Love Excel but work in Operations?

Way more common than you think, trust me when I say you are not alone. To be brutally honest, starting in operational roles before moving into specialist areas is always a benefit and never a curse. Don’t feel down about where you start, even if you dream about being a software engineer, cyber/security analyst or machine learning research scientist that all seem so specialist.

While I’m not any of those things above, I’ve had the pleasure to work with and mentor a few individuals who were exactly this. At the start of their careers, haven’t been pivoted yet so aren’t on a junior analyst track.

My best observation: Just take baby steps. Not because it’s a soft bit of advice that makes you feel safe and remain positive but rather because by taking baby steps, you are banking on the theory of marginal gains. A strong, winning strategy in anything.

So some baby steps, let’s go small and incremental. First off scrap the bootcamp, you don’t need to listen to and learn about data in 10-days, you need to build a relationship with the idea of data. You have the rest of your career to learn about data when you start doing it everyday.

Step by Step

You love excel? Test yourself. — This will alone wont get you a job but it might make you the best in your area which sets you up for future jobs.

I’m not a pro, esport level excel user but I feel pretty comfortable. Make sure you are past the point of PivotTables and PowerQuery and you’re at the point of knowing pretty niche keybinds, you’re comfortable with the stacked formulas, you understand the things excel does in other parts of the office suite etc. Get confident not just good.

Next go for SQL. — This alone will secure you junior analyst jobs.

You don’t have to be amazing at SQL but you need to be able to read it, understand what its doing and be fairly confident in writing it yourself. Nowadays you’ll be able to use GPT and Alex Freberg’s analystbuilder.com to get good. Make sure you are comfortable know Joins, SSF and CTEs.

Bring in some Viz — Wont get you a job on it’s own unless you really take to it but it will make you stronger about how you think and see data.

Pick either PowerBI or Tableau. Save the cool stuff like d3 and Ploty until later on. Get good at building reports & dashboard that actually do things rather than just KPI Card, Time Series Chart. Think about what the dashboard is showing, how does this all relate, how clean do all the visuals fit together including colours, who would be using it and what would they want to see etc. This should come a lot easier to you than you think, the technical side can be tricky but not too complex and your operational experience will make understanding the design theory a lot better. You’ll finally understand why some teams operate differently.

At this point, you’ll probably start to feel out the right track.