Career in Digital Analytics
No one in my generation dreamed of a career in digital analytics. It wasn’t an option. We dreamed of being engineers and doctors and, if you were like me, an astronaut.
My aspirations moved away from normal expectations. Instead, I grew enamored with the internet. An infinite creative canvas, uniquely accessible and measurable, with digital metrics — hits, sessions, users — that quantified and, thereby, empowered the impact of online investments.
In other words, I started to become a digital marketer.
We can’t analyze what we can’t track, and tracking requires a technical infrastructure. Anyone can look at a graph, but only analysts with strong technical skills can cull the data to create it or understand the underlying processes to interpret it.
But developing those skills is intimidating. Analytics was not an available course or major on university campuses so most of us were self-taught. That’s one of the things that many of the experts referenced.
There are many schools of analytics and for a long time, the skills necessary for web analytics focused mainly around the collection, or how do we get the information off the page and into a tool like Google Analytics. Changes over the years have made this part of analytics easier, as website platforms have risen in popularity and tag management tools like Google Tag Manager have lowered the technical barriers of entry.
While knowledge of front-end technologies is still vital, the shift is being made to focusing on analysis and evaluation or mining the data for results, which overlaps more broadly with other analytics focuses. While this shift couldn’t necessarily have been predicted, this shows the need for deeper technical skills.
Most of us learned technical skills the hard way: break it, read Stack Overflow threads, attempt to fix it. This mini degree could have saved me such frustration
Understanding how things work is so important, even if I’m not the one writing code. Especially if I’m not writing the code. Regardless of the role, I will need to be able to work with others to evangelize analytics and empathize with their goals.
Another reason, marketers and developers have an infamously complicated relationship that can feel more like a House of Cards episode than anything exhibiting teamwork. Analysts with a technical background can be valuable mediators between the two, serving as a trusted advisor with expertise in both areas.
Resumes in a stack begin to blur after the second dozen. Intangibles like enthusiasm and thought leadership don’t jump off the page like black-inked experience. Recruiters even take shortcuts to uncover it.
Almost all of us have personal projects that have added valuable experience with experimentation, promotion, and skills beyond their official job titles.
More importantly, varied experience leads to wisdom. Anyone can learn to write a line of code or create a Google Analytics filter. It’s the stories surrounding the lesson that add value to our career and extend our trajectory.
Acquiring knowledge is a science. Turning it into an experience is an art, and that is a learned skill that takes most people years to develop. Often it’s not something a professional can do on their own, in their own head. It requires the right environment. Sometimes it’s the right peer network. Sometimes it’s the right company. Sometimes it’s the right clients. Sometimes the right education and learning path.