Is Being a Data Analyst Hard? (My Experience)

So I've been a population health analyst at an insurance company for about three or four months now and I want to go over how hard is it to actually be a data analyst. But I've learned in the first three to four months that a lot of the skills that you need to learn, Excel, SQL, R or Python, and then visualization tools like Tableau or doing things in R or Python to make visualizations, those aren't extremely hard. A lot of that you're going to learn in school depending on what you go into school for. I was a statistics major so I learned a lot of these things beforehand, especially R and especially making visualizations in R. Personally for me, SQL is pretty new and there's definitely a little bit of a learning curve. But after, you know, three or four weeks of using it all the time, I would say I'm pretty comfortable using it and it's not that hard to learn. However, the actual hard part about being a data analyst is the logic and thinking and problem solving that goes behind every decision you make. Anytime you're given a task as a data analyst, you're going to be told by your manager or a director, you know, here's the solution that we want, can you do that? You just say whether you can do it, how you're going to do it, how long it's going to take, and what this could mean for the business. Now business users aren't going to always know exactly the intricacies of what you're going to have to do to pull everything together to make the product that they're asking for. So ultimately the goal of completing this project is going to fall on you to figure out how you're going to get the data needed to complete this goal, how you're going to put everything together, and what tool or packages you're going to use to actually complete this. Not only this, but you have to understand, you know, the impact that this is going to have so you can implement all the right things that directors or higher-ups are going to need to see in order for this tool to be successful. So not only do you need to understand the intricacies and the skills that I talked about at the beginning of the video, you need to understand the final use case and exactly what this is going to be used for so that you can pull all the correct data, put it in the right format, and display it in a way that makes sense to other people who might not have the same technical background you do. Ultimately being a data analyst is pretty hard, but the difficulty comes from problem solving, not from the actual skills you need to learn. However, if you do want to see more about all the skills you do need to learn in order to become a data analyst in the first place, watch this video next because that's going to break down exactly what skills you need.