I had a thought last week while staring at a SQL query that had turned into a monster.
Four hundred lines.
You know the kind.
Nested subqueries, no aliases… oh my!
And it reminded me of something I see with a lot of analysts.
They want to become a Senior Analyst, but they are still doing junior work.
And it has nothing to do with skill. They have the skill.
But they are stuck doing maintenance. They are not improving anything or being proactive.
Instead, they are:
Cleaning the same dataset every week.
Fixing the same Excel sheet again.
Explaining the same dashboard to the same stakeholder for the tenth time.
That is not senior work.
That is being the data janitor.
A lot of people think the next step in their career is learning another tool.
More Python.
Another certificate.
Another course.
But that’s not the whole story.
The real change is when you stop thinking about answers and start thinking about systems.
Let me explain with an example…
Most analysts can write a JOIN.
But not all of them will ask:
“Is this query going to be expensive every time it runs?”
Or
“Is there a cleaner way to structure this?”
Once your work starts feeding dashboards or models, that stuff matters a lot.
The analysts who move up fastest usually get comfortable with things like:
• Window functions for trends and comparisons.
• CTEs so queries stay readable instead of turning into a mess.
• Query performance so dashboards do not take 20 seconds to load.
You stop being the person pulling numbers.
You become the person who builds how the numbers are produced.
If that is something you want to get better at, one platform I often point people to is DataCamp.
The nice part is you can learn something and immediately try it. Their annual plans are currently 50 percent off if you were planning to study this year anyway.
Also…
If you use DATAWITHSARAH at checkout on Maven Analytics, you can get 20 percent off their plans.
So learn what you need and start applying those things to your work, and be a builder, not just someone who does what is asked.
New blog post coming later this week, so keep an eye on your inbox!
Till next time,
— Sarah
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—Sarah
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Is there a cleaner way to structure this is often a question I see missing. The focus is generally on getting the output fast, at the request of stakeholders. Often, time is not allocated to going back and improving it, or take a pause in the process to built the structure to be more efficient.