Data analysts: How do they spend their day?

Data analysts and data scientists are the most popular jobs for the past couple of years, but how do they spend their time? How much of their time is actually spent on crunching numbers and looking for useful business insights? Most of the times data is really dirty and the burden of sanitizing a data-set usually falls on the one who is going to analyse it, the data analyst. The digital analytics association and TMM completed a research and published the results, showing that data housekeeping, rather than analysis, is consuming analysts’ time, and in particular, data-driven organizations are facing productivity challenges when it comes to data access, integration, and governance.

More than 800 data professionals at every level, from C-suite leadership to in-the-trenches analysts, participated in the online survey. You can see the full results in the following infographic and on this link.

On the same topic, there’s also this survey from Alteryx. The survey indicates that advanced spreadsheet users spend at least 28 hours per week on data preparation and analysis. And a significant portion of that time is spent doing manual, repetitive work every time data changes. Self-service analysis using traditional spreadsheet tools results in a €55 billion wasted in Europe every year.