Entry Level Data Analyst Jobs With No Experience - How to Get One
Getting your first job as a data analyst is hard. Getting your second job as a data analyst is super easy. The reason for that is, of course, that it’s difficult to get a data analyst job with no experience. For that matter, it’s difficult to get ANY job before you have experience.
That said, it can be done! Everybody who is a data analyst now had to start somewhere. We all had to get our foot in the door and land that first job before we had experience.
I’ll give you some strategies for how exactly to do this in just a moment, but first let’s take a step back and put ourselves in the shoes of the people who are doing the hiring. What exactly are business owners or hiring managers looking for?
As a business owner myself, I can tell you from experience. We’re looking for two things:
Someone who’s capable of doing the job successfully
Someone who we don’t have to take a lot of time and energy to train
Ok, so what are the best indications that someone can do a job successfully, and with minimal training? Here are the most important ones:
The person has the necessary skills to perform the job duties
The person has experience doing similar jobs successfully
The person is confident in his/her abilities
The person is resourceful and is able to learn whatever he/she doesn’t already know
So we’ve narrowed it down to four basic qualities. There are other qualities as well, such as that the person is pleasant and easy to get along with (nobody wants to work with a jerk, no matter how skilled he/she might be). But these are the main ones.
Let’s go through how you, as an aspiring data analyst, can demonstrate these four qualities.
Data Analyst Skills
Here you have two jobs. The first is to actually learn the skills, and the second is to demonstrate that you have the skills.
Here are the skills I recommend to get an entry-level data analyst job with no experience:
Excel
SQL
Data Visualization Software (such as Tableau or Power BI)
That’s it.
There are a lot of other skills you COULD learn, but if your goal is to get hired in your first entry-level job as a data analyst, I recommend you start with just these three. Otherwise, you may get caught up learning skills for far too long and not actually getting a job and getting paid. My recommendation is you learn a base level of skills, get hired, and then WHILE you’re on the clock getting a nice healthy paycheck, THEN start learning the more advanced stuff and upgrading your skill set.
You might have noticed that a lot of the boot camps and college programs out there take a long time and put a lot of information in your head. For example, a lot of them say you need to learn Python or R. In my experience, Python and R are advanced-level skills that you will NEVER use in 95% of data analyst jobs. So it makes zero sense, from a career perspective, to learn Python or R before you’ve at least started working at your first entry-level data analyst job.
There’s also the question of WHAT exactly to learn in each of these skills. You could spend 10 years of your life just learning Excel alone, and still not know how to do everything in Excel. That’s why it’s really helpful to have expert guidance from someone who knows the field and knows what are the 20% of skills that get you 80% of the results.
Now, knowing the skills is not enough. You also have to PROVE that you know the skills. There are two main ways that you can do this.
Using a portfolio to prove your skills
The LESS effective way to prove that you have data analyst skills is to create a data analyst portfolio, where you show off some projects that you’ve created using your data analyst skills. So, for example, you could show a dashboard that you created in Tableau or an automated template that you created in Excel.
The reason I say that a portfolio is a LESS effective way to prove your skills is that, first of all, you can’t prove that it was YOU who created the projects in your portfolio. You could have just copied them from somebody else. And secondly, just because you HAVE a portfolio doesn’t mean that the hiring manager is going to take the time to look at it. Remember to put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes here. He/she probably sees a lot of resumes and doesn’t want to spend 10 minutes looking at your portfolio. I teach my students how to solve this second problem and get hiring managers to actually look at and understand their portfolios, but that’s a subject for another day.
Communicating to prove your skills
The MORE effective way to prove your skills is to be able to talk about them in a knowledgeable way. If the hiring manager asks you about how you created a certain Tableau project or how you would write an SQL query to perform a certain function, and you can answer that question competently, that’s solid proof that you have the skill. And I can tell you from a lot of experience: EVERY data analyst job you interview for will ask you questions to test your understanding of the skills.
Now that DOESN’T mean you have to memorize every function in Excel or SQL. You just have to understand them well enough to be able to walk through the process of obtaining a certain result. If you don’t remember the exact text for the function, that’s OK, because it takes 30 seconds to look it up on Google.
Now let’s get into the next part:
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Data Analyst Experience Bootstrapping
This is the tricky one, because if you’re trying to get into your first entry level data analyst job, then by definition you don’t have any experience. Here is where we apply what I call “Experience Bootstrapping”.
What you need to do if you don’t have data analyst experience is to CREATE your own experience. In other words, you need to do some data analysis projects using your data analyst skills. And this works best if you do these projects for a real company or organization.
I’ll use myself as an example.
My first full time job was a very low-level position that involved mostly data entry and cutting and pasting things between Excel spreadsheets. Pretty boring stuff. And I made only $38K a year for the privilege.
While I was working that job, I learned how to write SQL queries and how to do fancy stuff in Excel, including how to write Excel macros (as an aside: writing Excel macros is a SUPER valuable skill for data analysts that the vast majority of data analysts don’t have…if you want to get hired fast, stop wasting your time with Python and learn to write macros instead).
I used my new skills in Excel and SQL to improve the company’s processes. So instead of just manually copying and pasting stuff, I created queries and macros that automated most of the work. That is, that did most of the work for me.
When I created a resume to look for data analyst jobs, I talked about these projects on my resume, under the heading of my current experience.
After just 11 months on that job, I got 3 job offers for data analyst jobs. The highest offer was for $70K per year–almost DOUBLE my salary–and I took the job.
So here’s the moral of the story: find some way to use the new data analyst skills you’re learning at your current job. Find some spreadsheet that has some data on it that you can mess around with. And if you don’t normally work with spreadsheets already, ask around to your boss or someone else in the company if they have some spreadsheets you can work with. Chances are, somebody does.
And if you absolutely CAN’T get your hands on some data to mess around with, try to find a different organization that would be willing to give you some data. That might be an old company you used to work for, a friend’s business, your church, a charity organization you work with, etc.
Find some organization that has real data, and do some projects on their data. Now you can write that as experience on your resume. Now, all of a sudden, you’re not trying to find entry level data analyst jobs with no experience, you’re coming in WITH experience…despite having never officially worked as a data analyst!
Related Article: Skils vs Experience
Confidence in Data Analysis
When you talk to somebody over the phone or in an in-person interview, the most important thing to get across is that you’re confident you can do the job (and without much hand-holding).
People tend to trust people who trust themselves. On the other hand, if you don’t have confidence in yourself, nobody else is going to have confidence in you either.
Think about if you were about to have a major surgery, and you talked to the surgeon before the surgery started. If the surgeon seemed shaky and hesitant, like he was nervous about his ability to perform the surgery correctly, how would you feel? You’d probably want to find a different surgeon.
The same is true for the way you come across to employers. You need to have confidence in your abilities. Or at the very least, act like you have confidence in your abilities.
Now this does NOT mean that you have to be confident that you know everything about everything. If you’re an entry level data analyst with no experience, of course your knowledge is going to be limited. That’s OK.
What you DO need is to have confidence that whatever situation comes up, you can find a solution. You can learn. You can figure it out. You might not have the knowledge right now, but you’ll be resourceful and figure out a way.
This leads us to our final quality…
Resourcefulness in Data Analysis
There are two types of people in the world. There are people who don’t know how to do something and say “I can’t do that, I don’t know how.” And there are people who say “I don’t know how to do that, let me go figure it out”.
You want to be the second type.
If you’ve been the first type in the past, start being the second type. Seriously, it will change your life.
And it’s completely your choice. When you run into a challenge or an unfamiliar situation, it may be tempting to throw up your hands and give up. Instead, ask yourself “How can I get past this challenge?” “How can I figure this out?” “What resources do I have at my disposal that could help me figure this out?”
With free access to the internet, “I don’t know how” is no longer an excuse. Hiring managers know this, and they’re looking for resourceful people who aren’t going to come bugging them every time they don’t know how to do something. They want people who will take matters into their own hands and find a way to figure it out.
In Summary
If you want to get an entry-level data analyst job with no experience, this is the way to do it. If you follow these steps I’ve laid out for you, you will succeed.
Ninety-nine percent of people are not doing this, and 99% of boot camps and training programs are not teaching this. So by following this process, you’re putting yourself head and shoulders above just about everyone else who’s trying to get these entry level data analyst positions.
If you found this interesting and would like to get more specifics on how to do this, check out THIS FREE TRAINING where I demonstrate this process in more detail.
Knowing the difference could save you a lot.