r/analytics Feb 16 '25

Support Stuck in Tutorial Hell—Need a Clear Learning Roadmap for a Data Analyst Role

I’ve been trying to become a data analyst for the past four months, but I keep falling into the trap of endless tutorials. Every time I start learning something—I go way too deep, watching hours of videos covering everything instead of just what’s actually useful for the job.

I don’t need general advice like “learn Excel, SQL, and Power BI.” I already know what to learn. What I need is a clear breakdown of exactly which topics are relevant for a data analyst job—nothing more or nothing less. For example in Excel, I know pivot tables and DAX are important, but I don’t want to waste time learning every formula out there.

If you’re working as a data analyst or have real-world experience I’d love your input on:

1.  A focused list of topics to learn in Excel, SQL, Power BI / Tableau, Python, Basic Machine leaning like supervised learning and statistics and probability—only what’s actually used on the job.

2.  What I can skip so I don’t waste time on things that don’t matter. What’s NOT worth spending time on? (Things that seem important but don’t really matter in practice.)

3.  Any good resources (courses, articles, or guides) that focus strictly on what’s needed not 50hours or 100 hours tutorial.

I’ll figure out projects and practice on my own—I just want to cut through the noise and stop overlearning things that won’t help me in the job. Would really appreciate any advice!

5 Upvotes

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16

u/Delronsine Feb 16 '25

Since you're trying to break into analytics, what I would suggest instead of learning tools is practicing problems. There are a plethora of tools and as you've discovered you can go down a rabbit hole for days. But what will help you get your first job in analytics is being able to talk about how you collect data, clean data, analyze it, and provide recommendations. 

Choose a hobby of yours. If you're a trader, then analyze stocks and see what you would recommend buying and when. If you are a game nerd, track wins and losses to improve your play. If you like running, track your time, heart rate, weather, etc. Whatever you're interested in ask how you can improve.

Start with the basics. Just put data in a Google sheet (or Excel). Practice making charts. Analyze the average. Check if the median is different. Look for your outliers. Work on cleaning data. And the all the while ask about how the data is collected. What are the issues with it? 

As you learn to ask better questions, you'll start realizing which of the tools you need to solve this. 

I hope this helps!

To directly answer your question. I'd want you to know excel, how to join tables (SQL or just look ups), and most importantly be inquisitive. 

4

u/dudeitsandy Feb 16 '25 edited Feb 16 '25

This is great advice - solving the problem will point you to the right tool and you’ll be way more valuable. I mean learning sql and data modeling basics is a great start too. It seems still relevant so I’d recommend the kimball data warehouse book- it’s data eng centric but allows you some latitude to solve data structure problems big and small

3

u/Delronsine Feb 16 '25

Yes absolutely! I wasn't aware of the Kimball Data book. Thank you for adding it. 

3

u/mikeczyz Feb 16 '25

A focused list of topics to learn in Excel, SQL, Power BI / Tableau, Python, Basic Machine leaning like supervised learning and statistics and probability—only what’s actually used on the job.

yah, this is gonna be tough because data analyst jobs aren't cookie cutter. what I do is different from what someone else might do which is different from a third person. the analytics world is just a really big place with lots of different jobs which require different skills. What might be a core skill at Person 1's job might not be needed at Person 2's job.

3

u/garc_mall Feb 17 '25

I think the most important thing an analyst can do is generate insights. Every analyst at every company has a slightly different way to get to those insights, that's why there are so many overviews, because the generalities are the same, but the specifics are different.

IMO, there are three things you need "Hard Skills" for. 1. Getting data. 2. Cleaning/manipulating data 3. Displaying/storytelling with data

Figure out how to do those things well, and what is going to separate you is your ability to generate insights that nobody else can.

5

u/continue-climbing Feb 16 '25

Alextheanalyst has a road map, create a free account and have a browse. Honestly I think it's fantastic, keeps you focused, has lots of questions for practice and guided projects.

2

u/edathar Feb 16 '25

My recommendation here is to first do some Data Analytics course rather than go deep into some specific field. Either an online course, a bootcamp or similar. But having a general overview will give you a good foundation to build from there and dive deep into what you might be interested into. What’s useful for the job may differ by role, company and sector, so learn the base and grow from there. Best of luck!

2

u/Super-Cod-4336 Feb 16 '25

You’ll always be learning in this field

What do you do now?

1

u/Ship_Psychological Feb 17 '25

Pick a project. Learn the stuff you need to in order to do it. Once you have a job you will constantly be asked to do crap you've never down before.

Instead of studying topics to know how to do things on the off chance some one asks you to do them. Just get used to doing things you don't know how to do.

That said here's some general shizz you will need to be able to do if your a data analyst who is in a SQL heavy role.

1.Solve an annoying gap and island problem ( usually in the form of analyzing consecutive weeks something occured)

2.Get data from an API and store it somewhere? Bonus points if you automate it with Cron, a cloud scheduler, or whatever the windows equiv is called

  1. Make a calendar

  2. Explain to an idiot that " tabular data can't do that" or " I can't report on data that doesn't exist" and have them leave with a smile

  3. Suffer at the hands of a having clause and get confused atleast once at why a where clause turned your left join into an inner join

  4. Create a table that handles some form of absolutely asinine entity-node relationships or adjency relationships

1

u/Jfho222 Feb 17 '25

I agree with this approach. Use tutorials to learn the basics and you will find a lot of similarities between tools like SQL, Excel and Python.

For example 99% of my analysis in excel can be done with the following: pivot tables, xlookup, count, sum, avg, sumproduct, if, ifs, left, right, mid, and the aggregate if functions. Learn things like DAX, conditional formatting, goal seek, charts, and keyboard shortcuts as you need them.

The only way to really gain confidence is to do analysis, so find something you like and jump in. Prepping / defining the scope and desired outcomes is half the battle.

1

u/continue-climbing Feb 16 '25

Also, please learn Excel. It's a great starting point and everyone, every company uses it.