mean learn how to do everything with it. To push it to its limits.

The reason I recommend this is because, although all BI tools are different, at their core they’re all essentially the same that have been built to do the same kinds of things.

By mastering one tool, you’ll get to understand the challenges that will present themselves when working on BI projects and how to overcome them. These problems won’t be BI tool-specific (normally), they’ll be to do with how to calculate, aggregate or present data.

Once you know what kinds of problems you’ll face, when you’re working with a new, unfamiliar tool, you’ll know what you’ll need to do and it’ll just be a case of finding out where the functionality lies within the tool to achieve your goal.

What I’m essentially saying (in a fairly long-winded way) is that BI tools are just that, tools. Tools that you use to get the job done. So it’s better to focus on doing more jobs than learning more tools to do the same jobs. Make sense? 

If you want to know which tool you should learn then you can either go the route of learning the most used tools, either Power BI or Tableau (however, if you’re a Mac user, I’d forget about Power BI because you’ll need a PC or a PC emulator for mac).

Or if you don’t have any money to invest then you could start with Google’s Data Studio which is completely free to use.

You might hear some people be dismissive of Data Studio and say that it's really bad but, no offense to them, they’re wrong.

Data Studio is perfectly fine if you’re just starting out in BI and data analysis. It isn’t feature-heavy which is actually a good thing for 2 reasons.

Firstly, you won't be overwhelmed by lots of stuff that you probably won’t need and, secondly, you’ll actually be learning how to do more with less, which will make you use your brain more and be more inventive when it comes to problem-solving.

One other good reason to use Data Studio is that you can use third-party data hubs, like Power My Analytics or Dataslayer.ai, to connect to lots of different data sources.

And, in a lot of cases, you don’t actually need to have your own account for these sources because the data hub will let you play with some dummy data and build dashboards with it. Which is great if you need to...

If you want to master Google Data Studio, you can check out my online course here

5. Build a portfolio 

So, if you were looking to hire a photographer, how would you be able to tell how good each one was? You’d probably want to look at their portfolio, right?

Have they photographed the kinds of things you’re hiring them to photograph? Perhaps they’re great at wedding photography but not so good at real estate photography?

Ideally, you’d probably want to hire someone who knows how to do everything to a fairly high standard because that will speak to their level of experience.

This analogy, I’d suggest, could be applied to employers looking to hire a Business Intelligence analyst.

Except, instead of different kinds of photography, we’d be talking about working with different kinds of data sources or different ways of presenting data.

For this you’d need to be able to supply potential employers with some kind of portfolio, showcasing your varied talents.

Have you worked with:

• Sales data

• Marketing data

• HR data

• Website traffic data

• SQL databases (including writing complex queries to solve problems)

• Excel

What about some statistical analysis on some open data?

Perhaps you’d like to take on over 4 million rows of parking violations issued in New York City during this fiscal year? More on that in a minute.

Basically, if you can produce a portfolio containing projects you proactively created, this will not only show off your skills in working with these different kinds of data, but also it’ll show how passionate you are about working with and presenting data.

You now probably have 2 questions at this point. Where do I find the data sources to build these projects? And, where do I create this portfolio?

Both are fairly easy to answer. When it comes to data you’ve got websites like Kaggle, Statista and Data World. Or you could just do a web search for “open data”.

The New York City parking violations data can be downloaded, along with thousands of other data sets, from NYC Open Data. Then you have the UN Data website.

Here’s a great tip. Create a project using open data that will teach potential employers something they didn’t know already. Something that makes them say, “Oh, I never knew that”.

Imagine the impact that could have on your chances of getting the job ahead of someone else.

Another great way of accessing data that you may not yourself have, I actually mentioned earlier. You could use a data hub like Power My Analytics or Dataslayer.ai for either Excel or Data Studio.

Ok, they’re not free, but you can get an extended trial with Power My Analytics if you say Adam Finer from LearnBI.online sent you.

Then you can start from as little as $9.95 a month using their à la carte option.

When it comes to where to host your portfolio, you could use any of the BI tools I mentioned before.

Just remember that the whole point of your portfolio is to showcase your range of skills in terms of data sources and presentation styles.

6. Social Proof

This next step is all about getting yourself and your name out there in the right places. To show that you’re part of different discussions surrounding BI, data analysis, data science, etc.

You could say that this is more for your benefit than it is for any potential employer because it’ll help you keep up to date with what’s going on in the space.

Having said that, here’s one way that social proof could help you land that first job.

Ok, so you’ve downloaded some real-world open data (from one of the sites I mention) and you’ve crunched the numbers, perhaps done some statistical analysis, and then visualized and presented your findings in a beautifully designed report.

If you’ve found out something interesting that you think other people might find interesting as well, you could start to post about your project everywhere.

Think Quora, Reddit, Linkedin, Facebook groups. But what I would actually suggest you do is to write an article and publish it on Medium.

Then you can submit it to publications on Medium and ask if they’d like to pick it up. Then you’d be able to say to potential employers and even put on your resumé that you’ve been published. Again, this would make you stand out from the crowd.

If you’re unfamiliar with Medium, it’s free and super simple. Just head on over to medium.com and open an account. Maybe just watch a YouTube video or two on how to get started.

7. Never stop learning

If you’re really serious about landing your first job as a Business Intelligence analyst, you’re going to want to be learning as much as possible about everything surrounding your new chosen profession.

This means everything from subscribing to and watching YouTube channels in the space, like mine (don’t forget to subscribe, by the way).

To signing up with online learning platforms like Skillshare, Udemy, and Coursera. The benefit of taking online courses over, say, watching different Youtube channels, is that they collate all the information you need in one place and are (theoretically) taught by experts in the field.

You really, ideally, need to be learning and upskilling constantly to not only improve your chances of landing a job, but also keeping it once you’re there.

After all, the more skills you acquire, the more valuable you’re going to be for your future employer and the fatter and more rounded your resumé is going to be.

In fact, to help you get started on your learning journey, why not take 15 minutes now and learn some SQL basics with this video here.