Data and insight
What does a Data Analyst do?
Turning messy information into decisions other people can act on.
What the day is like
- Indoors, under a roof.
- A screen and a keyboard.
- Largely on your own.
- Right or wrong, to a standard.
- Answerable for your own work.
The facts
- Pay
- $120,230 a year, median
- Data scientists, May 2025
- Usually needs
- Bachelor's degree
- A year or two, often while earning something.
- Jobs
- +35% projected change in jobs, 2025-2035 projections
- Demand looks growing fast
What is good about it
- It pays well against the rest of the work on this site.
- You answer for your own work rather than for other people, which suits more people than admit it.
What people find hard about it
- Cleaning data
- Requests without a clear question
- Findings that get ignored
A large share of the work is preparation, not insight.
Will machines take this job?
What machines will do to this work. Query writing is largely automated; framing the question and defending the answer is not.
How to find out whether it suits you
Turn a public dataset into a one-page decision brief with a clear recommendation.
Would this actually suit you?
CareerDNA works that out from what you choose rather than from what you say about yourself: two minutes of choosing between real jobs, a few puzzles, and some questions about what you are like. It is free, it saves as you go, and it will tell you plainly where the answer is thin.