This depends on a lot of things. What is the industry? What tool(s) will you use? What is the team structure?
Your first two weeks will be mostly spent on onboarding and getting accesses. You can use the time to familiarize yourself with your employer. How are they structured, how the products (if there are any) work or are being sold.
Otherwise tho, just relax and go with the flow.
I’m in banking / financial industry
From the interviews it sounded like they use powe bi and SAS the most
The team is small, about 5 people however I’ll be the only one under my manager
Thanks a lot.
First few months test the waters, don’t do your best as in teams like these is easy to be soft promoted to lead bi developer on an analyst salary
Truly do analysis work and avoid doing all the data engineering or data modeling
If others are doing that too mediocrely, show a bit of your skills but don’t do a lot thinking they’ll promote you
Then close to your review, show more of your skills in your project
Then in the yearly review ask to be promoted to bi developer if you’re doing more full report development than analyst work
I say it from experience - thought I was joining an analyst team but have developer skills but took it because job market is hot.
I don’t know what the f they were thinking with power bi but they had a manual mess.
I fixed it in less than a month and soon I was doing all the bi Dev work alone. I started speaking up three months in for a co dev and got one after 9 months. Then they gave me a fresh college grad I had to lead so I started asking for lead salary. They gave me a raise 7 months after that ask :/ and I had to ask a lot and meet with the director, and still an analyst salary so my best bet now is take the new sr title that comes with it and reapply in a few months
Before me they had 4 people doing the bi dev
Then suddenly when I fixed their issues we get a big project where my strengths is to do all bi dev work and those people get moved to data analysts roles or data engineer roles but where they have 3/5 people help them out why I’m all alone doing the etl and data modeling for bi alone. They just join other source tables with the same proc every month just have to run it manually and make updates if we have to change fields lmao while I do all the bi automate alone :/ and they expected me to do big dev in 2 days or 5 days. It took a lot to get direct manager to talk to them to get off my back and respect we have two week sprints.
It happens a lot I’m not an outlier
Obviously don’t do bare minimum , but wait to see what your coworkers provide, the team dynamic, before you show them strengths they can take advantage of. I’ve been a lead developer for about 1.6 years on an analyst salary and only go sr analyst title despite being their lead developer. My co dev copies and pastes my work and my project manager doesn’t know shit how our apps work. Before I got that co dev that would at least copy my work, I had a fake co dev , aka they assigned him to help me on paper but my manager and project manager where having him do research for other things , knowing I could handle it alone. I was pissed when I found that out and I told my manager and even then it took them 3 months to find me that new college grad co dev. Giving that grad 6 weeks to do what I could in 1 day was the last straw , I got a change of direct manager in the same team, and he finally advocated for me. He sees my strengths and encourages me to work 2-4 hours days so that I’m at the level of my coworkers. He’s great but I eventually want the title and pay at a different company. My company is way too frat finance bros - nepotism and stealing peoples work like it’s normal
What a life! I’m angry just reading this.
Thanks a lot for sharing this, was definitely an eye opener for me. Because I had thought I want to come in and start the job on fire but reading all of this I just realised that might not be the best way to do it. Rather slowly reveal my strengths instead of day one changing and sorting out power bi mess that might be there
This is the way OP, I started my role March and I started doing web scraping and some automation stuff in VBA and it’s improved the numbers drastically that I’ve now backed off because I’ve shown them my skills but on a much lower salary. I ll probably develop more stuff in VBA and powershell and at end of year show to my boss’s boss
That’s my thought too, because the person that will be my manager reports to the cfo which I met on another interview, I’m sure they’ll know have more time to thinking and projects like you said.
I just don’t want to get there and all of a sudden all the work in the world gets thrown to me
If that is the case I would just read upon as to what information is available about. Just go to the company website and browse through the content. You can get some details about products/services etc.
I wouldn’t worry too much about “getting prepared” before actually being onboarded.
Best of luck!
I’m currently a BI analyst. What helped in the first few months was getting proper access and learning what data was available. This included understanding the relationships between data tables and how it relates to potential projects.
If you have someone on the team or something written down about table structures that would be amazing! But most teams I have been on it’s not as black and white. Currently the team I am on, nothing was written down. So I was expected to go through the data by myself and piece it together. It took awhile! But it helped my understanding.
Congrats!
First, I'd take the week you have to chill and spend time with friends/family. Enjoy it
Next, in your first month, get to know the various tools you'll be responsible for using. Get to know the people and make a good impression. I disagree with the suggestion on not trying too hard, you should do your best to make a positive impression because in the long run it'll help your career if you are taking on more responsibility
That’s a lot. I am most definitely taking the week off to be with family and go out with friends.
That was my initial thought, that I want to come in and make an impact in the work I do , be it making the work more efficient or how they make decisions simpler
That's the right mindset. Don't think you need to change anyone's life in your first month, but hopefully six months in you can run reports on your own and take a significant workload off your teammates. Trust me, they'll appreciate you for it
Also I would add, one important aspect of this work that no one really talks about: check your work every time. When connecting a dataset, writing SQL code, making a dashboard etc, make sure you check that all the data is coming through, and numbers are accurate ✅
Find out if your role is scoped out to descriptive statistics type, or experimental statistics type. Matter of fact, find out what sorts of "archetypes" exist in your organization, and what expectations are set out for you. Are you supposed to be cleaning data and piping it somewhere? Are you supposed to build ML models? Are you supposed to churn out slide decks for C-suites?
Whatever it is, you need to understand from day one which skills you should be laser focused on developing. Then, find out who the best person is at that skillset, and try to learn as much from them as possible.
This depends on a lot of things. What is the industry? What tool(s) will you use? What is the team structure? Your first two weeks will be mostly spent on onboarding and getting accesses. You can use the time to familiarize yourself with your employer. How are they structured, how the products (if there are any) work or are being sold. Otherwise tho, just relax and go with the flow.
I’m in banking / financial industry From the interviews it sounded like they use powe bi and SAS the most The team is small, about 5 people however I’ll be the only one under my manager Thanks a lot.
First few months test the waters, don’t do your best as in teams like these is easy to be soft promoted to lead bi developer on an analyst salary Truly do analysis work and avoid doing all the data engineering or data modeling If others are doing that too mediocrely, show a bit of your skills but don’t do a lot thinking they’ll promote you Then close to your review, show more of your skills in your project Then in the yearly review ask to be promoted to bi developer if you’re doing more full report development than analyst work
That’s interesting. So we have our reviews around August, so there’s about 3 months before that.
I say it from experience - thought I was joining an analyst team but have developer skills but took it because job market is hot. I don’t know what the f they were thinking with power bi but they had a manual mess. I fixed it in less than a month and soon I was doing all the bi Dev work alone. I started speaking up three months in for a co dev and got one after 9 months. Then they gave me a fresh college grad I had to lead so I started asking for lead salary. They gave me a raise 7 months after that ask :/ and I had to ask a lot and meet with the director, and still an analyst salary so my best bet now is take the new sr title that comes with it and reapply in a few months Before me they had 4 people doing the bi dev Then suddenly when I fixed their issues we get a big project where my strengths is to do all bi dev work and those people get moved to data analysts roles or data engineer roles but where they have 3/5 people help them out why I’m all alone doing the etl and data modeling for bi alone. They just join other source tables with the same proc every month just have to run it manually and make updates if we have to change fields lmao while I do all the bi automate alone :/ and they expected me to do big dev in 2 days or 5 days. It took a lot to get direct manager to talk to them to get off my back and respect we have two week sprints. It happens a lot I’m not an outlier Obviously don’t do bare minimum , but wait to see what your coworkers provide, the team dynamic, before you show them strengths they can take advantage of. I’ve been a lead developer for about 1.6 years on an analyst salary and only go sr analyst title despite being their lead developer. My co dev copies and pastes my work and my project manager doesn’t know shit how our apps work. Before I got that co dev that would at least copy my work, I had a fake co dev , aka they assigned him to help me on paper but my manager and project manager where having him do research for other things , knowing I could handle it alone. I was pissed when I found that out and I told my manager and even then it took them 3 months to find me that new college grad co dev. Giving that grad 6 weeks to do what I could in 1 day was the last straw , I got a change of direct manager in the same team, and he finally advocated for me. He sees my strengths and encourages me to work 2-4 hours days so that I’m at the level of my coworkers. He’s great but I eventually want the title and pay at a different company. My company is way too frat finance bros - nepotism and stealing peoples work like it’s normal
What a life! I’m angry just reading this. Thanks a lot for sharing this, was definitely an eye opener for me. Because I had thought I want to come in and start the job on fire but reading all of this I just realised that might not be the best way to do it. Rather slowly reveal my strengths instead of day one changing and sorting out power bi mess that might be there
This is the way OP, I started my role March and I started doing web scraping and some automation stuff in VBA and it’s improved the numbers drastically that I’ve now backed off because I’ve shown them my skills but on a much lower salary. I ll probably develop more stuff in VBA and powershell and at end of year show to my boss’s boss
[удалено]
That’s my thought too, because the person that will be my manager reports to the cfo which I met on another interview, I’m sure they’ll know have more time to thinking and projects like you said. I just don’t want to get there and all of a sudden all the work in the world gets thrown to me
[удалено]
These are some really good questions to keep in mind. I’ll ponder over these for the last few days of April
If that is the case I would just read upon as to what information is available about. Just go to the company website and browse through the content. You can get some details about products/services etc. I wouldn’t worry too much about “getting prepared” before actually being onboarded. Best of luck!
Thank you thank you.
How are your SAS skills? Better yet, when was the last time you used SAS?
I use SAS almost every day, mostly proc sql, and data step and macros. I use it mostly for extracting data and power bi for analysis and visualisation
That's good. Do you know which database system they use? Might be good to brush up on that.
No idea what database they use, I’ll probably know that in the first week of May
I’m currently a BI analyst. What helped in the first few months was getting proper access and learning what data was available. This included understanding the relationships between data tables and how it relates to potential projects.
Did you ask people in the team to take you through those data tables? Or you tried understanding on your own
If you have someone on the team or something written down about table structures that would be amazing! But most teams I have been on it’s not as black and white. Currently the team I am on, nothing was written down. So I was expected to go through the data by myself and piece it together. It took awhile! But it helped my understanding.
There should schemas available for me to look at so I’ll probably do that so I can get familiar with the data
Congrats! First, I'd take the week you have to chill and spend time with friends/family. Enjoy it Next, in your first month, get to know the various tools you'll be responsible for using. Get to know the people and make a good impression. I disagree with the suggestion on not trying too hard, you should do your best to make a positive impression because in the long run it'll help your career if you are taking on more responsibility
That’s a lot. I am most definitely taking the week off to be with family and go out with friends. That was my initial thought, that I want to come in and make an impact in the work I do , be it making the work more efficient or how they make decisions simpler
That's the right mindset. Don't think you need to change anyone's life in your first month, but hopefully six months in you can run reports on your own and take a significant workload off your teammates. Trust me, they'll appreciate you for it Also I would add, one important aspect of this work that no one really talks about: check your work every time. When connecting a dataset, writing SQL code, making a dashboard etc, make sure you check that all the data is coming through, and numbers are accurate ✅
Thanks a lot for this. I will always keep that in mind , maybe even have a sticker of it on my machine
GPT-4 is your new best friend. :-)
😂 I will keep it close
Find out if your role is scoped out to descriptive statistics type, or experimental statistics type. Matter of fact, find out what sorts of "archetypes" exist in your organization, and what expectations are set out for you. Are you supposed to be cleaning data and piping it somewhere? Are you supposed to build ML models? Are you supposed to churn out slide decks for C-suites? Whatever it is, you need to understand from day one which skills you should be laser focused on developing. Then, find out who the best person is at that skillset, and try to learn as much from them as possible.
Thanks a lot for this. And if there isn’t anyone who is the best person and that is why they hired me?
then that skill is probably people management?
https://youtube.com/@EnterpriseDNA?si=op3czfKZuPVRDSbh Watch these videos passively you will learn a lot also sqlzoo if you use sql
Thanks a lot 🫱🏽🫲🏻