Soft Skills for Data Professional | Full FREE Course

What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today I am releasing my full soft skills for data professionals course that's on Analyst Builder and putting it on YouTube for free. In most courses on my YouTube channel as well as on Analyst Builder and on other platforms is mostly technical skills. You're going to learn SQL and Excel and Python and a bunch of other things. But soft skills are a huge piece of how to actually get your job done as a data professional. Right here we have the course and you can see we have four different modules. one on communication, one on problem solving, one on collaboration, and one on time management. And so this is all of the lessons that you're going to go through. They don't just focus on only those topics. Those are just the module headers. I cover a lot of other topics. If you look through here, uh there are other things that are not just, for example, time management. When I was first starting out as a data analyst, I would say I didn't have the best soft skills in the world. I'm very much an introvert. This is an area that I struggled with personally, but throughout the years, I've gotten a lot better at it. And so I talk very specifically about how I kind of overcame some of those things and how you can as well. If you struggle with things like effective communication that was not one that I was initially very good at. If you like this course and you want to check out any of my other courses, I will leave a link down in the description. I cover so many different topics on Analyst Builder. And of course, we have our coding section on Analyst Builder as well, where you can actually go in and you can select questions and you can actually write out your code in kind of whatever language you want, whether it be Python, SQL, or R and you can actually practice these things. With that being said, I'm going to show you the actual trailer for this course. Then we're going to get into the content of the course. And I hope that you really enjoy it and I hope that is helpful to you. Hello everybody and welcome to the soft skills for data professionals course here on Analyst Builder. Soft skills are arguably just as important as hard skills, but can be a little bit more difficult to measure as well as teach. I have so many stories and examples to share on almost all of these soft skills. So, I'll be talking a lot about what I personally experienced throughout my career. And we'll talk a lot about how you can improve your soft skills and what to expect in a real job. This course is very unique and not a lot of platforms actually cover this topic. And so, I'm really excited to dive into this with you. Hello everybody and welcome to the soft skills for data professionals course here on analyst builder. If you haven't noticed on analyst builder we focus a lot on the hard skills. So Excel, SQL, BI tools and a lot of other things. These things are absolutely needed in order to land a job as a data analyst. But something that does not get covered a lot on almost any other platform is soft skills. Honestly, soft skills can be just as important as hard skills. The difficult thing is that soft skills aren't as measurable as technical skills. With teaching SQL, I can tell you you need to know the select, the where, the from, but with soft skills is a lot more subjective. So, in this course, we're going to dive into soft skills. And I'm going to give you a lot of anecdotes and things that I've encountered throughout my career. And by the end of this course, you should have a much better picture of what soft skills you need and how to improve them. This is a very unique course and I'm super excited to get started on it with you here on Analyst Builder. Hello everybody. In this module, we're going to be focusing on communication. I think communication is one of the most important soft skills, but I think it's one that people struggle with the most. So, in this module, we're going to cover a ton of stuff on communication. In this lesson specifically, we're just going to be focusing on kind of an intro to communication, why it's really important. The first thing to know is that you're going to be communicating with people in a lot of different ways. Unless you're an individual contributor, you're most likely on a team. So, you're going to have team meetings, you're going to have standups, and you may be giving presentations in those meetings as well. But, of course, you'll also be communicating just in person and via email. So, there really are a lot of different forms of communication that you're going to need to kind of get good at in order to really be effective in your job. And this leads into the next point, which is you're going to need to be communicating with a lot of different people in order to get most of your job done. Now, I just threw in there 90%, but sometimes it's 75%, sometimes it's 60%, sometimes it's 99% depending on your role. This is probably the thing that surprised me the most when I first got started as a data analyst. I thought I was going to be really technical, just keep my head down, working on my computer all the time. And I found out very quickly that I am pretty reliant on a lot of different people in order to get the data, in order to collect the data, to understand the data, to know what I'm actually doing with this data. And in every step of that process, I had to communicate with a lot of different people in a lot of different ways. And so although I just wanted to be by myself working and heads down and in the database and getting in with the data, that wasn't the reality of the job. And so my expectations pretty quickly changed after about a year or so. And I definitely think that was for the better because pretty early on I was getting really worn out. I'm more of an introvert myself. And so my expectations were that I wasn't going to be doing a lot of face tof face interactions. And so since my expectations were so off, I definitely was feeling drained at the end of every single day. The last thing to know is that if you're really bad at communication and you don't work on it and you don't improve at it that people will dread working with you. And I have had these people who I have worked with in the past where if I knew I was going to have to work with them, I was like, "This is not going to be fun." Not because their personality was bad, you know, I worked with a lot of different personalities over the years, but because I knew that if I needed something that they were so bad at communicating. They were so bad at relaying information and getting back to me in a timely manner that it was just not going to be enjoyable to work with them. And you don't want to have that reputation. You don't want to be that person who's not good at communication. Now, there's a lot of facets to communication and the way that it's presented and the way that you do it. And we're going to cover a lot of those things in the next several lessons. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about communicating effectively. Now, these are kind of the fundamental things that I think you need to know and really do well in order to communicate really effectively in almost any situation. Now, I'm just going to tell you right now, I'm going to do some things that might be a little goofy or a little bit silly in this video. And I'm kind of putting myself out there, but I am doing it for you. I'm doing it for a good reason. Now, some of you out there may be excellent at communicating. You're just naturally a good communicator. I definitely was not. I am very much an introvert. I get very shy. I also get a little bit intimidated sometimes and I just haven't in the past historically communicated super well. Over the years though, I have gained a lot of confidence and I've also learned a lot about just improving communication in general. So, I'm going to share a lot of those tips with you and we're going to get pretty specific into actually how to communicate, how to say things, how to look people in the eye, things like that that some of you may not need at all, but there are a lot of people who do need that. The first thing I want to touch on is eye contact. Now, eye contact is pretty difficult for a lot of people. Just even if you are good at communicating, it can be difficult to maintain eye contact, but it does really say a lot about how you communicate and how you're going to be as an employee. Now, I've gotten push back on this over the years. I've shared this on my YouTube channel. I've shared this on LinkedIn. A lot of people will say, well, you know, there are just different types of personalities. I completely agree with you. For some people, it is just more difficult to maintain eye contact. But it is definitely a respect thing and it is a confidence thing. And so this is something that you can practice. Now I will tell you some data roles are going to be presenting information a lot. And in those roles that is kind of where it is almost required to give some type of eye contact. This is what I used to do. I used to give the presentation and then I would kind of look down and be like and so you know that's kind of what we thought uh you know that are there any questions? And I kind of like glance up a little bit and I was very shy. I was just inexperienced in giving presentations. But over my career now, this is what I do. I present the information. I look them in the eye, said, "And here's what we found." And I kind of glance around the room at other people, make eye contact with a lot of different people. That shows people that I am engaged with them. I want to make sure they're engaged with me. It is a really important piece. And for some roles, if you're not able to maintain eye contact, if you're not able to show that in a meeting, it really takes away. And honestly, I've seen that in a lot of interviews where people just can't do that. And I'm like, I know the kind of role that we're hiring for and this is not a person that would do really well in this role. So that is why eye contact is really important. I myself have had to work on this. I am not naturally kind of an eye contact person. My wife has called me out on this many times, but this is something that you can improve on over time. This next point is going to cover a lot of different things and I'm going to read it really quickly. It's going to say non-verbals, body language, and tone to reinforce or weaken your message. Now, this is super important. I used to be a person where I didn't use my hands and I'm looking at myself in the camera. I didn't use my hands when I talked. I wasn't very animated and I was just kind of um you know this is the information and this is you know this is it. And I will tell you I was not as good at communicating information that I am right now. It's taken a lot of practice. It's taken a lot of work but it's made me a lot better at communicating what I'm trying to get across. So let's look at the first ones. Non-verbals and body language. So, when I'm communicating with someone or they're communicating with me, I am looking at their body language. I'm also making sure I have proper body language as well. If I sit back, I cross my arms and I'm like, Mhm. Mhm. Okay. Okay. Uh, that's a little bit silly, but I've have talked to so many people like that. It's very closed off. It's very standoffish. You're not really engaging in the conversation. Yes, they're listening to you, but the person who's, you know, acting like this and just sitting back is usually not as engaged as someone who's kind of leaning forward. I kind of sometimes will, you know, you can't see it right now, but I'm just putting my hands on my desk. Just putting my hands on my desk. I'm listening. My body language is showing that I'm engaged in this conversation. Body language can also be just as simple as looking at your phone. Right? If you're disengaged and you're looking at it and you're not paying attention, that is body language. That is you actively showing them that you're not listening, that you're not focused. So, everything you're doing does communicate something. Now, when you're on a video call like Zoom or Teams or something like that, it's usually not as important. They can't really see exactly where you're looking. But body language just in general, just making sure you're sitting up, making sure you're looking. You're not like laying down or arms crossed or looking elsewhere looking at another screen. You're actually paying attention to the conversation. We also have the tone of your voice. Now, I myself am kind of a sarcastic person. I've had to work on that a lot over the years because a lot of times my tone and my sarcasm gets me in trouble. And that has happened in the workplace. And I've had to kind of stop doing that because some people don't pick up on those things. They don't pick up on your tonality or the pitch of your voice or the way in which you say it. And I'm kind of have dry humor. And so I have to kind of read people. I have to say okay is this someone who will understand what I'm trying to say here or is this someone who you know they don't typically understand the tone or the sarcasm in which I am saying. So this one is super important and I'll give you an example. Let's say we're in a meeting. You're giving a presentation and at the very end you're about to give your final recommendation. You can say it in one of two ways. The first one is going to sound like this. And that's why I believe we should decrease quarter 4 spending for marketing. Are there any questions? Now, that didn't sound very good because it was very high-pitched. It was also not very confident. And your tone is really weakening the message in that example. So, now I'm going to do a better example of what I think sounds a lot better. And that's why I believe that we should be decreasing our marketing spend in quarter 4. Are there any questions? That was a lot more confident. My tone was much more even keel and a little bit deeper even. And so, even though the two messages were the exact same thing, the tone changed it completely. The first one was quite weakening to my message. I really wasn't confident and I wasn't sure if that was even the right recommendation. At least that's what I was presenting. The second one sounded a lot more confident. And so the tone does matter. The pitch of your voice, the way in which you say it, the inflection of your voice, all these things do matter and they come with practice. I promise you, I was really bad at presenting information and communicating way back when. The Alex from eight or nine years ago is completely different than the Alex now. I've had a lot of opportunities to work on these things in the workplace. So, just believe me when I say it comes with time, but you do have to identify, say, this is an area where I'm weak. I need to improve in this area. The last thing I want to talk about is active listening. And this does touch on body language and non-verbals quite a bit, but there are some other pieces to this as well. Something that is quite frustrating is when you're talking to someone and like we were looking at before, they're on their phone or they're not just on their phone, they're not looking at you in any way or they're sitting there, but they're kind of like but it doesn't seem like they're actually listening to you. I don't know about you, but that frustrates me. I want someone if I'm telling them something, especially in kind of the professional business world. If you're talking about something, it's probably important and they should be listening. And so, if they're not actively listening to you, that can be frustrating. So, you don't want to be that person. You want to be someone that shows that they're actively listening. Now, here's what this kind of looks like. Now, let's say you're talking to me right now. Go ahead and ask me a question. I know this sounds silly, but go ahead and ask me a question. I don't know. I absolutely agree with that. Why do you think that was now? All right. That was super silly, maybe even a little awkward, but I was doing it to show you that even though we're not having a real conversation, I can kind of seem like I'm having a conversation with you because of my non-verbals, the things that I'm saying, my follow-up questions. These are things that show I am actively listening to you. You don't have to go overboard with it. You're just trying to show that you are actively listening to that person. Asking follow-up questions and saying, "I agree with that." Or maybe you have some type of comment on what they're saying. These are things that show that you're interested in the conversation and that you are actively listening. Now, for you, that may have all seemed really silly and kind of obvious, but for a lot of other people, it's not so obvious and it is things that they need to improve on and they need to work on. So, I really hope that that was helpful to you because I know that this is not something that everybody excels in and I promise you it's something that you can work at. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about communicating results to non-technical stakeholders. Nontechnical just means that they are not someone like a data analyst or a data scientist or a data engineer, a data professional that's really going to understand how the data is stored, where the data is coming from, how the cleaning process works, how the data is sitting in the database. Most of the time they're not going to understand that stuff at all. They do often times understand the data in general. They know that that is data that they may be collecting. They just don't understand the full process or the technical details of everything that you've done in this project. This is something I would say I've really excelled at over the years because I myself came from a non-technical background. I didn't know anything technical at all. And so I really understand the mindset of just not getting it right, just not understanding it. And so I feel like over the years that's kind of been my sweet spot of kind of explaining things to people who just don't get it or don't come from this background. So I'm going to give you some tips that I've learned over the years on how to actually do this really well. The first thing is to present your information in a really simple way. Now look at these two images on the left hand side on this top one. This is a great way to visualize data. I actually kind of really like how this is presented, but I'm a technical person. I understand this. And if you've taken any of my data visualization courses or lessons, this should make a little bit of sense. Even not 100% knowing the data, you can look at this and see, oh, I see some trends or patterns or, you know, I can kind of understand what this means. To someone who doesn't, to someone who's never done this before, who's non-technical, this is an absolute nightmare. You would have to explain super in-depth how this works, what the colors mean, what the x and the y-axis are, everything, so that they would understand this. But let's take a look at the one below it. This one is super simple. Almost anybody who's looked at any basic chart or graph is going to understand this. And so when you are presenting to non-technical people or you're building a dashboard or insights or a report for non-technical people, the simpler you can make it, the better. The next thing to do is to really adjust how you're explaining things based off of who you're presenting to. I'll present information very differently to a non-technical group of people than I would a technical group of people. For my technical group, I might go a little bit more in depth. They're going to understand the nuances and kind of the data cleaning process or maybe how we're storing the data. These things might be relevant in the conversation or we may even talk about how we're extracting the data because they might understand it and say, "Well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about doing this?" But with a non-technical group of people, all that jargon, all those buzzwords and keywords that technical people are going to understand, they're going to get completely lost and overwhelmed. So, the explanation should be a little bit more simple. Now, don't patronize them, right? They're not dumb. They just think differently. Oftentimes I might use some type of analogy or something like that if I think it's appropriate. But understand that they're not stupid. They just think about things in a different way. They're non-technical, but they are probably quite intelligent. Something I'll do when I'm presenting information or when I'm doing visualizations is sometimes I'll show the underlying data. Right? Here's the data. Here's where it came from. Here's how we got it. Maybe I'll drill down into a visualization to show some of this underlying data. And non-technical people most of the time aren't really going to understand this or they're going to have so many questions because since they don't understand, they're going to ask all these different questions that have no relevance to the information that you're presenting. They're going to raise their hands. They're going to say, "Why is the data look like that?" And you're going to say, "Okay, well, here's what I did. I took the raw data. I aggregated the data and then we did this to it." And they're going to say, "Well, why did you do that? Why did you need to take that out?" And then you have to explain your whole thought process. sometimes in a presentation that might have a place, but more often than not for non-technical people, you're going to confuse them. And so adding underlying data can be really powerful depending on what you're presenting. Most of the time though, especially for non-technical people, I do not include it. I keep the visualizations pretty simple. I keep my explanations fairly simple as well. In the end, the recommendations may be the same to both groups, but I'm just presenting in a different way. As the great Michael Scott and Dwight Shroo said, K I SS, keep it simple, stupid. This is something that everyone should live by just in general as it comes to communication and presenting information, but it really is true. The simpler you make it often times the better it is. These are a lot of the things that are going to help you present to non-technical people a lot better. So, I hope that was really helpful. If you're already in a data job, right, you're already a data professional in some way, then try these things out. The more experience you have doing this, the better you're going to get. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at writing clear emails and reports. Now, this is something that every single data professional in some way is going to have to do. I'm also going to toss in here a little bit about just messaging people on things like Slack or Discord because you do communicate quite a bit through those channels as well. But often times, especially for, you know, more professional correspondents, when you're messaging clients, when you're messaging managers, oftentimes that is done through emails, which is why the primary focus is going to be on emails. In this lesson, the first thing I want to say is how you write does have a reflection on who you are and how you communicate. These things are really important. I have worked with people in the past do like that shorthand. Instead of writing a r e for r, they write r. So they'll say R and then the letter U and it's like shorthand text message but they do that in emails. They do it in everything. I myself as well as I know others do really frown upon that and kind of look down on it a little bit. It's like come on. It's not that much more difficult to write it out properly. But that is something that some people do and I highly recommend you do not do that. I'm of the mind that 99.9% of communication, any type of writing needs to be done really professionally. So whether that's email or messages on Slack or Discord, these need to be professional. But you know, there are going to be times where you get really close with one of the data engineers or something and you just shoot them a quick message and you say LOL and then you go on your way and that's totally fine because you guys are buddies. That's a totally fine thing to do. But anytime you're interacting with any type of client or stakeholder or manager or CFO or anything, you definitely want to write really well. Often times in writing emails to clients, things get lost in the details. They said something off-handedly in one part of the message, but it wasn't really communicated that that was something that you actually need a deliverable for. Something that I have gotten in the habit of doing, and I do this in almost all my meetings, especially when I'm talking with clients or, you know, consulting people that I'm working with now, is I will write out my full email and at the bottom I'll say action items for me. And then I'll say, "Is there anything that you need to add to this list?" And the action item for me is going to be things that I know that I'm going to be doing. and then they have the expectation that that is on my plate and is something that I will get back to them with. It has worked remarkably well for me and I've been doing that for maybe the past 3 or 4 years. I didn't do it for a long time. But I found that when I start making action items, when I start listing these things out, it is very clear and is very easily understood what I'm supposed to be doing. And sometimes I'll even write action items for other people as well. But most of the time it's for me, right? As the consultant, as a data professional, often times I'm the one doing a lot of the work. So that's typically what I'm putting at the bottom. If you look at this example on the right hand side, there are two separate emails here. And I think this is a pretty good example of what I'm talking about. The first one says, "Hey, I wanted to let you know about the meeting and the project report. It should be submitted soon. I think it's an exaggerated way of saying there isn't anything concrete or clear in this message. I think you need to get that report to me soon. We have a meeting. I don't know what time it is." But then look on the right hand side. It says, "Hi Jordan. Here's a quick update. Meeting on Thursday at 2 p.m. Submit the project report by Friday. Please review the draft. Best regards. Very professional, very specific, and very clear. There's no misunderstanding with these bullet points. And that's what I personally do, and I really appreciate when other people do this as well. Now, this just may be my personal preference, although I have worked with a lot of other people who have done the same thing, but I highly suggest that you do it because you want to be communicating effectively. And if you start doing this, you start implementing this in your emails, people are going to be like, "Okay, this person's on top of it. This person knows what they're doing. this person has clearly communicated to me. I appreciate that. And so if you aren't doing it, I think you should do it. Again, that's just my recommendation. If you have a better way of doing it or something that's really worked for you, continue doing that. But if you're like on the left-hand side and you're not doing super well, definitely try out communicating and writing emails like this. The next thing is to avoid writing things that could be perceived incorrectly in emails. As we all know, we've sent a text message or we've sent a message to someone that in our heads had a specific tone, right? You were trying to say it in a really positive way. Then the other person, they took it in the totally wrong way. There's this really funny and peel sketch and if you don't know them, they are comedians, but they are messaging each other and they're text messaging and both their tones are completely different. He's like, "Yeah, buddy, let's go." And the other guy's taking as like, "Yeah, buddy, let's go." Like, "I hate this guy." And that happens over email as well. that just miscommunication happens all the time. And so, anything that could be perceived in a really negative way, I'd recommend rereading your email and trying to write it in a different way. I definitely do not recommend writing anything sarcastic in emails. I am a sarcastic person. That has gotten me into trouble a few times in the past if I'm being completely honest. And so, I don't recommend doing that because again, the tone in emails is completely different than the tone when you're talking. They can interpret things and read things very differently than how you are actually writing it. And if you're trying to add a lot of tonality into an email, that can be changed depending on the reader. The last thing is highlighting important information. Now, oftentimes emails that I would get are like super super long. I mean, they just keep going. And sometimes I don't always read it, right? There's a lot to it. Maybe it's just seems like skippable and I can just skip down and I can just keep going. But people are going to do that in emails. And so I will highlight or I'll just, you know, bold it or I'll make it darker than all the other text to where it draws the attention of someone who is reading it. This is a super simple trick that I think is really important. I also sometimes will highlight or bolden the action items at the bottom just to make sure that everybody sees them and we're all on the same page. In general, when communicating through email or messages, keep it pretty professional. Be very specific. Don't use a lot of technical jargon. Don't get too sarcastic or use too much tonality in your email. and provide action items and bullet items. I know that you may not like that, but a lot of people do. And so, I highly recommend at least trying it out to see what people think. And if you get good feedback, then keep doing it. Hello everybody. In this module, we're going to be focusing on problem solving. By definition, that just means solving problems that are complex. And some people are naturally gifted at this, and some people need to learn this. And this is a skill that can be learned. Before I became a data analyst, I don't think I had the best problem solving skills. But now that I've been doing this for many years, I look at a lot of situations completely differently. In this module and in this lesson, we're going to talk about how we can get better at problem solving. Now, in this lesson specifically, we're going to be talking about how you can get an analytical mindset. Now, when I say analytical, I don't mean you're thinking like a data analyst. Because even though I am from a data analyst background, I know a lot of other people who have really benefited from this analytical mindset. People who are data engineers or software engineers, just data professionals in general can really benefit from this. Probably one of the biggest things that you can do is you can change your mindset from this is a task that needs to be completed. This is just something I have to do into this is like a puzzle. This is a mystery that needs to be solved. This turns you more into a detective trying to figure out the solution rather than just an employee who just needs to get it done. I used to work at a healthcare analytics company. It was one of my first jobs as a data analyst. And one of the mistakes that I just immediately started making was saying yes to things, right? I didn't ask any questions. And so someone on my team would come to me and say, "Hey, Alex, can you go and look this up in the database?" And I would say, "Sure, why not?" And then I would look it up and I'd send it to them. I wouldn't think twice about it. And often times when I actually sent it over to them, they were like, "No, that's that's not what I meant. I actually kind of wanted this or that's not really what I was looking for. I don't really know exactly what I'm looking for." And part of my role as a data analyst was not just to do what everyone says. They're not just giving me tasks to do. They may come to me with information, but something that I need to consider, something I really need to think about is I need to think about what is the business impact of what we're actually trying to do. And so, as I got into the role more, as I started getting a little bit more confident in my abilities, I started asking questions. I was like, why do we actually need that? What are you going to be using that for? What does this connect to? Are you getting this for a specific client? What do you need? As I started asking these questions, the picture of what they actually wanted became a lot more clear. and what they were asking for wasn't actually what they needed. That's just what they thought they needed because they didn't know the data as well as I did. Now, that is a big part of having this analytical mindset is just digging in, trying to figure things out, trying to piece all of this information together. But once you actually start getting into it, you may encounter some issues. You may start trying to put all these pieces together and find out that you just don't have the data available or that you can't answer that question in some way. What you need to do is you need to take a step back. Can you look at this from a different perspective? If not, maybe you need to go to them. You need to communicate, hey, here's what I've done. But because of the data or what they're trying to solve, you can't do it with what you have. And so, you need to come up with other solutions. As I got more experienced, this became even more important, especially as I got to larger companies when I had to really dig in. There were so many different layers and levels and people to talk to. I really felt like I was solving these complex issues. If you're looking at these things as just a task to do, you're going to hit a roadblock and you're just going to give up on it or you're going to say, "Nope, that task can't be completed." But when you're thinking about it in this mindset, you're going to find ways. You're going to put pieces together and you're going to figure out a way to solve it. In the next lesson, we're going to dive into the problem solving cycle and how you can improve on this skill. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at the problem solving life cycle. Now, all this is is a way to visualize solving a problem. What I used to do when I first became a data analyst is I would just jump into the data. I wasn't really thinking long term or that far ahead or really solving a specific problem. I was just like, "All right, let's jump into the data and see what I can find." Looking back, that wasn't the smartest thing to do. And in fact, I can remember specific instances where someone would send me something in an Excel file. I would do all this work and do all these different things to it, and then I would hand it back to them. They were like, "This isn't what we wanted. This actually isn't the right thing at all." And my heart just sank. I was like, "Oh jeez, I absolutely messed up." Because I didn't actually know what I was doing. This problem solving life cycle will help you identify what you need to do before you go and make mistakes like I did. So let's take a look at this life cycle. We have number one, define the problem. Number two, structure the problem, prioritize the issues, develop issue analysis, conduct analysis, synthesize your findings, and develop recommendations. Now, this may sound complicated, but it's actually quite simple. Really, what you're doing is is you're starting by figuring out what you're actually going to be solving. If you know what you're solving before you dive into the data, you are 10 steps ahead of most people because you'll already know what you're looking for and what you're actually trying to accomplish. The next several steps are really just about making sure you're going to be doing things in the right way. Often times requests aren't just one request. It's 1 2 3 4 five different requests kind of bundled into one question or one thing. And what you need to do is you need to sit down and say, "Okay, if I was only able to solve one of these things, what would I be wanting to solve?" And then you prioritize and you focus on that thing. Of course, you want to solve everything, but you're at least getting the main chunk of it, the big ticket item out of the way first. Next, you're going to actually dive into the data and try to figure out what you were trying to solve. Notice that this is number five. You have four different steps ahead of you where you're actually getting things ready and identifying what you're supposed to be doing before you actually dive into the data. After that, you're going to dig in. You're going to find your insights and develop your recommendations. It may not always be a recommendation. Sometimes it is a report. Sometimes it's data cleaning. It doesn't matter exactly what it is, but in the end, you're going to produce something. Those first four steps before you actually dive into the data is really important. It helps you break this larger task into smaller chunks. They're a lot more manageable. I myself get overwhelmed somewhat easily, and that's just a personal trait of mine. If I get these huge tasks, I'm like, "This sounds and looks impossible. How am I ever going to solve this?" But I found that breaking it up makes it a lot easier. The last thing to note is that this is a cycle. It just keeps going. So even though you go from one all the way over to seven, doesn't mean you're completely done with everything. Oftentimes, they're going to come back with feedback. And you have to take that feedback and you have to define a new problem. You have to kind of shift what you're actually looking for and how you break things up. And this is something that is going to happen. You're not just going to do it one time. You're often going to go through this process one, two, or three times for certain larger tasks until you actually get what you're trying to solve. Steps five through seven are usually the technical pieces, right? You're getting into Excel, SQL, visualization, and all these different things. But steps one through four, those are the soft skills. Those are where you're organizing everything and actually getting into that creative problem solving space. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about how you can ask the right business questions. This is something that is unique to every single company, every industry, every department, every team. But asking questions is an essential part of solving these complex problems. I'll give you an embarrassing story of something that happened to me many years ago and I just wasn't asking the right questions and I was I was very embarrassed. I'm just going to be honest. But it was early on in my career as a data analyst and my manager was, you know, seeing some potential in me and he's like, "Hey, I want you to take something over. It's this Excel report that we submit to our biggest client every single month and I want you to take it over." And I was like, "Awesome." I wanted more responsibility. I wanted to show that, you know, I knew what I was doing. So, I took it and I was like, "All right, I will do this." So all he did was is he showed me one time how he got the data, what he did, and how he did it, and that's it. I never asked any questions. He just showed me what he did. He showed me the process. So the end of the next month rolls around and I need to create this report. So I do what I think is exactly what I was supposed to do. I just kind of followed his steps and I got it and I sent it out. One thing I should have done first is I should have had my manager review it to make sure I didn't miss anything. But he was pretty confident in me. I felt like I had it. So, I sent it out. I get an email back maybe the next day and they're like, "Hey, Alex, the numbers are totally off on this. This number's wrong. This number's wrong. This number's wrong. This number's wrong." They're like, "What's going on?" My boss immediately comes over to me. He's like, "Hey." He's like, "Show me what you did." So, I start, you know, going through the process. Here's what I did. And he's just like, he's like, "Alex." He's like, "Yes, you did the steps I told you, but there's a few other things." He's like, "The reason we do some of these things are for these reasons, and the reason we do some of these are the for these reasons, and we actually need to perform this type of calculation in these types of events." I didn't know any of this. I didn't really even know what to ask. And so, looking back, I should have done a much better job of asking questions. Where do we get this data? Why are we presenting this information? If something like this were to happen, should I calculate in a different way? These are things that I should have known. I will also say that because I was so new, I think my manager, just being in a managerial position, having done this report a lot of times, should have given me a little bit more info. In the end, there was a lot more business context and things that I should have been aware of that I just wasn't. And I looked really foolish and I felt really stupid. Now, in the next one that I sent, right, I redid the whole thing. I checked with my manager. We ran through a bunch of stuff. We checked everything before we sent it out and that went a lot better. So, that's an example of when I failed, when I should have been asking a lot of questions. I just didn't even know. I didn't ask any questions. Now, I'm going to give you one more example of a time where I should have asked a lot more questions. I was working with this lady and her name was Judy. And Judy was great. I've been working with her for a long time, but she comes over to my desk in like a frantic panic. And she's like, "Alex," she's like one of our biggest clients, a different client called. They need this and this and this and this and this. And she's like, "They need it now. It's like super important for some reporting or some other thing. So, I just get to work. I basically asked zero questions. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this sounds really important." So, I get to work. I am working, working, working. I dropped all my other stuff. I'm working, working, working. I stayed late that day and then I came in early the next day and I was working, working, working. I got everything together. I brought it over to Judy. Judy, bless her heart, tells me they actually don't need that until next month. And some of the things that they were requesting, they didn't actually need. And so, thank you, Alex, for doing that, but we don't really need this anymore. I don't want to tell you how my wife reacted because she was not happy, but I did try to handle it as professionally as possible. It's just like, oh, okay, you know, no problem. I understand. You know, that's great to hear. But I didn't ask any questions. That's kind of on me, too. But of course, my wife blamed Judy. Thank goodness. But I should have been asking a lot more questions even in this quote unquote emergency, right? Why do they need this? What do they need this for? When is the reporting date? Let's go back to our clients before I do, you know, 6 7 8 9 hours of work. Let's go back to our clients and make sure that we are all on the same page of what we need and when we need it. I could have saved myself over a day's amount of work if I just asked some follow-up questions. And we probably would have gotten to that conclusion that we just didn't need it right now or some of those requests weren't actually needed if I had just asked the right questions. Now, I have countless other examples of when that's happened, but they may be more embarrassing and I just don't want to share them. But I've done that a lot where I just didn't ask the right questions. Something that's important to know, 90% of the time when someone comes to you with a request, it isn't exactly what they're requesting, right? It's going to be slightly different or sometimes very different. This happened a lot when I was a manager of analytics in the IT department. We had all these different teams asking us for all these different visualizations. And sometimes I would go to them and I'd get in these meetings and I'm like, "Okay, let's ask some questions." And I would ask these kind of more in-depth questions and they would realize, "Oh, we don't actually need a dashboard for that at all. We don't. we just need this one report being sent to us. That's actually what we care about. But if I didn't ask those questions, my team would have been doing a ton of really unnecessary work. And so the most important thing when you get in there is to start asking questions. Why do you need this? When do you need this? What business problem is this solving? Understand the business needs of what they're actually trying to solve with what they're requesting? Because sometimes they're requesting something that will not actually solve their problem at all. It is very common in business culture when someone else is doing the work. for example, my team was the one who was going to build it and do the work. It's very common for people to just request things. Even if they aren't 100% sure if they need it, they'll at least have it. And so, it's really important for the people who are receiving the requests to make sure that you are asking questions before and that you understand the business impact of what you're about to build. I promise you this is a very real thing where you'll build a 100 dashboards and people only look at one of them. It's because so many dashboards get built for absolutely no reason. they just get requested and somebody builds it, but it doesn't actually solve any issues, doesn't have the right data, doesn't have the right filters, it isn't the right report or whatever it is. Doing this right here, always asking questions, even when you might look a little bit stupid, just to clarify. That is important. Just to clarify, this is what you're requesting, that is still a very important process. Hello everybody. In this module, we're going to be talking all about collaboration, and that's how you work with other people within your role. In the next several lessons, we'll talk about very specific things, but in this lesson, we're going to talk about just how you collaborate with people in general. Now, there are going to be some unique times where you are the only data person working at your company. They typically call that an individual contributor. But even when you're the individual contributor, the only data person, you're still going to be working with a lot of different people and a lot of different departments or teams. Typically though, you are going to be on some type of data team. Whether it's just with a manager or there's one other analyst or you're working with a data engineer or a data scientist. Typically, you're going to be on a team of about two to seven people. Within that team, there's often a lot of different roles as well as a lot of different types of employees. So, sometimes it's full-time, sometimes they're part-time, sometimes they're your manager, sometimes it's contractor. And those roles are going to vary greatly. Some people are going to be data analysts or project managers or business analysts or data engineers or data scientists. And I could go on and on. So, the combinations are quite endless. Sometimes you have a lot of contractors on your team. Sometimes you have a lot of full-time employees on your team. Sometimes it's part-time employees. And so, the dynamics can change depending on how many or what kind of people you're working with in your team. With all these different roles, there's a lot of collaboration that takes place. Now, one of the things that you're going to have in almost every team is some type of standup. I used to do daily stand-ups, but some teams may only have a weekly standup where they do it on Monday or some will have it two times a week. But often times you're going to have some type of standup. If you haven't had a data job before, I think this image on the left hand side is pretty indicative of what a daily standup kind of looks like. Everybody gets together either virtually or in person and you just give updates on what you're currently working on. So you're going to say, "Here's what I did yesterday. Here's what I accomplished. Here's what I'm working on today. And here are some roadblocks or maybe some things that I'm trying to resolve." Everybody goes around and does this and you kind of get updates from other people. And sometimes you can ask, "Hey, John, uh, you know, I'm working on this project. Have you made any progress on that?" and they're like, "Oh, well, I haven't because you know, this person hasn't emailed me back." That's very common. And so, that's the kind of daily standup that typically happens at most companies when you're working in a team. It is important to understand everyone's role within your team because some people are full-time, some people are contractors. Some people are data engineers or some people are business analysts. And so, the dynamics can be very, very different with every team. When someone is a full-time employee, they are going to act a little bit different than something like a contractor. Contractors don't have to follow all the exact same rules as a full-time employee. Depending on the contract that the contractor signed, they may not get all the days off that you get. They may also have different PTO. They may have different work hours. And so, these are things just to take into consideration. So, understanding your team is really important. It helps you understand who you're supposed to go to for certain projects and products. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about working within a crossf functional team. A cross functional team is actually quite simple. It's just combining your team with another team and having some type of mix in there. This often happens when there are very specific projects where both of your departments are needed or both your teams are needed, but you don't probably need everybody. So, you're going to take two people from one team, two people from your team, and all of you guys are going to work together on this project. This can be a very unique experience, both positive and negative, and I have had both in working with these types of projects. But it is a little bit different than working just within your team. Within your team, you're going to know everybody. You're going to have some type of, you know, relationship with them. But when you're working on crossunctional teams, you're going to be working with a totally different personality, a different background from that person's education and work experience. Now, within your crossunctional team, you're probably going to set up some type of messaging system. Now, this is true within your internal team as well. That's kind of expected, but you're typically going to set something up just for this new team. So you might set up a new Slack or Discord group just for that group who are working on the project. You may also have a scrum master assigned to this project. Now I haven't talked about scrum masters before, but I'm just going to briefly mention what they are. A scrum master is kind of like a project manager. If you want to be a scrum master, there actually is some certification that you have to go through in order to be called a scrum master. You could think of them as just somebody who leads a project or kind of organizes for that project. And so when you have your daily standups and you're working within this cross functional team, you may talk to that scrum master for that project every day or every week depending on, you know, how much time you're putting in into this project. With that, you may also have something like Jira or Confluence where you are actually tracking all of the work for this project. As much as I really don't like all these project tracking softwares like Jira cuz I used that for many years, they are actually helpful. And so when you're working within teams, you typically are going to be doing that. This is a skill that you kind of have to get used to. As you do these stand-ups, you start being able to easily update them on what you did, what you do, what you're working on, any blockers, and asking questions in stand-ups. This is something that you just kind of get better with with experience. As I said before, I've had good experiences working on crossunctional teams. I've also had bad experiences. Looking back, there were sometimes I had expectations that I would be leading this project because it was my project for the past 6 months, but then we had to bring someone on from another team and then they were part of that and then they started, you know, trying to lead it and that caused conflict and these things happen. And so setting clear expectations at the front is actually a really important process. You don't want to get two or three weeks into this new project working with these new people and all of a sudden you're in this kind of like power dynamic power struggle of no, I'm leading this project. No, I'm leading this project. And so looking back, I do wish on some of these projects where I was working with, you know, new people I had never worked with before that we had kind of just set those expectations at the beginning. If you're working at any medium-siz or large company, you are going to work on crossunctional projects or in cross functional teams. My biggest recommendation is just kind of going with the flow. Be pretty easygoing for the first week or two as you get to know everybody as these expectations get out there. But definitely voice your opinion. Try to, you know, get involved in the project, make yourself known, and of course be as polite as possible. But as we talked about in one of our first modules, the communication has to be really good. And so if you don't have that communication when you're working on these types of teams, it's going to be even more difficult than if you're just working within your internal team where they already know you and they kind of have an expectation of how you communicate. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about managing expectations and feedback. Now, this can be very, very difficult. I have had experiences in the past where I've done very well in this area and I'm like, man, I just nailed this. I knocked it out of the park. Then there are other times where I think I completely failed. And so I'll talk a little bit about some of those experiences over the years. But this is a very important part of working in a team and collaborating. One of the most important ways to manage expectations is to set expectations early and often. Setting clear goals and timelines really help alleviate a lot of people's stress because a lot of people if they don't know when things are supposed to be done, if you feel behind, these things can cause a lot of stress and anxiety within a team. So, I'm going to tell you a story of a time where I think I did really well with managing expectations in a very high stress environment. This goes back where I was a contract to hire position at a Fortune 500 company. And I was in this contract position. I was hoping they would hire me on full-time, but I wasn't sure yet. But one of our senior directors comes into a meeting one day and they are just really frantic, right? And they say, "Hey, we had to fire this whole team uh who did this specific thing." And I'm sitting there and I'm just listening and you know, I'm new to the team. I've been there for maybe 4 months and my contract was for 6 months, but I'm 4 months into this contract. And so they come in and they say, "This team was doing really bad work. You know, they messed up a bunch of stuff. All of our clients were really unhappy. So we fired them all. But what happened is is the work that they were doing needed to be submitted within the next like 2 months and that was like really big deal. It was something called MIPS and that has to do with healthcare and submitting all these measures and everything. Now coincidentally enough in my last job I had done that. I had done that for like 2 years. I knew everything about MIPS and I had done that with a lot of different hospitals and doctors and all these things. And so I raised my hand and I was like hey are you talking about this kind of MIPS? And so we started talking, we start going back and forth and they realize I am the only person in this entire team who knows anything about this. So I say, I'll take that project on. I would love to lead that. And so I go from being just a contract to hire position to being kind of a leader on this big project. And this is like a multi-million dollar issue that they are trying to solve cuz MIP when you're submitting for hospitals, that's how they get reimbursed for a lot of their money. And so they want to meet these measures and they want to get a big reimbursement in the millions of dollars per hospital. And so I'm taking on this really massive project. So I start assembling this team of other people who I think might be good for it. I need a data engineer. I need a software engineer. I need a data analyst. I need a business analyst. And I start bringing people onto my team. Well, we have a very quick deadline. I'm talking 2 months of doing 4 months of work. This is a big process. And so I start delegating. I start setting expectations. I start setting deadlines. And I tell here's what we have to do in order to meet this deadline that the government has set. Because if we don't meet it, our clients all lose a ton of money. Now, this was a very stressful two months, but we got it all done. And I will say that my team did amazing. We missed basically no deadlines. We finished all the work in those two months and we got everything submitted on time. When that project wrapped up, they were very impressed with how I handled everything and how I took charge and how I managed expectations and got everything done on time. And because of that, I went from a junior data analyst contract to hire and they promoted me twice into a data analyst 2 position. I was only 3 years into my career, but I had to do this exact thing. I had to kind of take a leadership role early on. I had to set really clear expectations and goals and timelines. Then we had to manage that and meet it. And it was very tough, but it was one of the best things for my career. All that being said, creating clear goals and expectations is super important when you're working within a team. Now, when you're working on these projects, sometimes your timeline is going to get off. Often times you'll think something takes a week, but then it takes a month. And that happens, right? Once you start getting into the details, once you start digging into the data or maybe you're waiting on something from another client, sometimes you just get behind. And so communicating early and often is also really important. If you are behind on something and someone is waiting on that, right? You're waiting on your reports or they're waiting on your visualization or whatever it is, if they just don't get it, they are not going to be happy. But if you just send them an email saying, "Hey, here's what happened. Here's why we're behind. I'll get that to you by this day." And set kind of a clear expectation. and I'll get it to you in, you know, 3 days, 7 days, whatever it is. That will really help alleviate a lot of the issues that come with working within a team. If you look at this image on the right hand side, I think this is just applicable to all parts of life, but specifically within collaboration as well. We have these expectations and we have the acceptance. And the acceptance is just kind of like how acceptable we find the actual situation. And so the as the acceptance goes up and as the expectations go down, we'll have a lot better happiness because our expectations are down. But if you're on that far left side where the expectations are really high, but what's actually happening is really low, that's going to be very unhappy. And so you want people's expectations and kind of what they accept to be pretty even, but you'd rather have what they accept to be a lot higher. If you set their expectations a little bit lower, that typically makes them a little bit happier because they aren't expecting the moon and the world and flowers and all these different things that they could possibly have. They're just expecting something small. I'm going to share one more story. At my very first job as a data analyst, this was actually at a nonprofit. I was a data collection specialist and analyst. I had no idea what I was doing. I was very new. But in this, I would say I failed quite miserably. Most of what my job was was collecting data from all these different departments within the nonprofit. and we would submit it for grants. And grant is basically what the government gives you for doing specific work. I was new into this job, maybe two or three months, so I didn't know a ton, but I was talking to the senior director. This was like my boss's boss, and they were like, "Hey, we have to submit this grant data. This is really important to get, so I need you to have this done by the end of the week." And I was like, "End of the week? No problem. I got it." I don't know why I was so confident, but I remember being like, "Yeah, no problem. I just have to go ask this person for the data." So I go to this person, I get the data, I bring the data back and I start looking at it and I realize this data is really not set up to actually submit because the data has to sit in a specific way. You have to format it properly. You have to do some aggregations. And these were things early on in my career that I just didn't really know. Like I was very very new. So I should have gone to that senior director and said, "Hey, this data is really messy. It's going to take me some time. I'm going to try to get it by this day." and maybe they would have said, "Hey, let me help you on this. Let's work together on this." But I wanted to prove myself, right? So, I got heads down and I just started working on it. I started digging in and I couldn't figure it out. It was really confusing. I don't know why I was so stubborn, but I didn't communicate this at all. I just wanted to show that I knew what I was doing. And so, I worked on I worked on I worked on it. Friday came around when it was due. She comes over to me and she's like, "Hey, Alex, is everything ready to submit?" And I'm like, "Listen, I got to be honest with you. I could not figure this out. I really need help. So, she was very frustrated. I mean, it was visible. She was trying to be nice. I was new to my job. I was a young kid. She was trying to be polite, but I could tell she was visibly very frustrated because then she had to drop everything that she had to do to help me get this data ready to submit. And it was horrible. And I just remember that sinking feeling of like I really messed up. If I had said that four, five, 6 days ago or when I first got this data, the expectations would have been a lot lower and we had a longer timeline to actually resolve it. So, I didn't have to make this, you know, small issue an emergency. I just did because of kind of unmet expectations. Let's not dwell on my failures too much. I do have many, but that one I specifically remember really well. Next, let's talk about feedback. Now, feedback can actually be kind of hard to get sometimes. you kind of need to pry it from people in certain instances, but having a regular feedback loop within projects or within teams is really great. What I mean by that is sometimes things just don't work. They don't work well. The processes don't work. The tools don't work. But if you don't have a feedback loop, often times people just try to push through and they don't feel like they can come to you. So I'll give you just a quick example. Let's say you're working on a team and you have all of your data sitting in SQL and you're like, "All right, let's extract that data, put it into a report, and then, you know, send that off and then we'll automate that process." Well, you start getting in there and you start realizing the tools that they're using to extract that data and send the report are not working for what you actually need. But that's what they've always used. They've been using that for everything. So, you're thinking, "I just have to figure it out. I have to get it done." So, you start working on it. You keep your head down and you don't give that feedback. Hey, I'm having issues with this project. It's not working for me. Like, this tool is not working. Then finally, a week later, someone comes to you and they're asking for this and you're like, well, you know, there's an issue with this and this tool that I'm trying to use. And they're like, oh, I see. Well, let's take a look at it. And you take a look at it. You quickly realize this is a unique use case. You can't actually use this tool for what you're trying to do. And they're like, you should have given me this feedback a long time ago. Feedback is a communication thing. You need to have feedback. You need to be communicating. And so creating those feedback loops typically in things like daily standups is really nice to have. Almost always communicating and giving feedback on different tools or projects or all different things that you're going to be working on within a team. It always helps you kind of align yourself with your team to work in the same direction instead of kind of fighting each other or fighting the system or the processes or the tools. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about politics. Yes, we are talking about office politics. When you are working on a team, when you're working at any company, there are going to be office politics. And so, I'm going to kind of give some stories and looking back uh give you some just just interesting stories over my time uh being in the office politics. But office politics is a tool. And so, we're just going to talk about politics, talk a little bit how you can use it to your personal gain because I absolutely think that it is something that you kind of need to be aware of and be thinking about when working within a team. Probably the biggest thing that I'm going to say in this entire lesson is that office politics will help you influence decision-making. And this is a very good thing. It can be used really poorly, but it is a very good thing. I'm going to give you an example of a time I was very successful with office politics to kind of get what I want. And this was when I was first hired as a data analytics manager. I was new to managing. I had never done it before. But I was hired on for one specific goal within our IT department. And we had a bunch of siloed data with cyber security and the help desk and all these different departments. There were 11 different departments. So it was a lot. And for the past 6 years they had been trying to figure out a solution to get all that data into one place which as you can imagine is very difficult because everybody has different needs. They have different wants. They have different perspectives and ideas and all these different things. And so my only job was to try to get everyone into one single consensus. and I was trying to get us into a platform whether it was AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, data bricks, it doesn't matter as long as it worked for the entire IT department. So I started going around and I started going around to every single department one by one and I started trying to understand what they did, what kind of data they were working with, what data they needed, what their pain points were, what issues they were having in their business. Believe it or not, that took several months. And over those months, I started to get to know all the different managers, all the people on the team. And you know, just generally being friendly with them and really trying to sympathize and being understanding with their team and what they were going through and what they were trying to achieve. I started to be able to see kind of what each team was working on and what they needed. So what I did was I went back, I took everybody's feedback. I took tons of notes and I started creating kind of this Excel spreadsheet of needs, wants, how we can solve this out. And then I got every single person together. And that was kind of the trickiest part because there was some office politics that was already there before I got there. And I brought everyone into one room and I said, "Hey, listen. This is something we've been trying to do for many years." I was like, "Now is our time to get it done. Here's what I've laid out." I laid out all the details. I said, "I know that you guys all have your own opinion, your own preferences. I know you want Snowflake. I know you want Azure. You guys already use some AWS products." I was like, "But here's the deal. We can't use everything." So, I was using my influence. I was using my, you know, connections that I had made over those several months and I got us to all agree on using Azure. It was nuts. No one was able to do this in the past 6 years. They had tried many times, but I just kind of played the room. I got to know everybody. I talked specifically to everyone's pain points and what they were able to do and how Azure could solve it. That was probably the biggest success as it comes to office politics and getting everyone on the same page as I've ever had. I don't think any of my other stories that were positive would come close to the feeling of getting everyone together on this massive project. In the end, everyone agreed to it, even though some were more reluctant than others, but people wanted to kind of get on board with this and kind of all be on the same page. And then I submitted our budget, it got approved, and we started implementing people and hiring on analytic engineers and all sorts of people for this big project. I am 100% confident if I had not gone to everybody and started making friends with them and started kind of getting involved in all these things. I am 100% confident they would not have agreed to it in the way that they did. From what I was told, a lot of the previous people in my position just tried to kind of steamroll it and say, "This is what we're doing and make it happen." And people just fought them so much that they ended up giving up. Now, that's kind of a big example, right? But if you're just an individual contributor on your team, you're just a data analyst or you're a data scientist or something like that, you can still do the same within your team. Being friends with people and making good connections with your managers, your senior directors, the people on your team, that really goes a long way. One of my biggest pieces of advice in order to be really good in office politics is to avoid the gossip. And I know gossip is fun. You get to hear about what people messed up and what people are doing in their private lives. But when people see you doing that, they're not going to trust you as much. And things spread, right? You've no office politics. You say one thing to one person, they're going to say it to another, and soon everybody knows. And they know that you don't like that one person. That one person's not going to like you. And then they're going to try to get other people on their side to not like you. And then it's you versus them. And it's a whole thing. And so just not being involved in a lot of the gossip ends up helping a lot. The last thing I want to talk about is giving credit. Now, I'm going to give you an example of a time I felt horrible. It was pretty early on in my career, maybe like two, three years. And we were working on this big project and we got into this meeting and the meeting had some higher up. I don't remember if it was a senior director or senior manager, somebody higher up. I was, you know, like a junior data analyst, but I had been working on this project. My product manager was giving the presentation. I was just sitting there. But at the end, this person got all the credit. They did not ever once mention that there was anyone helping. They just kind of said, "That's it. That's the project." And they kind of took credit for themselves. And I remember being like, "That doesn't feel good." I was like, "I worked a ton on this project. I feel like I helped a lot. I didn't get any credit." And that really has sat with me. Like I remember that feeling because I was like kind of hurt by it because I was really a big part of that project. And so that feeling doesn't feel good. And so what you want to do is you want to give credit generously. This is something I think everybody should be doing. If you were in there and you're presenting and somebody helped you be like, "Hey, you know, we worked really hard on this project. John was a big help. John, that guy right there, John's awesome. Just a super smart guy. Just give people credit because when you give people credit, they're going to give it back to you in a lot of different ways. If you haven't done that before, I highly recommend trying it. One, it's just a really good feeling when you look over and you give someone credit and they're smiling and they're like, "Hey, you know, thanks for including me." It's also feels really good when someone does it for you. And I promise you, if you do it for somebody else, they are going to see that. And other people on your team are going to see that and they're going to want to give you credit. and it kind of lifts everybody. You know, that rising tide lifts the boat, right? You want everyone to come up together. So, that is office politics in a nutshell. Of course, there's going to be crazy stuff. There's going to be bad employees. And that's we're going to talk about in the next lesson when we talk about just tough employees or tough co-workers to work with. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about working with tough co-workers. Now, I am almost positive if you've worked anywhere ever, you've had a tough co-orker because tough co-workers are everywhere. Or I'll just say bad co-workers. These are people who don't do a good job, have a bad attitude, you don't enjoy working with them, they bring down the team. These are people that typically last a long time at companies for whatever reason. They just they never leave. They work there for 20 years and they're the worst people to work with. If you have not worked with someone like that, I assure you, you will. It is only a matter of time. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about how you can work with these types of people and what to do when you're working with a tough co-orker. There's kind of two different categories. One, is it workrelated? Right? Is this something that's inhibiting a project? Is it stopping you from getting your work done? Or is this person just annoying? Right? Do they just have a bad attitude, but they're still getting their work done? If it is in category one where it is inhibiting your work or it's inhibiting the project as a whole, these are things that you need to address. Now, in category number two, if it's just something that you don't like about them, it's their personality, it's their tone, it's their whatever, often times those are things that those are just personality character traits that maybe you just don't really vibe with, you don't really get along with. Typically, these are things that I am not really going to address. Now, it is possible that these personal things do actually bleed into being a real problem, and you always can address those. But the first category are things that definitely need to be addressed. I'm going to talk a little bit more about those first. If it's a very small issue, maybe it's just something you're just going to let go and hope they improve on in the future, right? Maybe they said they're going to email you something by the end of the day and they forgot or they just didn't do it and that's really frustrating, right? But it's not a big deal. Maybe they'll just email it to you in the morning and then you still have it and that's okay. But if it starts inhibiting your work, your ability to meet deadlines, your ability to do things, and this is a repetitive pattern, this is something that one, you can just talk to them about it and say, "Hey, here's how this affected my project. I needed you to get that to me by Monday and you didn't even start on it until Wednesday. That makes me look bad in front of the customer or the client or my manager. Like, I need you to be able to do that. If that's a repetitive pattern though, I would just go to your boss and say, "Hey boss, here's what's happening. I wanted to talk to you about John. There's this repeated pattern of I'm trying to get my work done and here's what he's doing and here's how it's affecting it. I've already addressed it with him, but it is not improving. Can you help me with this?" It is your manager's job to help you as an employee get their job done well. If you have a good boss, they're going to address this and they're going to get you guys into a room or they're going to go talk to them or they're going to help figure out a solution. That is probably going to be my advice for almost any situation. One, if you feel comfortable addressing it with them, if it's inhibiting your job, then address it and just talk to them. Be really polite, really kind, just explain things. If it continues, if it does not get better, if that person is just stubborn and they don't want to be, you know, a good co-orker, go to your boss, right? That is the chain of command. That is what I'm going to recommend for almost everybody. That does take really good communication skills, really good body language, really good tone so that they don't take it the wrong way. They just understand that you want to get your work done and because of what they did or because of them just not being a good employee, even if you don't say that, you weren't able to get your work done. The one thing that I would never do is start gossiping and start bringing that person down, start talking bad about them to other employees. Even if that employee stinks and everybody does not like them, that is okay. is not something that I would personally get involved in because typically when you start doing that although you may build camaraderie in a small group of people right for the people who don't like them there may be other people who do like them and you're going to cut off those people just like in a previous example that we talked about in one of our last lessons. Another thing to note and this is just kind of on a personal side is that people are going through things. You never know what's happening in their personal life with their marriage with their kids with their parents with their friends with their health. People go through things and so sometimes good co-workers can become tough co-workers for a season and that's not something that you should be taking personally. There could be something behind the scenes that they're not sharing or that you don't know. So try to have some compassion. Try to be really sympathetic. But if it is inhibiting your work, go to them first and then go to your boss. Hello everybody. In this module, we're going to be talking about personal effectiveness. Now, these are things that I think are very specific to being in a workplace, but also are very good soft skills just to work on and be aware of and improve on. One of the biggest soft skills as it pertains to personal effectiveness is going to be time management. This is something that a lot of people struggle with and I'm going to give you some reasons why that happens and I'm going to talk about how you can resolve that. One of the biggest reasons is that some people just aren't organized at all, right? They're just very messy with things. They use sticky notes to track things and then projects and tasks slip through the cracks and that is not a good thing. And so organization plays a big part in both of these things. The other thing that really affects this is the ability for somebody to say no to specific projects because some people just get assigned projects and they don't say anything and they just take on so much work. They literally cannot create any type of schedule or prioritize their work to get all of it done. When this happens, you are in a lose-lose situation. You literally cannot do it. But you're also going to spend an immense amount of time and be very anxious and have a lot of stress to try to accomplish something that is not accomplishable. If that is a word, I am not 100%. But how can we actually solve these issues? My first recommendation is pretty simple. One is just to use a calendar. I know a lot of people that they like to write things down and that's perfectly fine. I also write on sticky notes and I like journaling and writing on paper. But having something on your phone or your computer, whether it's an app or it's just your Gmail calendar or whatever it is, have something where you have everything in one place. You have something where you have all your meetings, where you have all your deadlines. This will be able to help you visualize and see how much you have on your plate at any moment. Now, that's just for time management in general. That is one of my biggest things that when I started doing that a lot, I started becoming a lot less stressed because I knew when my projects were due. I knew when I had meetings. I knew what my time frames were. and so I could kind of visualize and see everything. The other thing is using something to prioritize your projects. Now, I personally don't like something like Jira. I used it for many years. I just got exhausted by it. But something to organize your projects. I don't use Jira anymore, but when I was in the workplace, that's what we used. So, if you look at Jira, you can organize projects from most important to least important. Almost always you're going to do the most important projects first. The ones that have the largest business impact, the ones that are the most important, those are the ones that going to be prioritized first. Things that are super low on that priority, you may kick those down the road, right? They don't need to be done right now. Maybe they need to be done, you know, by the end of the quarter or maybe even the end of the year. You have a lot of time to work on this. It's not a high priority. That may be something that you literally just shift over and take off your list. And so now your list is a lot smaller. Instead of having this running list of a hundred things, you just say, "Hey, in this week, here's what I'm prioritizing these two or three projects." Earlier, I mentioned some people just take on too much. And a lot of this has to do with not having the ability to say no. Or maybe they haven't set that boundary within their career, and that can be very difficult. I know I personally did this when I first started. I just wanted to take on as much as I could. I wanted to show people that I knew what I was doing. I also didn't really know when I was supposed to say no. Could I even say no to this project? Could I say no to this co-orker? I don't know. But I can tell you right now, you do have the ability to say no. Now, I wouldn't start doing this right off the bat, right? You get a new job and you get in there and they assign you your first project and you're like, "No, I'm not doing it. I have to protect my time. You don't have anything on your plate." But as you start getting an actual workload, as you start getting a bigger case load, then you can start saying no to certain projects depending on their importance and depending on if that's something that you can reasonably take on in your schedule. And it can look like this. Someone's going to come to you with a request and you're going to be very polite about it and say, "Hey, I can tell that this is really important. I can't take this on right now due to my current workload. This might be something I can get to in the next two or 3 weeks." You're not saying no to it forever. You may even validate that yes, this needs to get done, but you're saying I can do it right now. This is maybe something I can get to in several weeks. One thing I want to mention, and this is super important, is that in data positions oftent times people see you as ad hoc generators. They're just going to come to you with a request and they expect you to do it. It's just everything and anything. I've seen it a million times. They come to you and they're like, "Hey, can you pull this data from this and this and this?" Then put it into a report. Just, you know, send it to me by the end of the day. And sometimes you'll be like, "Yeah, sure." Or you'll be like, "No, I can't do that." But what actually comes out of your mouth is, "Yeah, okay. All right, I guess." And you know, you hope they pick up on that tone or that sarcasm or whatever it is. But most of the time, unless this is coming from like a senior director or seale exec, these ad hoc requests typically aren't very important. And so a lot of these times when people come to these oneoff little requests, you can say no. You can say no, I can't get to that. You know, maybe next week, maybe the week after, maybe Josh can look at that because Josh doesn't have much on his plate right now. There are definitely ways to handle that, but you don't have to say yes to all these little requests that take up so much time that really aren't super important. If there's only one lesson that you really grab on to and really apply to your life, let it be this one in this module because I promise you this one will make or break your career or it'll make or break your experience at that company. Hello everybody. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about self-awareness. Now, this is a tough one for a lot of people, myself included. I will say when I first got into just data in general, I was not the most self-aware person in several areas. I've grown in this area specifically a lot. And I'll give you just a quick example. I always thought of myself as a very good communicator. Early on, I was like, "Yeah, I communicate well. Like, of course, everybody communicates fine. Like, there's no issues here." So, when I got into meetings, I thought I was doing okay, but I didn't have much self-awareness in this area because I was actually not very good. This was a weakness of mine as well as just being social in general. I kind of thought I would be okay working in an office from 9 to5 and I thought I wouldn't be drained at the end of the day but I was I was just exhausted and so my communication skills and my self-awareness and you know just my social ability were not the best and I wasn't super aware of it and that was very draining on me as a whole. So in order to be self-aware, in order to improve you kind of need to look at yourself and be like what are my strengths and weaknesses? Where do I really excel? Maybe it is communication. Maybe that's like your absolute best thing, but maybe you're horrible at time management. The worst thing to do, though, is to not be aware that you're bad at time management. I know you know someone like that where you keep looking at them and they're like, "You make horrible relationship decisions. Just horrible." And they're like, "No, I don't." And then every single time they start dating someone and they're in like the worst relationship ever, but they have zero self-awareness. And it is infuriating. You don't want to be that person in the workplace. You want to be aware of what you're good at and what you're not good at. One of the easiest ways to do this in the workplace is to just ask your manager. Say, "Hey manager, here's where I think I really excel. What are some areas that you think I could improve on?" And you can get some feedback from them. You could also go to something like a best friend or a spouse or a girlfriend or boyfriend or something like that. You can go to this person that you trust and say, "Hey, I kind of want to improve on myself. I want to improve in some areas. Where are my blind spots? Where am I not being super self-aware? As long as you can trust that person and get this feedback, it can really help you kind of identify these blind spots so you can become more self-aware. When I was early on, I started to become a little bit more self-aware that presentations weren't my thing. I wasn't very good at them. And so what I did was I went to my manager. I was like, "Hey," his name was Tristan. I was like, "Hey, Tristan. I'm just not doing well in these things. Can you give me some feedback because I want to improve on presentations. I just know I'm not the best at them." And Tristan was able to give me really great feedback. He thought I was doing pretty good, but he absolutely had feedback that I started implementing. And now I think I'm a lot better at presenting than I first was as a data analyst. I will tell you though, I still fail in a lot of areas. But I'm a lot more aware of where I'm not really good anymore. Before I just kind of did things. I didn't know if I was good or bad. I thought I was really good at communication. I thought I was really good at, you know, different things, but I wasn't. And so now I'm just much more self-aware. I still have things I'm not good at, but I'm aware of them. So I do consulting and I'll get into a team and it's a bunch of different people. And some people are going to have strengths that I don't have. So if a certain task or a certain thing comes up, I can say, "Hey, John, you're really good at that. You should be working on that task. That's not my area of expertise." Or, "Hey, we need to present information and gez Josh, you're amazing at presenting. Let's have you lead that presentation." So, I just know my strengths well enough to be like, I am not amazing at this, but I can tell that you are. Let's lean into your strength in your area of expertise. And in other times, I'll lead because that's my area of expertise. So, being self-aware is really important in working in a team and just in working in general. I'm always going to be changing and I'm always going to have different blind spots or I'm going to get better at some things and worse at some things. I'm trying to just be better at everything, but that's not who I am as a person. I don't think that's realistic for most people. So listen, if you have something that you're not good at, kind of own that. It's okay. It's not something that's going to absolutely or destroy you. For example, I am super introverted. It was very tough for me for those first two or three years to get acclimated to working in person 9 to5 every day. That was really tough on me cuz after about 2 hours, I was drained. And I would get home and my wife was like, "Oh my gosh, you need to stop doing this. Like you are killing yourself essentially." But that was an area I was aware of and I started improving on that over time and now I can work 9 to5. I can be in person with people and that doesn't drain me as much. So it is something that you can work on and improve on. But if you're not aware of it, if you don't kind of realistically look at yourself and look at your strengths and your weaknesses, how can you improve on those weaknesses if you don't even know you have weaknesses? So try to just look internal. Try to identify things that you're not the best at. Work on them. But also notice if someone else has that strength in that area you're weak. Let them help you by taking the lead on that and you can learn from it as well. Hello everybody. In this lesson we're going to be talking about work life balance. And this is a skill. This is a soft skill. Has a lot to do with communication and setting boundaries and all these things. But work life balance is very important. It is something that I didn't really have you know at parts of my career and in other parts of my career. And now I have very good work life balance. Even though I work more hours now than I ever have, I have better work life balance than kind of at the start of my career. If you don't know what work life balance is, and I'm sure you do, it's just the balance between how much time you're spending working and how much time you're spending on kind of your real life. That's with your family, with your friends, with your hobbies, with anything else you want to be doing besides just at your computer or at a desk working. If you are spending too much time working and not enough time on yourself, you're going to start going down and it's not good. If you're spending too little time working and you're spending a lot of personal time and not accomplishing anything, that also has negative effects. There is a nice balance where you can get both things done and feel accomplished and feel like you're really being a good member of a team, but also feel fulfilled in your personal life. And that is what we're going to be talking about in general. This isn't always true. depends on the season, the time of the year. But in general, if you spend more time working and you spend less time in your personal life, you're going to feel less fulfilled. You're just going to feel like a robot. You're just going to feel like you're wasting your life. Most of the time, a lot of our fulfillment and where we really feel like our best selves is in our personal life with our hobbies and with our friends and with our family. These are the things that really fuel us. But most people need to work. It is something that drives them. It's something that gives them a purpose outside of their personal life. It also provides money and that is very important in this world. Now, early on I was working at a nonprofit. If you've never worked in a nonprofit, the pay is really low and the expectations are really high. It's not a good trade-off. Usually, if the expectations are really high and the demand for your time and effort is really high, you get paid more. Not at a nonprofit. It's kind of a beautiful irony. And so, I'm working at this job and the job is from 8 to 4. Now, 8 to 4 was my hours because I told them that I had to get off by 4:00 to go pick up my kids from school. And so they were like, "Okay, no problem. Not a big deal." Right? But as I got more into the job, 2 3 4 months go by, more work keeps piling up. I do not have a good work life balance. I have to start going in a little bit early. I have to staying a little bit late. My kids have to spend more time in afterare or sometimes my wife has to go pick them up. And that just did not work for our family. So I did this for several months. But that was not working for me. And so because of this, I ended up just looking for another job because I was like, "This job is not doing it for me. I don't have that work life balance that I really need, especially since I had kids and obligations outside of my work. A lot of this has to do with company culture as well. And sometimes you can't get away for it. Sometimes you don't really even know it's happening until you get into it. So before you get into a job, you can ask about these things, but you won't really know until you get into it. So at the next job that I got, the work life balance was much better. I still worked 8 to 4, but I actually got off at 4:00. and my boss let me get off to go get my kids or go on a school trip or different things. My PTO was quite flexible, but I did set those boundaries pretty early. Even in the interview process, I was like, "Hey, I got a family. This is really important to me. You know, I am a great employee. I'm going to work really hard." But, you know, this is something that I really prioritize in my life. And I will say he respected that. Even though he didn't have kids, he was like, "Hey, listen. I know kids are really important. We want to support you in this." And so even in the interview process, I was talking about setting boundaries. I was talking about prioritizing kind of myself and my life outside of work. And you can do this at any point. You don't have to do at the very beginning. Even if you've been in a job for 5 years, if it's not working for you, you don't have a good work life balance. You can go to them and you can say, "Hey, listen. This isn't working for me. I'm not able to spend as much time with my kids. I'm not feeling fulfilled. I need to be able to set boundaries in this area in order to have a good work life balance." Now, if they can't do that, if they're like, "Hey, listen. You have to do it. You don't have a choice." Then, you know, they don't prioritize you, they're prioritizing the job and the company, and that is okay because that tells you you can go look for another job. So, while you're working in this condition that you don't like, start applying, start looking for another job. Most of the time, if they're a good person, if they're somebody who you know you get along with and you respect, they will try to make that happen. A good employee is good for business. Not every manager, not every company understands that, but that is a real thing. So stand up for yourself. Set those boundaries, set these expectations so that you can have a good work life balance. Now, just one caveat to this is not everybody likes work life balance. Some people don't have a lot of friends or family or hobbies. Their work is what they really find fulfillment in. But even then, you have to set some personal boundaries at that point. You need to say, "Hey, listen. I can't work 12-hour days every day. That's not good for me. I need to go for a walk. I need to get out there. I need to get a dog. Do something outside of that. Something that is good for your mental health. That's just my one small caveat, but not as many people are like that as people who really do want a good work life balance. But if you're one of those people, that is something to consider. Hello everybody and congratulations on completing the soft skills for data professionals course here on Analyst Builder. I hope that this was really helpful and you learned a ton. Saw skills are quite difficult to learn, but hopefully I was able to present it in a way that really helped. I know I shared a ton of personal stories, so I'm hoping that those stories really resonated with you and you're able to improve your soft skills and be ready to apply those soft skills in your job. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback.