Business Intelligence Career Master Plan

Book description

Learn the foundations of business intelligence, sector trade-offs, organizational structures, and technology stacks while mastering coursework, certifications, and interview success strategies Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Key Features

  • Identify promising job opportunities and ideal entry point into BI
  • Build, design, implement, and maintain BI systems successfully
  • Ace your BI interview with author's expert guidance on certifications, trainings, and courses

Book Description

Navigating the challenging path of a business intelligence career requires you to consider your expertise, interests, and skills. Business Intelligence Career Master Plan explores key skills like stacks, coursework, certifications, and interview advice, enabling you to make informed decisions about your BI journey.

You’ll start by assessing the different roles in BI and matching your skills and career with the tech stack. You’ll then learn to build taxonomy and a data story using visualization types. Additionally, you’ll explore the fundamentals of programming, frontend development, backend development, software development lifecycle, and project management, giving you a broad view of the end-to-end BI process. With the help of the author’s expert advice, you’ll be able to identify what subjects and areas of study are crucial and would add significant value to your skill set.

By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to make an informed decision on which of the myriad paths to choose in your business intelligence journey based on your skill set and interests.

What you will learn

  • Understand BI roles, roadmap, and technology stack
  • Accelerate your career and land your first job in the BI industry
  • Build the taxonomy of various data sources for your organization
  • Use the AdventureWorks database and PowerBI to build a robust data model
  • Create compelling data stories using data visualization
  • Automate, templatize, standardize, and monitor systems for productivity

Who this book is for

This book is for BI developers and business analysts who are passionate about data and are looking to advance their proficiency and career in business intelligence. While foundational knowledge of tools like Microsoft Excel is required, having a working knowledge of SQL, Python, Tableau, and major cloud providers such as AWS or GCP will be beneficial.

Table of contents

  1. Business Intelligence Career Master Plan
  2. Foreword
  3. Contributors
  4. About the authors
  5. About the reviewers
  6. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Download the example code files
    5. Conventions used
    6. Get in touch
    7. Share your thoughts
    8. Download a free PDF copy of this book
  7. Chapter 1: Breaking into the BI World
    1. Where to start?
    2. BI roles
      1. Problem solving
      2. Specific industry knowledge and subject matter expertise
      3. Communication skills
      4. Statistical analysis
      5. Technical knowledge
      6. Business acumen
      7. Keep up with innovation
      8. Potential entrances to the BI world
    3. BI roadmap
      1. ETL developers
      2. Data architects
      3. Data modelers
      4. BI developers
      5. Data scientists
    4. Technology solutions stack
    5. Non-technical data analysis
      1. Case 1
      2. Case 2
      3. Case 3
      4. Case 4
      5. Case 5
    6. Summary
  8. Chapter 2: How to Become Proficient in Analyzing Data
    1. Building a taxonomy of your data sources
    2. How to use a BI tool to explore data
    3. Understanding your data needs
    4. Summary
  9. Chapter 3: How to Talk Data
    1. Presenting data
      1. Know your audience
      2. Choose the right visualization
      3. Keep it simple
      4. Use color and formatting effectively
      5. Provide context
      6. Tell a story
      7. High-level dashboards
      8. Operational reports
      9. Talking to stakeholders
    2. Data visualization taxonomy
      1. Bar charts
      2. Line charts
      3. Pie charts
      4. Scatter plots
      5. Area charts
      6. Heat maps
      7. Bubble charts
      8. Gauge charts
      9. Tree maps
      10. Box plots
    3. Advanced data visualizations
      1. Sankey diagrams
      2. Bullet charts
      3. Taxonomy diagrams
      4. Pareto diagrams
      5. Decision tree for picking a visualization
    4. Storytelling
    5. Summary
  10. Chapter 4: How To Crack the BI Interview Process
    1. Finding the right interview
    2. Building a business problem and data solutions matrix
    3. Potential business cases and solutions
      1. Teamwork
      2. Customer service
      3. Adaptability
      4. Time management
      5. Communication
      6. Motivation and values
    4. A hypothetical BI interview process and what to expect
      1. General business intelligence interview questions
      2. Scenario-based BI questions
      3. Business case study questions
      4. SQL business intelligence interview questions
      5. Database design business intelligence questions
      6. Python business intelligence interview questions
    5. Summary
  11. Chapter 5: Business Intelligence Landscape
    1. The current landscape and the most effective technologies to study
      1. Collecting data
      2. Storing data
      3. Cleaning and preparing data
      4. Analyzing data with BI tools
      5. Focusing on user experience
      6. The use of AI
    2. BI developer versus BI architect versus data engineer versus data modeler versus business analyst
    3. Business acumen
    4. Increased productivity
      1. Automation
      2. Templating
      3. Standardization
      4. Monitoring systems
      5. Efficient team management
    5. Summary
  12. Chapter 6: Improving Data Proficiency or Subject Matter Expertise
    1. Data proficiency
      1. Concluding thoughts
    2. Subject matter expertise
      1. Concluding thoughts
    3. Data behavior in different business units
      1. Data behavior in marketing
      2. Data behavior in sales
      3. Data behavior in finance and accounting
      4. Data behavior in operations
      5. Data behavior in human resources
    4. Data behavior in academia
    5. Analytical thinking and problem-solving techniques
      1. Problem-solving
    6. Leveraging online tools for problem-solving
      1. Web (Google) search
      2. Stack Overflow
      3. AI chatbots (ChatGPT/Bard)
    7. Summary
  13. Chapter 7: Business Intelligence Education
    1. Academic programs, training courses, certifications, and books
      1. Academic programs
      2. Training courses and certificates
      3. Data architecture books
      4. Data modeling books
      5. Data analysis and visualization books
    2. Summary
  14. Chapter 8: Beyond Business Intelligence
    1. Business analytics
      1. Cross-pillar reporting
      2. Measuring your BI success
      3. Executive briefing books
      4. Customer-focused processes
      5. Automation
      6. BA final thoughts
    2. Data science
    3. Data exploration
    4. Summary
  15. Chapter 9: Hands-On Data Wrangling and Data Visualization
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Data analysis using Python
    3. Data wrangling and visualization with Python
      1. Step 1 – loading the dataset
      2. Step 2 – an initial exploration of the dataset
      3. Step 3 – remove duplicate rows
      4. Step 4 – cleaning and transforming data
      5. Step 5 – saving the cleaned dataset
      6. Step 6 – load the cleaned dataset
      7. Step 7 – creating visualizations to summarize the data
    4. Tableau for data visualization
    5. Tableau dashboard hands-on
    6. Summary
    7. Conclusion
  16. Index
    1. Why subscribe?
  17. Other Books You May Enjoy
    1. Packt is searching for authors like you
    2. Share your thoughts
    3. Download a free PDF copy of this book

Product information

  • Title: Business Intelligence Career Master Plan
  • Author(s): Eduardo Chavez, Danny Moncada
  • Release date: August 2023
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781801077958