Resources for Data Analysts: Further Your Skills and Stay Up On the Latest Trends

No matter where you are in your career, or what job you’re in, you should always strive to continue learning. Whether that be by reading articles, following blogs, taking online courses, reading books; continuing to further your knowledge and stay up to date with what’s going on in your field is critical. Staying up to-date with your knowledge and skills not only helps keep the quality of your work at its best, but also helps you to move up and keep the forward momentum of your career. No one likes to stay stuck. With that in mind, we did our best to find resources to help all of our data analysts out.

Here are some of the resources that we think will help those that work as data analysts or in similar positions.

Articles

There are a ton of great articles on the web surrounding data analytics and tools used in data-driven career paths. Here are the top 5 articles that we found that can be of use for data analysts:

• Data Analytics Top Trends in 2017
• What Meaningful Careers Exist in Data Science?
• Python for Big Data in one Picture
• Python for Data Science - A cheat sheet for beginners
• R and Python Cheat Sheets

Books

While articles are great and less time-consuming, books can go more in depth and provide a wealth of information. Here are 4 books, a mixture of print and eBooks, that we think would benefit data analysts.

• The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver
• The Elements of Data Analytic Style, by Jeff Leek; book on data analytics by one of the co-developers of the Johns Hopkins Specialization in Data Science.
• The Art of Data Science, Pang and Matsui; A book outlining the process of analyzing data by two authors who have extensive experience within the field.
• The Data Analytics Handbook; free handbook series released by Leada to promote data analytics literacy.

Blogs

There are plenty of great bloggers out there in the world, and luckily, there is no shortage of data analysts and blogs. Here are three blogs we love to keep our eyes on.

• FiveThirtyEight: launched by prominent data guru Nate Silver. The site offers analysis and visualizations of a range of topics including politics, culture, and economics. Great insight into how data can be transformed and made accessible to a wide audience.
• R-Bloggers: great resources for R, news, and tutorials.
• Data Science Masters: Open Source data for the data science community.

Online Courses/Learning Paths/Certifications

If you really want to commit to continuing your education and furthering your skills, there are plenty of great online courses, learning paths, and even certifications that are available online and are worth considering. Here are 5 that we found.

• Springboard offers a data analysis path with 26 resources and over 310 hours. The best part? It’s free!
• Basics of Python! Python for Everybody Course from University of Michigan, offered through Coursera. You can audit the course to access the class materials but must purchase the course to access graded materials, receive a final grade, and earn a shareable certificate; it's course 1 of 5 in Coursera's Python for Everybody Specialization)
• Cloudera Certified Administrator for Apache Hadoop (CCAH) certification which proves demonstrated technical knowledge, skills and ability to configure, deploy, maintain, and secure an Apache Hadoop Cluster. Cost is $295.
• SQL Tutorial for Data Analysis offered by Mode
• DataCamp is a great online Data Science learning platform with courses focusing on R, Python, and Data Visualization. There are both free and paid courses available.

Other Resources

Here are some great resources that don’t fall quite as neatly into categories.

• Data Science Cast Study: Turo’s Dynamic Pricing and Recommender Engine
• Data Science Weekly; A weekly newsletter email of the latest news and trends in data science
• Data Machina; weekly digest of data science curiosities, machine intelligence, data geekery, and more!

Are you a data analyst or aspiring data analyst? Maybe just a data enthusiast? What are your favorite data focused resources? Let us know in the comments if we missed any of what you think to be the best and most useful resources, we’d love to hear from you.If you’re pursuing a new career in data analytics or looking to move to a new role, check out our careers page to see any data-focused positions we are hiring for. Hope to hear from you soon!