Let me start by making it known that data analytics is one of the most lucrative courses anyone could offer both in South Africa and any other part of the World.
Apart from helping you in the organization and arrangement of raw facts, it goes a long way in putting food on your table because when you are done studying it and become a professional, you would be sought after by big organizations and companies who would want you to help them manage and organize their very bulky and complex data.
What is Data Analytics
Data analytics is the part of science that deals with the analysis of raw data to make conclusions about that information. The techniques and processes of data analytics have been automated into mechanical processes and algorithms for human consumption.
Data analytics is also described as a method of examining datasets to find trends and draw conclusions about the information they contain.
It is important because it helps businesses to optimize their performances by implementing it into their business model and reducing costs by recognizing more efficient ways of doing business.
Organizations use data analytics to increase customer retention and create market campaigns globally. I know a lot of people are already asking how, as we go further you would see the magic of data analytics.
There are four types of data analytics which I showed diagram below;
Descriptive analysis: juggles raw data from multiple data sources to give valuable insights into the past. It answers the question: what happened?
In diagnostic analytics, historical data can be used to measure against other data to answer the question of why something happened.
Predictive analysis tells what is likely to happen. It uses the findings of descriptive and diagnostics analytics to detect clusters and to predict future trends which makes it a valuable tool for forecasting. Another exciting benefit of data analytics!
Prescriptive analytics identifies what action to take to eliminate a future problem and take advantage of a promising trend.
Data Analytics Course
Data analytic courses are programs that are organized and designed to provide the trainees with the ability to perform statistical analysis on datasets. The knowledge gained from these courses will lead to attaining numerous job roles such as business intelligence analyst, seta analyst, data engineer, data scientist, and many other reputed designations with a higher pay scale.
In addition to this, these are some of the skills you would learn if you take up these courses:
Structured Query Language(SQL)
R- statistical Programming
Predictive Analytics
Big Data Analytics and Data Science Integration
And lots more we would see in the course of this writing.
Duties of a Data Analyst
Before going down into the different data analytics courses in South Africa, let’s see your responsibilities first when you are fully a data analyst.
Firstly a data analyst is a gatekeeper for an organization so that the stakeholders can interpret data and employ it to make strategic business decisions. There are various duties of a data analyst which include:
1. Using statistical tools to understand datasets, giving appropriate attention to patterns and trends that can be useful for predictive and diagnostic analytics.
2. Preparing reports for executive leadership that effectively show trends and predictions using relevant data
3. Collaborating with programmers, engineers, and organizational leaders to see opportunities for process improvements and develop policies for data governance.
4. Demonstrating the importance of their Work in the context of local, national, and global trends that impact both their organization and industry.
You can now see that for you to be considered as a data analyst, you must be very smart and high intellectually. You must be able to think fast and arrange even the rawest form of data.
Below is a chart that briefly describes the processes of data analytics and what is expected of a professional data analyst;
Data Analytical Courses in South Africa
South Africa and other countries globally have major training courses in data analytics which can be studied both online and in specialized centres. Below are the major data analytic courses in South Africa and other countries globally:
DATA ANALYTICS WITH R
R- analytics is data analytics using R programming language, an open-source language used for statistical computations or graphics. This programming language is often used in statistical analysis and data mining.
TABLEAU TRAINING
A tableau is an analysis software that is used for Business Intelligence (BI). From tableau, you can rapidly create visualizations ( also” vizzes”) by dragging your data shelves into panes, from there you can develop dashboards and stories to bring your analyses to life.
MICROSOFT POWER BI TRAINING
Microsoft Power BI training is a software tool for business intelligence and analytics. This platform permits users to aggregate and share data with reports, visualizations, and other analytic tools. The software is user-friendly and provides effective tools for people across all levels of technical know-how.
It integrates with Microsoft Excel and other Microsoft suites. Most organizations use Microsoft Power BI to gather and analyze their business data to uncover insights that help them make data-driven business decisions. The users of this software can connect datasets from different data sources and perform advanced data analysis.
INTRODUCTION TO SQL
SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It is used to create, remove or alter the database or database objects in a database management system. SQL is equally used to store, retrieve, and update the data in a database.
SQL is a standard language that is used for the creation, accessing, and manipulating of a database management system.
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS TRAINING
Predictive analytics is a branch of data of statistics and data analysis that uses data modelling to determine the future results of a decision path.
By identifying trends and patterns of past and present data, data analysts in the course of this study can build models to forecast the effects of different strategies and decisions.
Programs in marketing analytics, big data, machine learning, and data science all include predictive analytics in their coursework and Microsoft offers a course-specific to creating specific analytics to spark. So you can grab the opportunity to enrol in any of the free online courses to learn the tools for data analytics.
KNIME ANALYTICS PLATFORM TRAINING
KNIME is a softer approach to machine learning automation. It is a special instance of guided analytics that makes use of fully automated web applications to guide users through the selection, training, testing, and optimization of machine learning models.
DATA SCIENCE ANALYTICS
This is a course taken, which helps in the designing and maintaining of database and data systems. It teaches the use of statistical tools to interpret data sets and prepare reports to effectively communicate trends, patterns and predictions that are based on relevant findings.
Other data analytics courses include pandas for data analytics training, data analytics training using MS Excel, big data analysis and data science integration course, etc.
These courses can be offered in South Africa or any other part of the world. You could even offer them online and get certifications. Let me shock you a bit. Some of these courses are free online, you only have to pay a few Ransome for the certificate to make you a complete and professional data analyst.
The following are places/ websites you can take up these courses:
Data analytics strengthens organizations to digitally transform their business and makes them more innovative in their decision-making processes. Data analytics aids in mitigating risk and fraud to protect all physical, intellectual, and financial assets from internal and external threats.
Some of the benefits include:
Collaboration: it aids collaboration across data science and IT teams on big data analytics projects which increases the efficiency and overall productivity of the organization.
Connects intelligence with action: with full clarity into all the data anywhere any organization can work in their best version based on insights and intelligence.
Helps to respond quickly and accurately: it helps to respond to problems within fractions of time and ensures that the right people handle the problem at the right time.
Conclusion
There is more to data analytics than this, this is just a nutshell. South Africa and other countries globally have made these courses available online, some free. So why not grab the opportunity now, study these data analytics courses and see the wonders they can perform.
I am a student with passion and hunger to help individuals and students get more useful, legit, accurate, and up-to-date information by providing them with valuable resources and information.
