Junior Data Analyst to Senior Pipeline
The importance of navigating politics, managing stakeholder relationships, making your work visible, AND self-advocating.
Got BDE?⚡️
Hi BDEs! ⚡️ Sorry I’ve been a little quiet over the past few weeks… I’ve been busy with something BIG!!! If you missed it, Big SQL Energy is launching on Teachable 🔗 in a couple of months, and it’s gonna be epic with all the freebies and giveaways. You DON’T wanna miss it!
So what’s different about my course from others?
Hands-on Coding: It’s 100% hands-on. You’re coding with me the whole time. No sitting back and scrolling on your phone 😏
Modern Tech Stack: It will use a modern tech stack including Hex data science notebooks & Snowflake data warehouse which will equip you with in-demand skills for the industry.
Portfolio Project: You’ll walk away from the course with a complete portfolio project which will practice all of your skills together and give you something to talk about in interviews.
Real Business Problems: You’ll solve real business problems I’ve solved on the job as a Senior Data Analyst in SaaS tech using my proprietary data model so you get used to real-life scenarios. Say goodbye to the Titanic and Iris datasets!!
✨ The presale will be October 29 and will ONLY last 2 weeks! ✨ You’ll get:
Invite-only access to a VIP live Q&A session with me
A SQL Job Ready Kit to prep for interviews
First access when the course drops at the end of Nov
The lowest price the course will ever be
If there’s one thing I don’t mess around with… it’s SQL. It’s gonna be fun. It’s gonna be challenging. It’s gonna be empowering. And I want YOU there!
This course is based on real business problems I’ve solved on the job using a proprietary dataset based on a typical SaaS tech company data model using skills such as Joins, CTE, Subqueries, Window Functions, Set Operations (like union), Self Joins, Case, Optimization, Temp Tables, & Views.
Thanks to @Teachable for hosting my course! If you want to build your first course for free, I highly recommend them!
Social Highlights⚡️
Junior Data Analyst to Senior Pipeline
Moving from a Junior data analyst position to Senior can be really tricky especially if you have to navigate red tape, politics, and seniority at your company. Especially at a bigger company with more policy and procedures around promos, it can be super difficult to move up unless you’re getting your name out there and getting visibility with leadership. I’ve always worked in smaller startups (mostly), so it’s been easier for me to advocate for my work and make it visible, but I’d be lying if I said it were easy to move to the senior level— and that I didn’t have imposter syndrome when I first got promoted up!
How I got Promoted to Senior
I got promoted to the senior level from a regular data analyst job completely because I advocated for myself and asked for a raise to better meet my job duties. I was doing a lot and fulfilling a lot of responsibility— including managing someone and creating data insights for our execs to present to investors for a capital raise. That’s a LOT of responsibility for a data analyst making $72K a year 😅
So I advocated for a higher salary just over $100K which was closer to an average data analyst salary in tech at the time. Unfortunately, they denied my raise request (don’t worry, I got it the second time I advocated a year later), but they did give me my senior title. So kind of a win for my career even though titles don’t pay my bills. Having that senior title though gave me confidence when I grew into it and opened up other career opportunities for me because recruiters took me more seriously on the job market.
Self Advocating & Visibility
My biggest advice is to self-advocate. You won’t get what you don’t ask for. Very rarely do people get promos they didn’t ask for and set themselves up for. Passive is not the way to go! But it won’t always work in your favor— I haven’t been promoted OR gotten a raise in almost 2 years now at my job 🤡 Sometimes politics, layoffs, budget, etc. can come into play and it’s completely out of your control. But it’s always worth trying! The first step you need to do it make your work visible— and make sure stakeholders and leadership understand the full impact of your work.
A lot of this politics and relationship building starts with stakeholder relationships and how well you can position yourself as a leader in the company and your work as something they need to meet their goals (and look good in front of their bosses!). Yes, it’s all about politics unfortunately. If you go to stakeholders and ask for directions and input, you’re adding extra work and responsibility on them which will make you seem more junior.
Instead of framing your questions as “what should I do” and “how should I do it” expecting explicit responses from your stakeholders, ask more open-ended questions about their goals and the business impact they have. Not only does this show a deeper level of thinking, but it’ll also position yourself as more senior in their minds which could get you a better review later on. Here’s some examples of the difference:
Junior Data Analyst asking stakeholders questions:
- What events do you want to track?
- What metrics do you care about?
- What time period should I look at?
- Which users should I look at?
- How many visuals do you want in the dashboard?
Senior Data Analyst asking stakeholders questions:
- What business question are you hoping to answer?
- What would signal to you that this was a huge success?
- What would signal to you that we should roll this back?
- Is there anything you're worried about with launching this? Risk?
- What does leadership ask about this project?
Then a Senior Data Analyst crafts events, metrics, and a story around these answers. A Senior DA is able to align questions with data, make experiment and product recommendations, and then translate the results into actions that leadership cares about.
This is how you can really stand out. It all starts with good stakeholder and leadership relationships + self advocating and making your work impact visible!
Well, I’ll c u next tuesday!
-xoxo,
jess💕
WHO AM I?⚡️
I'm Jess Ramos, a content creator, instructor, and leader in the data world. I'm super passionate about data and especially SQL! My 9-5 is being a Senior Data Analyst @ Crunchbase, a top tech startup that specializes in private company data. I'm also an Instructor with LinkedIn Learning and the founder of Big Data Energy Analytics. My 5-9 (aka outside of my regular job!) is creating amazing content for YOU on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok-- and this newsletter!🤩