Stephen Greet Data analysis is the process of turning raw data into information and insight, which can be used to make business decisions.
A data analyst, or data business analyst, is someone with the knowledge and skills of data processing software and business development strategies to provide sound decisions to executive management.
Data analysts collaborate with other data professionals to identify and extract pertinent data, transform data into useful information, generate reports based on their findings, and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess business initiatives’ success.
Finding a great data analyst for your organization is a tall order, but BeamJobs is here to help. We have great examples and advice on how to create excellent job descriptions, so you can attract and hire the right people.
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Data Analyst Job Description Example
The job
Crunchy Foods is a small, but growing company that provides healthy snack foods. Our data analyst position is perfect for someone with a passion for crunching large amounts of data, analyzing, and creating highly useful business information and statistics. We are looking for someone to make an immediate impact by taking the initiative to build our data warehousing and generate a library of tools to help our business leaders create successful products and expand our market share.
What you’ll be doing
- Lead the gathering, filtering, and warehousing of big data for business intelligence.
- Oversee the processes and systems used for data analysis and reporting.
- Author technical requirements for IT developers to build new features and enhancements for business reporting tools.
- Increase the usability and effectiveness across our reporting and data analysis systems and tools.
- Develop features, functionality, and integrations that drive organic growth to our apps and information databases.
- Work with programmers, engineers, and management to identify process improvement opportunities, propose system modifications, and devise data governance strategies.
Benefits
We offer a competitive compensation plan with salary and bonus, health insurance, 401(k), option plan, and unlimited vacation policy.
- Job type: full-time
- Salary: $65,000.00 to $90,000.00/year
- Additional compensation: bonuses
- Other: Dental insurance, vision insurance, retirement plan
Qualifications
Besides your priority for organization and getting the details right, we’re also looking for:
- Bachelor’s degree
- Over 3 years of data analysis experience
- Highly organized and detail-oriented
- Excellent knowledge of SQL and Oracle analytical tools
- Knowledge of Python and R (preferable)
- Software development experience for BI software (preferable)
About the company
Crunchy Foods was founded in 2015 in scenic Des Moines, Iowa, and is a quickly growing snack food producer and supplier. We have an increasing number of products and are working hard to develop our brand and more innovative products. We rely heavily on market data analysis and are focused on leveraging technology and big data to drive our growth. Our company is a small, driven, and highly team-oriented group. We are looking for a like-minded professional to join our team.
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Senior Data Analyst Job Description Example
Job details
Buy-This-Not-That is a high-tech marketing company that was established in 2010 and is headquartered in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii. Our main business is providing media buying platforms to Fortune 200 companies. The senior data analyst function is a key role within our company and is a client-facing position that provides business-critical consulting services.
Role
This position requires equal aptitude and enthusiasm in executing these critical functions.
- Complex analysis of and in-depth understanding of business functions/processes and associated data that enable the client’s business to be performed.
- Understanding of database designs (logical/physical) that support complex business processes and related applications.
- Advanced SQL expertise to effectively query and navigate across multiple data domains to perform data analysis and create findings. Able to use complex joins, sub-queries, and analytical functions to generate clean, comprehensive, and relevant datasets.
- Collaborating with project teams and other data analysts and technical/database leads to provide insights and resolve data issues to enable better business decisions and improve data processing.
- Working directly with client executives and technical management to analyze big data relevant to their business and facilitate decision-making to drive successful business outcomes.
Benefits
We have strong competitive compensation plans with salary and bonus, full benefits including health insurance, 401(k), option plan, and unlimited vacation policy.
- Job type: full-time
- Salary: $96,500 to $128,500 per year
- Additional compensation: bonuses
- Other: Dental insurance, vision insurance, retirement plan
Qualifications
Besides your priority for organization and getting the details right, we’re also looking for:
- Bachelor’s degree (math, science, computer science)
- Over 5 years of data analysis or data science
- Management experience
- Very strong written and verbal communication skills
- Excellent knowledge of Google and Adobe Analytics, SQL, and Tableau
- Experience managing engineers, designers, and line staff (preferred)
- Experience in handling reporting packages like Business Objects, programming (JavaScript, XML, or ETL frameworks), and databases (SQL, Oracle)
- Proficiency in statistics and statistical packages like Excel, SPSS, and SAS to be used for data set analysis
- Associate Certified Analytics Professional (aCAP) (preferred)
- Certified Analytics Professional (preferred)
About the company
Buy-This-Not-That is focused on leveraging cutting-edge technology and methods to maintain our position as a market-leading provider of programmatic media buying and media buying platforms. Both our technology and consulting expertise combine to give us our competitive advantage. We need someone who is a driven knowledge leader who can work closely with clients and provide expertise in best practices for data analysis. If you want to be an industry leader and pioneer in innovative marketing IT, then we are the company for you!
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Analytics Manager Job Description Example
Job details
Treblecleff Industries in Durham, North Carolina, is a custom manufacturer of automotive parts. We are seeking a data analyst who is an expert in data acquisition, statistical analysis, review, and visualization. If you join our team, you’ll also need to be able to interpret large amounts of data from many sources to generate a seamless story to enable executive decision-making.
Responsibilities
As a key position within Treblecleff’s IT organization, this position participates in creating client deliverables, marketing analysis, research initiatives, client support services, and go-to-market strategies. The analytics manager also serves as a technology resource, assisting with databases, pipelines, and other data infrastructure.
- Gather and analyze data in support of client deliverables, including, but not limited to, competitive product analyses (retrospective, current, prospective analyses for corporate executives and board), production performance analyses, and HR pay-for-performance assessments.
- Develop tools, templates, and analytical models as needed to support consistency and quality across product lines.
- Collaborate with subject-matter experts to create and publish business intelligence, performance, and KPI reporting.
- Provides direct daily supervision and oversight for one or more teams of analysts (data, reporting, business).
- Support marketing and business development through research on campaigns and prospects, mining data for new initiatives, performance tracking, and management reporting on market trends.
- Generate detailed analysis reports and deliverables for all levels of management.
- Support data quality and security standards through detailed monitoring, quality control, and rigorous adherence to methodological standards and data security protocols.
Benefits
We offer a competitive compensation plan with salary and bonus, health insurance, 401(k), option plan, and unlimited vacation policy.
- Job type: full-time
- Salary: $98,000.00 to $138,500 annual
- Additional compensation: health, dental, vision, life
- Retirement: 401(k)
Qualifications
Besides your priority for organization and getting the details right, we’re also looking for:
- Bachelor’s degree (math, science, IT)
- 5+ years of data analysis experience
- Proven leadership experience, minimum 2 years
- Extensive experience with statistical models
- Very strong analytical and reporting skills
- Microsoft Certified: Data Analyst Associate (preferred)
- SAS Certified Advanced Analytics Professional Using SAS 9 (preferred)
Who we are
Crunchy Foods was founded in 2015 in scenic Des Moines, Iowa, and is a quickly growing snack food producer and supplier. We have an increasing number of products and are working hard to develop our brand and more innovative products. We rely heavily on market data analysis and are focused on leveraging technology and big data to drive our growth. Our company is a small, driven, and highly team-oriented group. We are looking for a like-minded professional to join our team.
How to Write a Data Analyst Job Description
Writing a great job description for any role can be challenging. The data analyst role can be especially difficult because it covers such a broad selection of skills and can be very different among companies. It is easy to fall into the trap of creating a lengthy description of what a data analyst does.
To ensure that your candidates read and understand the complete description of the job, it is important that you keep it as brief as possible, but make sure you include all the key information that makes your job and/or company unique. Remember, you’re selling the job and your organization, and you’ll get a lot better quality data analyst resumes and data analyst cover letters when your job description doesn’t stink.
You obviously should always include all the pertinent job requirements for the role. Doing this for a data analyst position can be difficult because there are so many things that a data analyst does.
A great way to show what a job role requires is by using examples of the types of issues a data analyst in your company needs to be able to solve. Use an example of a gap they need to fill or why you are specifically hiring for this role. You can cite a specific current challenge they will need to address. If you are increasing resources, capacities, or capabilities, then talk about that. As always, be specific and brief.
Include critical and unique requirements for your company, but don’t have too many. Avoid listing obvious skills or traits, such as “strong data analysis skills.” A long list of job requirements will discourage diverse candidates from applying. Companies are constantly striving to increase their diversity and remove barriers for women and minorities in the workplace.
A long list of requirements will discourage diverse candidates from applying.
To ensure your job descriptions are not countering these efforts, it’s important to use words and phrases that are not biased.
Mya’s “Bias in Job Descriptions” article breaks the topic down to give you a better understanding of how to keep your documents unbiased.
Furthermore, data analysts must manage many complex tasks simultaneously. They must be able to quickly and efficiently identify essential data and distill massive quantities of data down to the most valuable information. Your job description needs to do the same.
The University of Arizona’s writing center stresses the importance of picking “the word that most clearly conveys your meaning.” When writing your data analyst job description, consider the connotation of each word choice. While you may want your data analyst to meet with stakeholders, consider leading with “engage” rather than “meet.” While they may have similar meanings, “engage” has a more positive connotation.
Finally, before you post your job description for the world to see, take the time to revise and edit. We know you worked hard, so avoid the temptation to submit your description for mass perusal before you’ve corrected word choice, grammatical errors, or even worse, an inaccurate salary range with one too many zeros.
So, take an extra day or so to have other staff (preferably data analysts familiar with the jargon) provide feedback; then, give it a last look yourself. When you’re satisfied, submit your post to boards with confidence, knowing that your job description will speak to high-quality talent.
Your data analyst job description layout
Below is an outline that covers all the items for all data analyst job descriptions.
Job details
This is a quick introductory section for your job opening and company. Take advantage of this section to immediately sell the role and your organization. Remember to keep it very brief. Give a quick one or two sentences about the what and why of the data analyst role. It is also important to give them a taste of what your company is about. You want to strongly entice them to join your company.
What you’ll be doing
This section may also be referred to as “Roles” or “Responsibilities” or “Requirements.” This should be a bulleted list of the tasks involved in the job role. As we mentioned earlier, keep this list short, but make sure you include anything unique to the data analyst role in your company (versus other companies) and critical to the success of the role. Best practice guidance for any job description is to always use active verbs, avoid jargon and filler words, and be as specific as possible.
- Lead the gathering, filtering, and warehousing of big data for business intelligence.
- Oversee the processes and systems used for data analysis and reporting.
- Author technical requirements for IT developers to build new features and enhancements for business reporting tools.
- Understand database designs (logical/physical) that support complex business processes and related applications.
- Leverage advanced SQL expertise to effectively query and navigate across multiple data domains to perform data analysis and create findings.
Qualifications
This is a key section of the job description because it quickly tells the applicant whether they are a good fit for the role. It is critical to include all the absolute must-haves for the position. Typically, these are things like: education, experience, certifications, and specialization requirements.
For soft skills, use relevant personality words like “creative,“ “self-motivated,” “organized,” and “reliable,” but avoid having too many. Data analysis has a lot of typical requirements, but it also covers a wide range of skill sets. Always include any special and non-standard qualifications for your company. As with every section of your job description, be brief, specific, and clear.
- Bachelor’s degree in mathematics, statistics, or related field
- 3+ years of data analysis
- 2+ years of database experience
- SAS Certified Advanced Analytics Professional Using SAS 9 (preferred)
- Extensive experience developing reports and managing reporting tools
- Strong communication and leadership skills
Benefits
Placement of this section is flexible. We don’t recommend having it as an introduction, but it is okay just about anywhere else. You may want to have this early in your job description if your benefits are a major selling point for the position. Focus on anything that differentiates your company benefits from other companies. Be specific and clear about the benefits and list everything. Again, you want to make the position as attractive as possible.
About the company
We recommend placing this at the very end of your job description. This section is where you give job seekers more details about your company. If your company is small and not well known, this is where you tell them why they should want to work there.
A data analysis professional is also interested in knowing what the company’s position is on leveraging information technology and big data. You should, in a sentence or two, give them a brief synopsis of how the company approaches the use of data in their strategy and how the data analyst role fits in.
Data analyst roles and responsibilities
Data analysts are investigators and puzzle solvers. They seek out data that is relevant to the business strategies in any way, and they identify patterns and trends in the data that can be translated into viable business plans and/or tactics. The data analyst must be able to process and translate very large volumes of data into understandable and usable business information.
Below are some sample roles a data analysis professional might fulfill as part of their job. One single data analyst might not fill all these roles, but this will serve as a source for things you might want to include.
This is also the time to sell your project team. A project manager’s main goal is to make sure the project progresses, which means communicating with the team frequently and on a personal level. What you choose to include is crucial. Emotive language and active verbs are great additions here, but take care to not go overboard. Subtle touches go a long way.
The next step is the hardest part of any writing project: revision. This is the most crucial time to make your post stand out. As stated previously, job applicants can read dozens of job descriptions, which tend to be generic and boring. If you can make your post stand out, you can expect applicants to keep applying up until the deadline.
Mostly this means cutting out all filler and making everything easy to read. Accountants are analytical and appreciate organization, details, and clear communication. So, your job description should be organized, thorough, and understandable even when applicants are skimming the text. Make sure to use bullet points and keep excess wordage to a minimum. If you end up cutting so much that it sounds dry, focus on specifying word choice instead of keeping excess.
Once everything is recorded, take a break from the post. When something becomes too familiar, we tend to miss mistakes, so work on something else for a time. A quick review from peers can be an excellent idea, too, especially if they are familiar with the position.
Once you’re sure the content is great, fix any minor errors, misspelled/misused words, and any grammar mistakes. Then you can post your job ad and wait to meet your new project manager shortly.
Roles and responsibilities of a project manager
Although the main roles and responsibilities of a project manager will vary from company to company, the overall expectations stay the same. The biggest differences between project manager jobs are seniority and industry. Senior project managers will have different roles than junior managers, and each industry differs with the tasks they require of their project managers.
However, there are enough responsibilities shared between project managers to have some generalities. Use the following roles as a guide to what you can include in a project manager job description.
Data Acquisition
Great data analysts have an investigative nature that allows them to review large databases and data sets from many sources to extract pertinent information in response to a particular question.
- Identify internal and external sources of data that can be used as well as to detect important patterns and trends in the data.
- Determine the processing methodologies to best transform data into usable business intelligence.
- Think critically about how data is used, and assess and quantify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities posed by data sources and processing
- Continually seek to find new data sources, ways to improve data processing, and new technologies to better utilize data.
Problem-solving
The data analyst function helps to define how data can be used to make the organization successful. They provide expertise and guidance to the business on how to best use data to drive processes to support the business strategy.
- Study business challenges, research relevant data processing techniques, and determine solutions (leveraging data analysis).
- Build, maintain, and enhance technology systems (databases, warehouses, interfaces, reporting, etc.) for obtaining and processing data.
- Identify technical issues in data acquisition, processing, and utilization, and assess and resolve any issues found.
- Continually work with the business to review and assess business processes about how data is gathered, analyzed, and used.
Planner
Project managers drive the entire project from start to completion, so they need to be excellent planners to devise a solid strategy for finishing the project according to client guidelines. Knowledge of Agile methodologies and Scrum is critical for this part of the job.
- Develop clear, straightforward plans for given projects, including the project’s overall scope, task estimation, available resources and their allocation, and new work requests. Once a plan is finalized, evaluate individual team member capabilities and assign action items to team members accordingly.
- Must have obtained PMP and PMI-ACP certification. Must also be highly organized and excellent at time management with proficient knowledge of project tracking programs.
Communication and Reporting
A successful data analyst must have excellent written and verbal communication skills that enable them to present complicated information and findings to all levels within the company.
- Collaborate with teams, colleagues, departments, and all other stakeholders to effectively understand business processes, and translate technical information into coherent business information.
- Compile written analyses and reports regarding certain data figures.
- Effectively translate complex data and findings into useful information for all business stakeholders.
- Facilitate business communication and reporting for internal and external stakeholders.
Leadership
We recommend placing this at the very end of your job description. This section is where you give job seekers more details about your company. If your company is small and not well known, this is where you tell them why they should want to work there.
The best data analysts have a very team-oriented mindset and work extremely well with other employees to find answers leveraging data.
- Work with business owners to understand business processes in great detail.
- Drive data analysis efforts as a subject-matter expert, team leader, and process owner.
- Consult with and guide all stakeholders (internal and external) regarding best practices and effective usage of data to improve business processes.
- Lead teams and projects to productively leverage data gathering and analysis to successfully complete tasks, initiatives, and projects.
Training
Data analysts should demonstrate a strong interest in continued education and seek certification courses related to statistics or data analytics to improve their professional capabilities. Technology, data sources, and related best practices are constantly changing and evolving.
- Continually research and stay up to date on the current state of data analysis.
- Maintain professional training hours, and keep certifications current.
- Engage with the business and stay in tune with what stakeholders are doing with the data, information, and reporting provided to ensure that business needs continue to be met.
- Promote ongoing training and technical education for data analysis professionals and business process owners to enhance and evolve the organization’s utilization of data.
