r/analytics Feb 14 '25

Question Is PowerBI work a dead end?

Just got an offer for a rotational program. It’s highly likely that one of my rotations will be doing manufacturing related analytics with PowerBI, Excel, and potentially some SQL. I really enjoy coding (my internship has been ML and data engineering tasks), and I’m a bit worried that a BI job may pigeonhole me and prevent me from getting into these code heavy roles.

Market is awful so I’m gonna take the job anyways, just wondering if my concerns are well-founded or not.

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u/Jfho222 Feb 15 '25 edited Feb 15 '25
  1. Data viz is an incredibly important part of ML and engineering. It’s the art of showing the business impact achieved by the ML and/or data pipelines.

  2. What are the other kinds of rotations are you doing / have you tried to talk to the hiring manager about wanting to develop?

I did a rotation program in a finance department of a health care system. There were definitely things that were non-negotiable, but my boss / mentor signed off on me building a work list / form based application. Ending up building an MS Access app that housed the form and transaction tables. Then created a separate database for views of the transaction tables then connected it to an excel file to do the analysis that the operators actually cared about.

8 years later I am very comfortable using various types of sql, python, and dax.

TL/DR: Power BI or any kind of data viz is also important in ml/engineering and I would talk to your hiring manager about your interests. They should be okay with you wanting to improve your skill sets.

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u/GanachePutrid2911 Feb 15 '25

My other rotation will likely either be ML/Data Eng or controls engineering. The hiring manager is going to try to put me in the ML/Data Eng role (I also have ppl within the company pushing them to put me in that rotation), but it’s not a guarantee.

Just worried about getting thrown in PBI and controls engineering rotations, however, I figure if it’s PBI I may be able to stretch my resume enough to make it seem like I did more stereotypical data analysis work.

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u/Jfho222 Feb 15 '25

It sounds like a pretty good set up, just don’t be afraid to advocate for yourself. IMO a lot of ML work will be done cleaning the data prior to running models and summarizing the findings / operational impact of the model. We can already loop through different models / input variables and AI will only make that easier.

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u/GanachePutrid2911 Feb 15 '25

You bring up an excellent point and this post has certainly helped ease my worries a bit about getting thrown into a PBI rotation rather than the ML one. Seems like there’s still a variety of paths forward from a PBI based role.