What are the 3 most important skills of an analytics translator?
Analytics translators have the goal of integrating analytics capabilities in a company. They should identify value cases for the business, and they should help deploy data-driven applications to support or automate intelligent decision-making.
The role is new and not yet well defined. Attention, it should be clear that this role or related roles will continuously evolve, and as well the role name might change.
The top domains for an analytics translater are fluent speaking and understanding of business know-how, IT constraints, and analytics understanding.
Especially understanding the domain know-how of your vertical (industry sector) is of high relevance. Independent of the industry sector, like retail, manufacturing, information technology, finance, or others, you have to understand the business’s logic, customers, and market. I compiled over 16 basic skills in my lecture The analytics translator — Data Science Career
However, the essential skills are three soft skills.
After conducting several interviews and rethinking critical skills, I would like to highlight the mandatory three soft factors to become an excellent translater. Since every translator will have to moderate and translate between people, it requires multiple soft skills; these three seem most crucial. The three skills are mandatory for this role and any other career path you will take.
Top skill number one: Empathy
Problems are everywhere, and these need to be solved. Part of your job and one key competence you have to develop is identifying relevant or human-centered issues.
Problems are everywhere which need to be solved. The path from framing a problem to solving it is complicated. Note that most problems can not be found by data analytics but by careful listening to people. You have to understand their needs and pains.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the frustration of others when using bad digital products.
Top skill number two: Resilience
You will experience many situations that might be frustrating since, during the translation and mandatory change processes, you will experience a lot of resistance. Not giving up while continuously challenging the status quo can be exhausting.
Try and fail, present and re-write your story, model and re-modeling will be part of your job. Don’t give up and develop a gift to recover quickly from difficult situations.
Top skill number three: Collaboration mindset
It is all about teamwork and engaging with many stakeholders.
Only a strong team delivers significant results; The grouping of the right skills paired with an inspiring goal is vital for success.
There are often some lone fighters in the business, IT, or analytics who think they can solve everything by themself. Try to balance the level of knowledge. Involve diverse skills and multiple parties across the business, IT, and analytic know-how and ensure working together. Yes, we will solve it together.
Push your limits is vital for success!
The most successful analytics people are not motivated by reaching one particular goal. They’re motivated by pushing the limits into the distance over and over again. Leaving this role by heart, you will be continuously in a world of new topics and change.
All additional mandatory skills are highlighted in my lecture: The analytics translator — Data Science Career
Originally published at https://theanalyticstranslator.org on July 20, 2021.
