Introduction to Data Analysts in New Zealand, a roundup of practical skills even non-data analysts can learn

Attention, aspiring data analysts in New Zealand. I've put together a hands-on curriculum of Google Colab, power queries, visualization techniques, and more that I learned in five weeks at Queenstown QRC as a non-major. A must-read for anyone looking to make a career change in IT

Can non-technical people really do data analytics?

I'm Daniel from the ‘Life in New Zealand' whitepaper, an aspiring data analyst in New Zealand.

I asked myself this question hundreds of times before I started, but the past five weeks at Queenstown QRC have turned that vague fear into conviction.

Today, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of the practical skills you'll learn in the Introduction to Data Analyst course in New Zealand, based on my own experience. If you're thinking about becoming a data analyst, you might be wondering what exactly you'll learn at QRC in Queenstown, New Zealand.

If you want to know more about my story as a data analyst in Queenstown, New Zealand, please read the prequel post below, which will help you understand this post better.

3 key hands-on skills I conquered in 5 weeks

The New Zealand Data Analyst course offered by Queenstown QRC was more structured than I expected. Over the past five weeks, we focused less on the theory of data and more on skills that are immediately useful in the field. Some of the skills we've learned include.

Before we dive into the key techniques above, let's briefly explain the data rotation process below.

Here's the short version of what I learned: I once worked on Airbnb data for Queenstown for an assignment. I'll use this example to illustrate.

Your tutor scrapes the Queenstown Airbnb website. Scrape means scraping all the material on a website. This is called the source (data material).

And then saving that scrape to a CSV or Excel file is what you can think of as an extraction.

The Staging Area is where you open CSV files and more. Think of it as data cleaning: removing duplicate data, filling in blanks, checking for typos, and converting the appropriate data types.

When you're done cleaning your data, move the cleaned data into Power BI (or Tableau). This is called a transfer.

However, you may still find something to fix in your data that you thought was actually completely clean, because you're more likely to spot data errors by looking at a visualized chart than by looking at a file.

You can think of this secondary cleaning and moving it to a dashboard as a load. Think of a dashboard as a place to grab key data, create charts, add your own insights, and tell a story to your audience.

Google Colab (Jupyter Notebook) : Python

Before I started QRC School, I thought I absolutely had to know the programming language Python to analyze data. I didn't, but I knew enough Google Colabfor this purpose.

For now, think of Google Colab as a place to do data cleaning using the language Python.

I actually installed the Jupyter Notebookwhich differs from my Jupyter Notebook installation in that Google Colab uses a cloud server to run AI.

By using AI on a cloud server, you don't need to know Python, you can just type in natural language and the AI will understand and execute it.

You can use the hashtag # and just type in whatever you want. In my case, I asked for the toy_clean.csv file to be imported here.

From the next line, import pandas as pd, onward, I didn't do anything - this is the part where the AI writes and executes the code in Python exactly as I typed it.

Google Colab uses Google's AI, Gemini, and if you press the blue circle there, you can use the AI to write code. It doesn't matter if it's Korean or English. That's why I said you don't need to know Python to utilize Google Colab.

I finished cleaning up the Airbnb CSV files for Queenstown here, and my classmates really followed along with the AI, even though they didn't know Python. It's a good idea to study the Python language beforehand, but don't be intimidated if you haven't. You can do it.

Power Query

Power Query refers to the data modification space and technology used by the Power BI platform.

Google Colab isn't the only place to clean your data, you can also do it in the Power Query editor, as shown above

I actually preferred to do the cleanup work in Colab because I had studied Python beforehand, but Power Query was useful in that regard because I could fix and verify simple fixes right away.

When I first saw Power Query, I thought it looked complicated, but it's actually very similar to using Excel. If you've ever used Excel, you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Power BI

Power BIPower BI is a data analytics and visualization platform created by Microsoft. In New Zealand in particular, many businesses use Power BI for data analytics and visualization as a Tableauis preferred.

This is the Power BI dashboard we created for this assignment analyzing data from Airbnb in Queenstown.

Power BI has so much to offer, I've never been able to use all of it. When I did something new, it worked great, but when I tried to do the same thing again the next day, I couldn't always remember.

Still, I dabbled with the features and learned them one by one.

The three key skills I learned during my five weeks at the Queenstown QRC were the following: the concept of data in the first week, the process of data rotation in the second week, and how to clean data and create dashboards in the third week.

Finalize

Today, we're recapping 3 key skills from our 5 weeks at Queenstown QRC that helped us get started as data analysts in New Zealand.

What I liked about the course was that we talked a lot about why I'm doing this, rather than just making a pretty dashboard.

Because as I continued to talk, I often found myself coming up with reasons for why I was doing this.

Of course, it's also easy to have a discussion on the other side and realize, "Oh, I was wrong," and change direction, so I think I realized how important communication between people is in data analysis.

So if you're thinking about how much do data analysts make in New Zealand and how in-demand are they in the country, here's a post on salaries and demand for the profession in New Zealand.