Data Analyst, Data Scientist, and Data Engineer

Data Analyst

Average salary: $68,752

What is a data analyst? This is typically considered an “entry-level” position in the data science field, although not all data analysts are junior and salaries can range widely.

A data analyst’s primary job is to look at company or industry data and use it to answer business questions, then communicate those answers to other teams in the company to be acted upon. For example, a data analyst might be asked to look at sales data from a recent marketing campaign to assess its effectiveness and identify strengths and weaknesses. This would involve accessing the data, probably cleaning it, performing some statistical analysis to answer the relevant business questions, and then visualizing and communicating the results.

Over time, data analysts often work with a variety of different teams within a company; you may work on marketing analytics one month, then help the CEO use data to find reasons the company has grown the next. You will typically be given business questions to answer rather than asked to find interesting trends on your own, as data scientists often are, and you’ll generally be tasked with mining insights from data rather than predicting future results with machine learning.

Skills required: Specifics vary from position to position, but in general, if you’re looking for data analyst roles, you’ll want to be comfortable with:

• Intermediate data science programming in either Python or R, including the use of popular packages
• Intermediate SQL queries
• Data cleaning
• Data visualization
• Probability and statistics
• Communicating complex data analysis clearly and understandably to people with no statistics or programming background

Career prospects: Data analyst is a broad term that encompasses a wide variety of positions, so your career path is fairly open-ended. One common next step is to continue building your data science skills — often with a focus on machine learning — and work toward a role as a data scientist. Alternatively, if you’re more interested in software development, data infrastructure, and helping build a complete data pipeline, you could work toward a position as a data engineer. Some data analysts also use their programming skills to transition into more general developer roles.

If you stick with data analysis, many companies hire senior data analysts. At larger companies with data teams, you can also think about working toward management roles if you’re interested in developing management skills.

Data Scientist

Average salary: $128,173

What is a data scientist? Data scientists do many of the same things as data analysts, but they also typically build machine learning models to make accurate predictions about the future based on past data. A data scientist often has more freedom to pursue their own ideas and experiment to find interesting patterns and trends in the data that management may not have thought about.

As a data scientist, you might be asked to assess how a change in marketing strategy could affect your company’s bottom line. This would entail a lot of data analysis work (acquiring, cleaning, and visualizing data), but it would also probably require building and training a machine learning model that can make reliable future predictions based on past data.

Skills required: All of the skills required of a data analyst, plus:

• A solid understanding of both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods
• A strong understanding of statistics and the ability to evaluate statistical models
• More advanced data-science-related programming skills in Python or R, and potentially familiarity with other tools like Apache Spark

Career prospects: If you’re working as a data scientist, your next job title may well be senior data scientist, a position that’ll earn you about $20,000 more per year on average. You might also choose to specialize further in machine learning as a machine learning engineer, which would also bring a pay raise. Or, you can look more toward management with roles like lead data scientist. If you want to maximize earnings, your ultimate goal might be a C-suite role in data — such as chief data officer — although these roles require management skills and may not involve a lot of actual day-to-day work with data.

Data Engineer

Average salary: $132,653

What is a data engineer? A data engineer manages a company’s data infrastructure. Their job requires a lot less statistical analysis and a lot more software development and programming skill. At a company with a data team, the data engineer might be responsible for building data pipelines to get the latest sales, marketing, and revenue data to data analysts and scientists quickly and in a usable format. They’re also likely responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to store and quickly access past data.

Skills required: The skills required for data engineer positions tend to be more focused on software development. Depending on the company you’re looking at, they may also be quite dependent on familiarity with specific technologies that are already part of the company’s stack. But in general, a data engineer needs:

• Advanced programming skills (probably in Python) for working with large datasets and building data pipelines
• Advanced SQL skills and probably familiarity with a system like Postgres

Career prospects: Data engineers can move into more senior engineering positions through continued experience, or use their skills to transition into a variety of other software development specialties. Outside of specialization, there is also the potential to move into management roles, either as the leader of an engineering or data team (or both, although only very large companies are likely to have a sizable data engineering team).

Source: DataQuest