132: How to Become a Senior Data Analyst (ft. Elijah Butler)

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my newsletter subscribers what they want me to cover next in the data career podcast. And a lot of people messaged and they said, Avery, you helped me so much go from zero to data analyst, but now what do I do to become a senior data analyst? And so that's what today's episode is going to be about. So I invited my friend, Elijah Butler, who has over 200, 000 social media followers and recently went from data analyst to senior data analyst. At Humana, a Fortune 50 company. Elijah also just recently started his own YouTube channel, where I will be featured on there very soon. So you can check that out in the show notes down below. Let's get into the episode. Elijah, what even is a Senior Data Analyst?

A Senior Data Analyst is a data analyst that kind of bided their time for a little while, learned some more things, and eventually were given a fancy

title. So what even like changes, like do you get to wear a badge when you come into work or what's the difference?

There are a bunch of differences whenever you become a senior data analyst, depending on the company of course, because some data analysts do more than senior analysts, but in my experience you're expected to have a higher level of technical skills, a higher level of soft skills, and then you're also given more ownership over all of your projects. When you're starting as a data analyst you're kind of just given commands to perform analyses. When you become a senior data analyst, you should take more ownership over the project so you can give suggestions on what might be a better approach or a better way of solving a problem.

So you're basically a data analyst with more responsibility and hopefully more capabilities at this point.

That's the hope. Anybody that's worked with me has been thoroughly let down, but that's what they're trying to do when they hire a senior.

There you go. I like what you said though, that there is quite a spectrum that even like some, I don't know, non senior data analyst jobs. Might be harder or more difficult or even maybe like more responsibility than some senior data analyst jobs.

Oh, a hundred percent. There is no like threshold. The government doesn't like force us to name jobs properly or anything like that. So I look at job openings all the time because I spent a lot of my time helping people get into data analyst jobs. And I will see a senior data analyst job that pays 70, 000. And then I'll see a job that doesn't even have a Senior in front of it for $190,000. So don't what title be a big distraction. It's obviously nice, it looks good on LinkedIn, but there are a lot of jobs that just say data analysts where you're probably doing more work than many senior analysts or at least a higher level of work. Great.

And, and you went from being an analyst to a senior analyst recently. How long have you been a senior analyst for?

I've been a senior analyst for about six months now. I had been in data analytics for just under three years. By the time I got promoted to senior analyst, I actually got referred to a senior analyst position on a different team at the same company. And now combined, I've been an analyst for three and a half years and just out there analyzing every data that comes my way.

And most of that data is like some sort of like healthcare insurance data because you work for Humana, right? Which is a pretty big company.

Oh yeah. I obviously can't get too deep into it. Humana does a million more things than I would have thought coming in. So it's been various healthcare data, business data, a lot of fun stuff. Very cool. Very cool. And,

and so you were an analyst for, you know, three years and then you got promoted to the senior role, which you've been in the last six months. You mentioned you stayed within the company when you made that transition. You did change teams, but you stayed within the company. Is that right?

Yeah, that's correct. I had been looking at senior roles for a few months. I just, I thought I was ready. Also, as I had chances to interview for a couple of different roles, it gave me other things to learn and prepare for. And I happen to have a connection on LinkedIn, which I know you're going to love this Avery that worked at my company. And she shared a opening on her team for a senior analyst. And I was like, Hey, I'm currently looking for a senior analyst role. Would you mind to refer me? And she did. And I guess my former boss had said good things about me, because obviously if you're going to switch within the company, they're going to ask your current boss, how good you are. And the rest was history and. I'm so glad that it happened. Even more than just the title change and a little bump of salary. I'm really enjoying the kind of work that I'm doing. So never discount that when you're looking at what job you think is right for you.

And what's really changed for you? Like on a day to day basis, like you still go to the office at the same time. Like what, what has actually changed for you?

So I, I've always worked from home, so I at least don't have to worry about a different office schedule. I think the biggest change of pace for me would be the ownership factor of my projects. My boss, who I love, really pushes me to take ownership, to ask all the questions I need to, to give suggestions whenever I think there is a different approach that might work better, or say we're looking at the wrong metric for what we're trying to solve. So I think that's the biggest thing that has changed and As I've become a senior, I'm still actively looking to find different ways of analyzing data that are better, that I can find answers that I couldn't find before, and part of that is I'm starting to implement Python into my work for the first time, and I'm just really getting started with that, but that's always fun. It's nice adding new capabilities to your work. It's nice to challenge yourself. But again, overall, it's just like, instead of just receiving orders, you're a part of the team. You help make the decisions.

That's good to know because I think a lot of people who are looking to land their first day at a job, they often think, well, what if I don't know what to do or like how to analyze it? And I mean, that's always going to be the case. Even when you're like, A senior, senior, senior analyst, like you, you're still not going to know everything, but it's important to recognize that like as like a junior analyst or even like a normal analyst, you're not expected to know everything right off the bat. Like you are expected to get instructions from someone and then kind of execute those instructions. Versus a senior analyst, you might start to come up with your instructions on your own, if I understood what you're saying, correct? A hundred percent.

You're expected, like, the expectations, again, you're gonna have a little bit higher expectations on your technical skills. Like, whenever you're getting your first job, you probably spent If the job market was good, you probably spent a couple of months learning skills like SQL, Excel, Tableau, stuff like that. Done a couple of projects, but actually applying that will be your first time doing actual application. Whereas when you start as a senior data analyst, I would expect that you're much more comfortable with those tools. It doesn't mean that you have to be an expert. You don't have to master it. I know neither of us would say that we've mastered anything. We'll be mastering these tools until we die. But you're expected, like, you should know how to build a report in Power BI or Tableau. You should know how to write basic SQL query, like it's nothing. And you could figure out more advanced stuff with the help of Google and Stack Overflow.

Very interesting. And do you feel like your, your journey of like three years is pretty typical or is that faster

or slower? I think it can vary a lot. Again, remember that. The job titles don't always match experience. So, but in general, from what I've seen, I think for driven, hardworking individuals, I definitely think three years is reasonable. A lot of people have to job hop a little bit to make this happen. And there's. Definitely no shame in that. I'm happy that I was able to be promoted within my organization. But I definitely think three years is reasonable. It may be on the shorter end, but also don't let that hurt you or get you down if it takes you longer than that to move up. Because even if it takes you five or more years, there's no shame in that. There's

also a lot of growth opportunities from the analyst role to the senior analyst role that don't necessarily reflect in the title, but there's definitely a lot of growth that I've seen individuals have just like taking more leadership over a project, getting promoted before you're actually like getting a money promotion before getting the title promotion. So there's still a lot of like, I guess the little mini milestones on that way to the big one. The one thing that I thought was interesting that you mentioned is you mentioned that you are using, you know, Python, a new tool in this senior role, but that doesn't seem like it was a requirement. Like you didn't have to know

Python to move into the senior role, right? A hundred percent. It was not required of me. Again, I think as I have before

you're actually like getting a money promotion before getting the title promotion

using SQL, you need to build this report using Tableau. Instead, it's more like you need to solve this problem in the best way that it's going to be to solve it and For a few of the problems that I'm currently working on, I think literally a simple linear aggression would really help to find the cause and effect of certain things. So it was more of me taking that initiative and being like, I think Python would help me a lot with my work. I think it would help us think about problems better. And. Yeah. It was pretty much me that was like, I definitely think Python would help our team and help us answer questions.

Very interesting. So I think a lot of people would be like, no, you have to, you have to be like taking a, you're going to get tested in SQL and then tested in Python. And then that's how you get promoted. But it seems like to me from your experience is it's almost like as much about your soft skills as it is about your technical skills.

Exactly. It's a lot more. Critical thinking and problem solving, especially like for the first few months of this job, I hardly used SQL at all. I'm now starting right now. I'm going to be using it a lot more, but it's using the tools that just happen to make sense in the moment. So it's been a lot of Excel and Power BI and then Salesforce because my current team uses. Salesforce and then just being able to communicate with others again to really dig into the why of whatever you're doing whenever someone comes to you and just like, can you pull data about this? You should always be asking why, like, what question is this going to answer? And then you can get into more technical questions like, how do you want the data to look? What timeframe of data are you looking for? So. Those soft skills of communication, critical thinking, and problem solving really come more into importance in a senior role, at least in my experience.

Very interesting, because for those who've listened to the podcast before, you know, that landing your first day at a job is not really about how skilled you are or how many tech skills you have. It's all about the SBN method, right? The skills are just a third, the portfolio ends up being a third, and then networking ends up being a third. And kind of similarly landing the senior role sounds like it's a lot of, of course, your skills have to be there. Like you have to be able to write some sort of a SQL query. You can't just be SQL illiterate, but then your soft skills play a big role in terms of like, that's kind of like networking in terms of like projects. I'm curious here, obviously like you're, you're not getting promoted because you built a project outside of side of work, but I would imagine that the stuff you were responsible for. In your previous role allowed you to kind of show, Hey, look, I can take responsibility and not totally muff it up. You know, I can take a project, analyze it and come up with some meaningful insights. And that's kind of proof that I should move into the senior role. Was that your experience?

Yeah. Especially again, moving up within my organization, because they're going to contact my boss. So. If I was clocking in three hours late every day and I never got any work done, that probably wasn't going to bode well with me for moving up in the company. But definitely the work that I was currently doing made a big benefit to me waiting that senior role. I was able to go to my interviews. I think I had three or four interviews for my senior job and be able to talk about the previous projects that I'd done for work, but. Honestly, some stuff outside of work ended up playing to my benefit as well. I'm a big, kind of, business nerd, as weird as that might sound. So, my knowledge of things like finance and business operations, I think that was a big selling point for me. And then, Also, I always recommend for really driven data analysts, don't let your only learning be what you do on the job. If you want to really have a wide swath of senior level roles that you want to move up to, if your job only has you working with Power BI and Excel, you're really going to be limiting yourself. So, if That is your case. Make sure that you're spending a little bit of time out of work working on SQL. And maybe after you've got all three of those downs, you could add something like Python on there. So I think the mix between my projects that I did for work, my interests outside of work, again, business, it kind of gave me that domain knowledge as well as. Spending time learning out of work really are what propelled me to move up as quickly as I did.

The, the other thing that I think you're actually maybe underselling, you mentioned briefly at the beginning, was actually networking. You know, networking is not only important for your first day of the job, but for your second, for your third, and for your fourth, and so on and so forth. Even when you're transferring internally, In the company, like, like you did, because you have a big presence on LinkedIn, followers there and you post useful, funny stuff on there quite a bit. And that seemed like that was one of the reasons, or at least you have a connection within your company that kind of was like, Hey, there's this job that you might be a good fit for within our company. You want to apply.

Oh, yeah, really for any job that you want to want there any job that you want to get in your life There are two things that you need to do You need to be good at whatever that job wants you to be good at and you need to know somebody Especially in this economy. I really I would love to have the data for how many jobs are by Referral over like cold apply and every other thing. It really has become of Like again, you obviously got to have those skills, but everybody that is trying to get into analytics has some level of those skills. So it's really about finding an effective way to network and it isn't just formal things. It isn't just cold DMing on LinkedIn. It isn't just career fairs. This was just person that I had on there for my company. Never plan to. Asked her for anything and then just she happened to pop up that her team was hiring for that role and I was like, hey, no pressure. I'm currently looking for a senior role. Um, if you think that I might be a good fit from it, you've probably seen some of my posts on it. I would love to interview for the role. I'd love to hear more about it. And. That's just really all networking is. And when I say all that networking is, it can literally be at any forum. Like literally one of my best friends I met on LinkedIn because I was trying to meet other data analysts in the area. And now me and my wife go on double dates with him and his wife all the time. So within the

past I thought you were talking about me there for a second.

No, you're, you're special too. But, uh, shout out My best friend.

I

got to shout out my friend Clayton if he is listening to this. But literally like Uh, six months ago, I got a new job through LinkedIn just by being friendly. And then like a year and a half ago, met one of my best friends through it. So, uh, don't just think that jobs are all that you can get out of networking.

A hundred percent. I love that. And I also love that you stayed internal within, within your company for, for this role. I interviewed Zach Wilson not too long ago on the podcast. We'll have his interview in the show notes down below if you guys want to take a listen. But he was able to go from like, basically like 40, 000 to like 600, 000 in like six ish years because of job hopping. And he was able to He, he was in a different role, not like an analyst role, more like software engineering and data engineering. And they had a little bit more, especially software engineering has like a more structured development process, but she was able to do so from job hopping. And I often see that's, that's a way that people kind of land the senior role. So you can at least know that you have the two options. You can, you can follow. You know, the job hopping method of like landing these promotions through other companies, a lot of the times, for some reason, other companies are more willing to invest in you than your current company, but I'm glad to see that Humana was willing to invest in you and saw, saw your brilliance and was like, yeah, we got to keep Elijah let's, let's promote them. But it's just good to know that, that both options are there and available to, to people who want to do this.

100 percent and the important thing to remember overall obviously salary and all over compensation is really important But keep in mind things like stability how much you enjoy your job How much you enjoy your co workers and that with all of those reasons? Were really big on me trying to stay at humana before I worked elsewhere And that's definitely the case on my current team. My current team has Just incredible chemistry. I love the people that I work with. So make your money. Don't get cheated out. Like if I were to, I don't know, fall off a cliff tomorrow, it isn't going to hurt Humana's bottom line. So always be looking out for you and your family. But sometimes it can make sense to just try to climb the ladder at your current company. If that works for you. I love that.

Okay. What other advice would you give, you know, young Elijah or someone that's looking to, you know, become. I'm more senior analyst in the next 12 months or so.

I think it's just all about learning and you can even include your boss in on that. Like if you say, Hey, I really want to grow in this role. I really want to, however long it takes eventually lead to that senior role. I really want to take on more responsibilities and get a lot better. And a lot of becoming a senior data analyst is just learning and becoming a better data analyst. So you got to improve your technical skills. So that's going to happen naturally somewhat on the job. But again, I highly recommend spending a little bit of time. It can even be on company time, uh, working on your technical skills. Like if you're taking courses outside of work, that's also going to benefit your work because you're figuring out better ways to do things, learning how to work with stakeholders better. So managing stakeholder. Expectations. Learning the good questions to ask when a report comes in. Really try to become more of a suggester than just an order taker. I think that is incredibly important, but again, I just can't overstate enough. Learning every day is It's gonna benefit you so much in life, even if it's just 20 minutes a day. Doesn't even have to be just data analytics. Read some good non fiction books, read Atomic Habits or something like that. If you spend a little bit of time learning every day, spend a little time trying to get healthier every day, those habits are just gonna compound, and if you don't even focus on that end result, just focus on your process, and you're just gonna see leaps in your life that you wouldn't have thought possible. https: TheBusinessProfessor. com

Totally agree with that. Uh, I, I love that you also mentioned that like, you can, you can upscale on work's time, one of my students who just landed a data role, she may have landed it over a year now, she just messaged me and she's like, my boss is giving me 10 hours a week to upscale. I was like, Holy crap. That's a lot. Usually people don't get that much, but the point is you probably have or can take like one to two hours, at least a week in upscaling she has 10, which I think is fantastic, but. Like every company is going to want their employees to improve. And they, like you said, reap the benefits of that. So don't be like, Oh, I'm going to go to this job. And as soon as I'm there, I'm never going to learn anything again. You're going to, they're going to help you learn. And that's, that's one of the cool things is when instead of paying to learn, you're getting paid to learn at that point, which is such a cool feeling.

Oh, 100%. Literally today, my boss was encouraging us in a team meeting to make sure that we're spending even just a little bit. One to three hours a week. I'm sure we could spend more than that if we needed it, had the time for it. But I really liked that she encouraged us to learn. Something that I had been doing for a while. I've kind of fallen off the past couple weeks was I start work at 8am. And if I'm honest, 8 to 9am, I'm still waking up a little bit. So responding to Teams DMs, I'm responding to emails. And I also spend like 30 minutes just working on something. Learning that's going to help me do my work better. So recently that's been a Python course and a pandas course within Python. So yeah, just learning a little bit every day really just goes so far. And I would say the one other thing I would add, as long as it's something that is at least tangential to your work, like. A social media creator. So I wouldn't spend time on the clock personally, like working on LinkedIn strategy course or something like that. But anything I'm doing that has to do with statistics or SQL or Python, that's going to benefit my job. So I, if they ever discouraged me from learning, I'd be like, that's only going to hurt you. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah. That's a little bit of a red

flag at those, at that point. Um, but yes, of course, make sure it's, make sure it's related. Now, now I'm curious though, Elijah, you're a senior analyst. You've been there six months. You're in no rush to go anywhere else. But like, what is next after a senior analyst role? Like, are you a senior analyst for the rest of your career? Um, you

could be, honestly, like there are some very high paying senior analysts. A lot of companies after senior, they might expect you to go into management. And if you can still get some salary increases. Increases you don't necessarily have to go into management. Some people won't like managing people. Some people honestly won't be good managing people and I've yet to know because I've yet to try it yet. So there is no specific path. You could stay a senior analyst. I would say within my company, it would probably need to eventually move up to a lead analyst, which it has lead in the title, but that can vary based on what I've seen. I think it would It would be a title and salary change. I would probably take a little bit of management, be kind of like a side manager to people, but not be like they're direct. So right now I'm incredibly happy on my company and my team. So the most likely thing for me would be moving up there, but I'll always look into every opportunity if I, there was ever something crazy that came my way. I would always look into that. I will. At some point, probably at least take a educational deep dive into data science and data engineering to see if any of those interests me more than data analytics, but as far as I can see, I love the team that I work on and hopefully I can make an impact big enough that would warrant an increase or just. It's just stay in there and being happy.

Love that. Yeah. Lead, lead analysts, I think is a great option. Management, like you said, is a great option. And then, yeah, of course there's the offshoots of data science. There's the offshoots of data engineering. There's this new thing called analytics engineering. That's like halfway data analysts, halfway data engineering that I think, uh, is a big opportunity for a lot of people to grow. I guess to, to sum that up is. There's lots of options. There's, there's lots of different directions you could go based off of what your interests are and maybe what they will become down the road. Once you try to experiment with all of that.

A hundred percent. It's just literally whatever you're interested in. And that's overall, what's going to guide me down my path. I think at least for right now, I again, really enjoyed business. I really liked being a part of the business decisions. I feel like data engineering is. It's kind of between data and software engineering, so I feel like it's less on the business side. But if you're like, I literally don't care what I'm doing. I literally just want to make as much money as possible. That isn't me currently, but like you can make some stupid money in data engineering and data science. So it's good to always look at those. But even if you're making a ton of money, if you hate your job, if you're making 500, 000 as a data engineer. You're having to work 60 hours a week and all 60 hours are miserable. I promise you would be, I almost promise that you would be happier in a much lower paid job that you enjoy. Totally agree with that.

I love that. So to summarize for all of you, Asa. Aspiring senior data analyst, you guys can follow Elijah's example. He made sure that he had a good baseline of skills and had been in the industry for a while, but then it was really his personal skills and what he was doing outside of work that allowed him to transition within his company from the analyst role to the senior analyst role. Now, of course, that's one path that Elijah is showing us. But there's so many more you could job up. You could do so many different things, but regardless, you always got to keep learning. Like Elijah said, it's not going to hurt you. And then just make sure you're doing the soft skills at your job. Elijah, thank you so much for joining us. You guys can check out Elijah's own YouTube channel in the show notes down below. I'm going to be on there soon. So you guys know that it's going to be good, right? Elijah. Oh,

I'm so excited about that video. Avery shares a ton of specifics about building a portfolio. I know that's kind of one of the most stressful parts about getting into data analytics. So if you want all of the deep down dirty secrets of how to build a great portfolio, be sure to tune into that.