- 1 hour ago
Strong technical skills can help you land a data analyst interview, but succeeding on the job also means communicating clearly, managing time, and working with other teams. This practical career discussion compares hard skills like SQL, Excel, Python, data cleaning, and visualization with soft skills such as collaboration, critical thinking, and relationship-building.
Learn how the balance shifts from job applications to everyday data analytics work—and why the skills needed can change as you move into management or a more technical role. This data analyst career advice is useful for aspiring analysts, career changers, and anyone preparing for a tech interview or their first analytics job. Explore data analyst skills, hard skills vs. soft skills, workplace communication, and career development in data analytics.
Learn how the balance shifts from job applications to everyday data analytics work—and why the skills needed can change as you move into management or a more technical role. This data analyst career advice is useful for aspiring analysts, career changers, and anyone preparing for a tech interview or their first analytics job. Explore data analyst skills, hard skills vs. soft skills, workplace communication, and career development in data analytics.
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00:00What's going on, everybody?
00:01Welcome back to another video.
00:02Today, we're gonna be talking about hard skills
00:04versus soft skills to see which one is more important.
00:13Now, just so we're all on the same page,
00:15hard skills refers to the technical skills
00:17or the job-related knowledge that you need
00:19in order to perform your job.
00:21So it's not just knowing a skill like SQL or Excel or Tableau,
00:25it's knowing how to use those.
00:27So data cleaning, data manipulation, data collection,
00:30data visualization, all of those things.
00:32On the other hand, soft skills are things
00:33like your personal traits and characteristics,
00:36things that make you, you.
00:37These are things that are often linked to your personality.
00:39So things like your communication style,
00:41how driven you are, your critical thinking skills,
00:44and things like that.
00:45Now that we're all on the same page,
00:46I wanna take a step back and give you some context
00:48to why I'm making this video.
00:50Now to the shock of many of you,
00:51and I've talked to a lot of people about this,
00:53is I would actually consider myself
00:54a lot more of an introvert than an extrovert.
00:57So when I got into data analytics,
00:58I had this idea that I would mostly be on my computer,
01:01kind of working in my own silo.
01:03And I absolutely love that.
01:04I was super excited to just be able to work on a computer
01:07and just kind of recharge,
01:09because that's how introverts work.
01:11We kind of recharge when we're by ourselves.
01:13And that is not exactly how I would say
01:16my career has ended up.
01:17I genuinely thought I really just needed to know
01:19the technical skills in order to be a good data analyst.
01:21And so I think I had some pretty unrealistic expectations
01:24when I was first starting out as a data analyst.
01:27So this video is to help you understand the hard skills
01:29versus the technical skills
01:30and see where they are very important in the workplace.
01:33So let's start off with talking about hard skills.
01:34I'm gonna kind of break it up into two sections.
01:36One is actually getting a job
01:37and then when you actually have the job.
01:40So when you're getting a job,
01:41hard skills are extremely important.
01:44You can have the best personality in the world
01:46and you will never get an interview
01:47if you don't have the hard skills.
01:49So if you don't have things like SQL or Excel or Power BI,
01:52whatever that data analyst job is hiring for,
01:54if you don't have those hard skills,
01:56you're not gonna get an interview.
01:58Now, once you actually land an interview,
02:00you're face-to-face with a hiring manager
02:01and they're asking you about these things,
02:03your soft skills do play a much bigger part
02:05because then they're wanting to get to know
02:07a little bit more about you, how you work,
02:09how good of a culture fit you're going to be,
02:11as well as make sure you actually know
02:13these technical skills.
02:14Now, which one is more important
02:16when you're actually trying to get a job?
02:17Is it the hard skills or the soft skills?
02:19Here are my genuine thoughts on this
02:21and you may or may not agree,
02:23but these are my genuine thoughts.
02:24I think that hard skills are more important
02:26when you're trying to get a job.
02:28You may just have a lackluster personality.
02:30You may not be super outgoing.
02:32You may not have the biggest smile
02:34or tell the best stories
02:35or be the best communicator in the world,
02:37but you can absolutely still get a job
02:39if you have good technical skills.
02:41I can't say I'm as positive for the other way around.
02:44I myself was in that exact place.
02:46I had a pretty good personality,
02:48but I would say that my technical skills
02:50were kind of lacking,
02:51but I kind of just got lucky
02:52and somebody took a chance on me and that happens.
02:55But if I had really good technical skills
02:57and my personality was not as good,
02:58I most likely would have been hired a lot faster.
03:01So in my opinion,
03:02hard skills are about 65 or 75% of getting a job
03:05when you're first starting out.
03:06So now let's talk about
03:07when you're actually working in the job
03:08because getting a job can take several months
03:10or even up to a year,
03:11but you can be working in that job for three,
03:13five, or even 10 years.
03:15Now, this is the part that really shocked me
03:17when I got my first data analyst job,
03:18because I thought they would take a few weeks to train me
03:21and then they would just give me work
03:22and I would do it all by myself.
03:24And I was really looking forward to that
03:25because previously I had a very, very draining job
03:28where I was talking with people all day
03:30and I kind of was hoping that wasn't the case.
03:33But to my dismay, I learned that the real work
03:37is super involved.
03:38You need to be able to communicate
03:39with a lot of different people.
03:40Now at every single data related job that I've had,
03:43we'll have daily meetups.
03:44You'll be working with non-technical teams,
03:46technical teams, stakeholders, clients,
03:49and then just internally.
03:50So you meet with your team to make sure
03:53that you can get the work done in the timeframe
03:54that you've been given.
03:55And that just blew my mind.
03:57I was like, how can you have so many meetings
03:59about so many things?
04:00When are you going to get your work done?
04:02So I personally had to learn a lot of soft skills
04:04when I first started out, like time management
04:06and how to communicate to different teams
04:08and different people like technical versus non-technical.
04:11I kind of had to learn how to communicate with those people.
04:14So these soft skills became extremely important
04:17when I actually got my first job.
04:19Another thing about working on a team,
04:20and I think this surprises a lot of people,
04:22is that you really need to work with these other people
04:24on your team to get your work done.
04:26So you can't just do everything yourself.
04:29Sometimes you're going to have to go to a data engineer
04:31because data isn't coming in properly
04:32and you'll have to work through that.
04:34Or you'll have to go to your manager and say,
04:35Hey, I'm having trouble communicating with this client
04:38because they're not emailing me back.
04:39What would you like me to do?
04:40I think that's what shocks a lot of people.
04:42You rely on a lot of different people,
04:44a lot of different teams in order to just get your work done.
04:47So you really have to work on and maintain
04:49professional relationships when you're at work.
04:51You have to make sure that that data engineer
04:53that you're working with isn't pissed off at you
04:55because you didn't get them something
04:57or you didn't do something
04:58or you weren't communicating with them.
04:59You have to make sure that you maintain those relationships
05:01because honestly, if you don't
05:03and all those relationships start to fail,
05:05you're not going to be able to get your work done.
05:07Again, I'm just putting a lot of emphasis on this
05:09because there's so many people who don't realize
05:12how much work it takes just to maintain those relationships
05:15and communicate and really work with other people
05:18in a tech job.
05:19It's just so much more involved than you think.
05:22So soft skills in the workplace are extremely important
05:25and so are hard skills.
05:26You absolutely need to know how to actually do your job
05:29when you get your work.
05:31So a lot of the hard skills that I was working with
05:33when I was a data analyst was along the data collection side of things.
05:36So I was doing a lot of data collection,
05:37a lot of data transformation, a lot of data cleaning as well.
05:41With all those things, I was using software like Azure
05:44and Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Excel, Python.
05:47I was using mostly software, but of course, hardware as well
05:50in order to get that work done.
05:51So knowing the hard skill itself is really important.
05:54You can have it on your resume.
05:55You've learned it.
05:56You've taken a bunch of courses,
05:57but now you're actually in the job
05:59and you need to know how to implement those hard skills.
06:02That's where you'll learn just a lot of that on the job.
06:04So you'll work with all these different teams.
06:06You'll see how the data flows and how it's cleaned
06:08and visualized and used in products.
06:10And you'll learn these things as you go along.
06:12Even though I just put a lot of emphasis on soft skills,
06:15I still believe that hard skills are more important
06:18when you're in the workplace.
06:19It's really close though.
06:20I'd give hard skills a 55 or a 60% split
06:24with the soft skills,
06:25because hard skills are how you actually get your work done.
06:29And that's where you spend most of your time.
06:31It depends on the week though, because some weeks it may be,
06:34the soft skills are a little bit more important
06:35because you have a lot of meetings.
06:37But in general, I would just say that you have to know
06:40how to do your work by yourself.
06:42And then working with other teams to get your job done
06:44is just a really important part as well.
06:47But I would say slightly less important.
06:49This is why I think you see a lot of really intelligent people
06:51who are super good at the hard skills,
06:53do really well in their careers,
06:55even though they don't have all of the soft skills.
06:57They may just be okay with communication and problem solving,
07:00all those other soft skills,
07:01but they're super good with the technical skills
07:04and they can go really far in their career.
07:06Now, this is one of the last things that I wanted to mention
07:08with hard skills versus soft skills,
07:10is that certain jobs require more hard skills
07:13than soft skills and vice versa.
07:15For example, I became a manager and honestly,
07:18it was mostly soft skills.
07:20I almost was doing no coding.
07:21I would help people, you know,
07:23I would say, okay, here's where your mistakes are.
07:25So I do a little bit of QA, high level hard skills,
07:28but most of my job became soft skills.
07:32So those hard skills and those soft skills
07:33helped me get to the manager position.
07:35But when I actually got there, it was mostly soft skills.
07:38And a lot of it was just delegating
07:40and making sure that they were getting the work done.
07:42And it wasn't me actually using my hard skills
07:45to make sure that things were getting done on time.
07:47So that's just one example.
07:48And that's kind of where my career took me,
07:50but I could have gone down the path of a senior
07:52or a technical lead analyst, but I didn't do that.
07:55And that probably would have been a lot more heavy
07:58on the technical side rather than the soft skills.
08:01Now you may or may not agree,
08:02everybody has a different perspective on this.
08:04I personally think that hard skills and technical skills
08:06are a little bit more important than the soft skills.
08:09But of course, if you have terrible soft skills,
08:11it's gonna make it really, really difficult
08:13when you're actually in the job.
08:15So I hope this helped
08:16with just having more realistic expectations.
08:18I know myself, I just had really bad expectations.
08:21I didn't have anybody ever talk to me about this.
08:24And so my expectation was it was mostly hard skills.
08:27And I didn't prep, or I was not mentally prepared
08:30for all the soft skills that were needed.
08:32And I built those up over the years.
08:34So if you're more like me, don't worry.
08:36You can kind of build those skills up over time.
08:38I used to get exhausted of just being around people
08:41and using soft skills after about like an hour or two.
08:44Now I can go almost a full day.
08:46It was definitely a genuine skill that I had to learn.
08:49That's just not what I used to do.
08:51That's not what I was used to.
08:52And so, you know, if you were like me,
08:54and that is really difficult for you,
08:56and you don't have those soft skills,
08:58those are things that you can learn, just like a hard skill.
09:00You can learn to be more outgoing.
09:01You can learn to communicate more effectively.
09:03These are things that you can work on.
09:05They just take time and it takes practice.
09:07And so don't give up on this career
09:09because you don't have soft skills,
09:11or you're not super outgoing,
09:12or you don't have, you know, a great personality,
09:14or however you want to characterize yourself.
09:16Don't give up on it just because it's difficult,
09:18or it's tough for you right now.
09:20That's absolutely something that you can work to
09:22and get better at.
09:22So with that being said,
09:23I hope that you enjoyed this video.
09:25If you did, be sure to like and subscribe below,
09:27and I will see you in the next video.