Why Business Analytics Doesn’t Necessarily Require Coding: Debunking the Myth
Many people believe that learning to code is essential to becoming proficient in business analytics. It is true that coding can greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of data analysis processes. It can also help identify patterns, create visualizations, and automate reports. However, it’s a myth that coding is always a necessity in business analytics. In fact, there are many tools available today that can help professionals analyze data more easily and efficiently, without needing to learn complex coding skills.
Tools that negate the need for extensive coding
Tools such as Tableau, PowerBI, and Qlikview have made it possible for business analysts to create complex reports, dashboards and visualizations with minimal coding. These tools allow analysts to connect to data sources, create data models, and use drag-and-drop functionality to create reports that are easy to understand.
Another notorious example is Excel, often overlooked as an analytics tool. Excel provides a wide range of functionalities that can be used to perform analysis, including pivot tables, functions and charts. It remains one of the most widely used tools in the business analytics world.
When coding is required
While it is possible to perform data analysis without coding, it’s important to acknowledge that coding may be necessary for complex or highly customized projects. Examples include building a custom predictive model, scoring customer lifetime value or customizing algorithms to identify specific patterns that are unique to a business. In these cases, knowledge of coding may be essential to ensure the best performance of the solution.
The benefits of learning coding for business analytics professionals
While coding may not always be necessary, learning to code can still be beneficial for business analytics professionals. The ability to customize and optimize algorithms, or to develop your own specific models can be a powerful tool in the data analyst’s arsenal. As data sets grow larger and more complex, knowing how to code can help analysts better manage and process data.
Conclusion
In conclusion, coding is not always a necessity for business analytics. With the advent of powerful data visualization and analytics tools, analysts can now perform extensive data analysis tasks without ever writing a single line of code. However, coding still has its place in the field and can provide an added advantage to analysts who are willing to invest the time to learn it. Regardless of the decision to learn to code or not, it’s important to focus on key analytics skills such as data wrangling, data cleaning, business context and insights generation which are the core set of criteria of any successful analyst.
