Business Analyst vs Data Analyst

Business Analyst vs Data Analyst

Business Analysts can be placed between IT and Business sectors, since their primary objective is to help companies implement data-driven decisions. Hence, they are required to understand the sector they are working for, their goals and strategies, to be able to analyze the large sets of data coming from it.

With regards to their set of skills, they have:

• Strong programming skills, in particular Phyton, R, and SQL;
• Data visualization skills (Tableau, Power BI, Excel);
• Data cleaning;
• Data management.
• Machine learning techniques.

If Business Analysts main duty is to analyze vast amounts of data to address the business’ needs, Data Analysts are required to manipulate these data - by sorting, cleaning, and analyzing them - to get useful insights.

For this reasons, their set of skills involve also key aspects of business:

• Programming languages, like Python and SQL;
• Agile methodologies;
• BI tools to create dashboards and reports.

As for their educational background, they both tend to hold a degree in the Stem field, which could be followed by a Economics/Business specialization.

Source: https://www.theforage.com/blog/careers/business-analyst-vs-data-analyst