While many business intelligence positions may not require coding skills, learning programming skills can allow analysts to accelerate the value they offer organizations and help them stand out from the crowd when searching for employment. Business intelligence (BI) requires coding to process data to generate useful information. Coding is used in the modeling and data storage stages of the life cycle of BI projects. However, coding isn't necessary at the other stages of the BI lifecycle.
Anyone can start a career in BI with a little programming practice. While BI data analysts may not perform calculations regularly, they do need to understand some programming to work efficiently with the data. These are the different programming languages and technical tools that you will learn to use in your career as a BI data analyst. Most importantly, the BI data analyst career path is designed for those of us who aren't “numbers people,” and we'll guide you through everything you need to know in a practical, data-focused way, Michelle says.
In addition, we will teach you how to use the technical tools and programming languages used by BI data analysts. In the lifecycle stages of business intelligence, data modeling and the creation of data warehouses, BI analysts tend to spend more time coding in SQL and Python or R. We'll teach you how to use Tableau to import, manage and visualize data in the career path of BI data analysts. At this point, it is now more clear that business intelligence does require programming, but only in some aspects.
You can consider the Data Skills for Business section, where you'll learn some Python programming. The field of BI is poorly defined and can be quite confusing, especially since each job description offers slightly different expectations for a BI analyst. However, I firmly believe that having interpersonal skills to work with company stakeholders is as important as technical skills. As you advance your career as a BI data analyst, be sure to connect with your fellow students and job seekers through the Codecademy forums.
In your career as a BI data analyst, you'll learn the basic concepts of managing, analyzing and visualizing data in Excel, as well as working on data analysis projects using real world data sets. A typical BI analyst would use SQL to explore available data and plan the data points needed to be included in a data warehouse. This step involves understanding the business context of a problem given by a company stakeholder. Effective data storytelling is difficult and it's absolutely important when it comes to convincing that analysis can drive business decisions.
BI data analysts must be able to interpret and contextualize numbers so that a wide range of audiences and stakeholders can understand what they mean.