What Are Data Analyst Projects For?

Projects are one of the most powerful tools to showcase your skills to a potential employers, but still not many people do them.

If you’ve spent any amount of time looking into becoming a data analyst, you’ve probably noticed a large emphasis on building projects to put into a portfolio. 

I agree that this is a crucial part of becoming a data analyst, but this begs the question: 

Why? 

Projects and portfolios serve 3 main purposes:

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1. Projects help you apply your data learning to real-life scenarios. 

There is only so much you can learn from watching SQL videos and even doing practice problems. 

Your real value as a data analyst comes from using critical thinking to apply your technical skills to solve unique problems. 

When you’re on the job, you’re not going to be given explicit instructions of what functions to perform in tools like SQL and Tableau. 

Rather, you’ll be given a request to analyze data, and it’s up to you to figure out how to use your skills to complete that analysis. 

And, before you have a job, a project is the best way to mimic these on-the-job requests.  

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2. Projects are used to show recruiters and hiring managers that you have the skills they are looking for. 

No one is born with experience. 

But even entry level jobs want to see some level of competence before hiring you. 

Therefore, you should build projects to show that you are able to use common data tools to solve problems and that you are able to effectively communicate the results. 

Put them on your resume and be sure to have a link to your portfolio website so they can check them out! This will give them more confidence in your skills and help you land interviews.

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3. You can talk about them as experience using a skill during an interview

A common question you’ll get asked is: “How have you used SQL before?”

For most people they’ll answer that they’ve never used it before, but they’ve taken some courses and feel confident using it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t sound great to an interviewer…

Here’s what sounds much better: “I was recently working on a project where I used SQL to clean and analyze Housing Market data. I created a Stored Procedure to clean the data, and wrote SQL scripts to find trends and pattern in the data.”

This sounds a lot more impressive to an interviewer!

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With all that being said, I can’t recommend projects enough! That’s why do so many of them in our courses on AnalystBuilder.com!