#001: Becoming a Better Digital Analyst

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:21.38 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:57.06 [Michael Helbling]: Hi, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode one. My name is Michael Helbling. I’m the Director of Analytics at Search Discovery here in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m joined by my two other hosts, Jim Cain, CEO of Napkyn, and also the CEO of Babbage Systems. Hi, Jim. Hi, Michael. How’s it going? It’s going great. And of course, we’re also joined by the inimitable Tim Wilson, partner at Web Analytics Demystified. Hi, Tim. Inevitable.

00:01:03.30 [Tim Wilson]: Inevitable hello to you. It’s something like there’s a snowman associated with that.

00:02:22.90 [Michael Helbling]: The abominable Tim Wilson or the inimitable Tim Wilson? Inimitable? Inimitable? Now I don’t know how I can pronounce that word. You nailed it the first time. All right, well good. That was the important one. Let’s move right along then and let’s get into our topic. Just so you guys understand, everybody understands the format of this show, we spend a little bit of time talking through some of the things that we think are important about the industry and digital analytics today. Tonight we’re talking about a topic that I think is going to be near and dear to many hearts, which is how do I get better as an analyst? What are my opportunities for self-improvement and how do I pick the best ways to get better. Today, you know, digital analytics is in a place where it’s going through a transition. If you think about how the three of us got into this industry, most of our skills and information is self-taught and self-acquired. I think there’s more interesting ways of getting up to speed in this industry and that’s what we want to talk about. So, Noble Analyst, sit back, listen, learn about how you can increase your skills all while getting the big money and accolades that you deserve. All right, let’s get into it. Tim Wilson, how does an analyst improve themselves?

00:03:07.39 [Tim Wilson]: It’s interesting. Even listening to your setup, it’s interesting because it’s one of those cases where it’s probably not what we did. I think it’s probably not what we did, but it’s probably also, it kind of is what we did. Because even though I think we’re going to You’ll list there’s a lot of kind of standard tropes. Go take the course at the University of British Columbia. Sign up with Market Motive. Read books. Read blogs. But it’s weird because I’m not sure if I had all of those 10 years ago how much that would have directly made me a better analyst.

00:04:17.44 [Michael Helbling]: Well, in my perspective, as I agree with you, like when this was 15, 10, 20, whatever years ago, you know, analytics, digital analytics is only about 20 years old, you can not learn it the same way as we did because there’s a lot more opportunity for information and selection of information than there was at that time. You know, if you think about it, we had to go through years of trying to figure out, am I doing this the right way? Because there’s literally not enough inputs to say, hey, this is the right way to do things or these are the best practices. I think what’s important or what would be useful in an episode like this is to actually try to talk about some of the things we did kind of coming up. in this industry and then look at maybe what are some things that are transferable like what did we do that you should still do and what are their ways like okay you don’t have to assemble a hundred blogs on analytics in your feed to try to keep up with this industry anymore you know that’s probably not something you have to do you know following the measure hashtag might be enough but Jim Cain me I just gonna say one thing that I would add in as well is that

00:04:59.63 [Jim Cain]: Like we all really like what we do, and I think we’re active members of the community, and we’re always just big stompers on, you should do this, it’s awesome. But just to kind of put it into a real world context, there are literally thousands of high paying jobs sitting out there on dice for people who know how to be an analyst. Like this isn’t just a, this is cool, you should do it. There’s hundreds and hundreds of companies trying to hire someone with any level of experience whatsoever. It’s not a great economy. And this is definitely a very high demand, very low supply kind of gig. Which means you don’t have to be that good.

00:05:10.59 [Tim Wilson]: Why do you want to make yourself a better analyst? You could be a shitty analyst and you’re still going to have a job. That’s a topic for another episode.

00:05:16.01 [Jim Cain]: Looking for a career indoors, able to operate a mouse.

00:05:22.74 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. Well, so as that, oh, I can’t touch that.

00:06:00.99 [Tim Wilson]: I am not even touching that. Well, I think, I think Jim, actually, I think you, you actually did kind of call out it. That’s the other, to me, becoming a better analyst, a huge part of it is actually being, is actually given a shit about the, about the fielding your job and saying, you know what, this is what I want to do because as we, you know, we sort of settled on this topic a few days ago and, you know, made a few notes and I’m like, you know, I feel like I’m rattling off a bunch of tropes, but it comes down to me. It’s like, just do shit, you know, do stuff. I care.

00:06:04.16 [Michael Helbling]: Now I can play this show for my kids.

00:06:25.75 [Tim Wilson]: Way to go, Tim. I love the explicit tag on… That’s true. As you were. I’ll try to keep that profanity in check. I think we got Jim on here. If we don’t have an F-bomb inside of a… I was going to be good and you blew it.

00:06:29.49 [Jim Cain]: Ladies and gentlemen, Tim Wilson, the George Carlin of Measurement.

00:07:33.32 [Tim Wilson]: Seven words you cannot… But I think that’s, to me, that’s what I don’t think has changed about any of our, what we did, and I would like to think we’re all pretty good analysts, was, you know what, we did dive in. We did kind of take some risks. I mean, the number, I can list out specific times where I got dropped into something, and it was of my own making, of, yeah, sure, I’ll figure out And I didn’t. It took me a while until I had somebody who was helping me. But I’ve also managed people who have waited for what’s the formula. I’m in a good, comfortable routine. I know what to do. I know how to pull this data. And if you’re not pushing yourself, you’re going to become a worse analyst because things are moving too fast. You have to be moving faster than a rapidly changing industry.

00:08:27.53 [Michael Helbling]: But I would say there’s a caveat to that. I agree with you that you have to move quickly. However, if you look at practitioner of analytics versus what we do more on the services side of analytics, the practitioner side stays relatively still in comparison. And actually being a good analyst in that context is having a deep understanding of the context in which the business operates and how the data and the analysis applies to it, right? And being a better analyst may not be learning everything about all the new things that are happening in the industry as much as it’s digging deeper and getting more proficient in bringing to bear things within the current set of solutions that you run as a company. And not to, you see where I’m going with that? Does that make sense?

00:08:48.79 [Jim Cain]: I think it’s super valid, dude. I think that an analyst can only go as fast as the business will allow them to go. And the bigger the company that you’re embedded in is, the more there’s organizational inertia. You could do the coolest crap ever if no one’s gonna read it. I mean, this is E-metrics Bar 101 stuff, right? Why doesn’t anybody look at my awesome work?

00:09:35.05 [Tim Wilson]: Sorry, go ahead. Well, let me say, so maybe I, frame that a little unfairly. I would disagree. I would say that maybe I didn’t articulate it well. I think you can always be going out of your comfort zone. It doesn’t mean you’re necessarily chasing the latest, you’re chasing slack analytics, or you’re chasing the latest social media, but I think Actually, to Jim’s point, why aren’t people listening to me? Well, you know what? I got to figure out how to communicate better. I’m going to go and I’m going to be ballsy, and I’m going to set up a meeting with our CFO, and we’re a half a billion dollar company, and I’m going to just ask him some questions. I’m going to learn the business more.

00:09:45.25 [Michael Helbling]: I would never recommend the first meeting be with the CFO. I would find another friend in finance first.

00:10:26.07 [Tim Wilson]: I was going a little bit off of one of my own moves. Did you do that? No, I had an opportunity. He set up a meeting with me on some very specific project and I used the opportunity to ask him some questions about some fairly major business decisions that have been made and he was happy as a clam to explain to me what they had done. So I guess push yourself out of your comfort zone. Don’t do something stupid, right? But find a, set up a new process. Figure out a new way to visualize stuff.

00:10:27.75 [Jim Cain]: Can I ask you guys a question?

00:10:28.57 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah.

00:10:30.82 [Jim Cain]: Sorry, I cut you off, dude. We’re going to do that on that.

00:10:34.88 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, we’ll probably see it or we’ll never end.

00:11:11.96 [Jim Cain]: We all totally came into this. We all do kind of the same gig. And we came at it from three totally different ways. One of the ways that I look at how to work on my chops is to find out how somebody else came into the discipline and then do what they did because I probably didn’t do it. You know, like people who started off in the server room mashing log files and they ended up in the marketing department. I mean, I came from a sales background. I kind of have a weird story about how I came into measurement. Maybe it would be helpful for you guys to kind of say, I was doing this and someone got me to do that. Next thing you know, I’m an analyst, you know?

00:11:53.06 [Tim Wilson]: That’s kind of a break-in, so I think we all have. My quick one was I backed into it from technical writing to intranet web development to business owner of a community, before the word community was used, and the web analytics tool just came along with it. And when I went to drop the web analytics tool to the BI team, instead I went with it to the BI team, and then my seminal moment was going to a Data Warehouse Institute conference in the light bulb going on. I mean, to me, that’s like, how do you get into it as opposed to how do you actually get better at it?

00:13:11.22 [Michael Helbling]: Well, but I see your point. So like, yeah, I came from a business analyst background on technical implementation, web dev projects, and just got into the log file analysis side of it. and then started seeing, hey, there’s more to this. And just started taking it from there. But yeah, well, I love to hear people’s stories about how they got into this field because a lot of times people’s entrance into the field, especially because it’s so new, a lot of that dictates how they perform as an analyst and how they think as an analyst or the connections they can make to kind of where they were before. I think as people start in careers in analytics explicitly, which we’re starting to see that, there’s people who, I’ve been a web or digital analyst ever since I got out of school, right? And they’re starting to become programs in schools where you can just go study this or have it be a bigger and bigger portion of what you study in your undergrad, not necessarily even master’s degrees or external post, collegiate studies. So, it’ll be interesting to see what happens there, but I do think there’s something to be learned from where people come from.

00:13:23.09 [Jim Cain]: That’s why, you know, I would think, you know, Tim was starting to really focus in on kind of process and program management, which I know are kind of near and dear to the way that you approach things, like it’s a good thing.

00:13:27.32 [Tim Wilson]: All conversations with me lead there, so. There you go.

00:13:33.08 [Jim Cain]: And, you know, we all, I’m the people. I’m a people person.

00:13:37.66 [Michael Helbling]: So that means, Jim, you have to be the technology one. So we have people process and technology.

00:13:41.53 [Tim Wilson]: Thank God you’re the CEO of the technology company. That’s right.

00:13:43.93 [Michael Helbling]: We have things in the weekends.

00:13:46.92 [Jim Cain]: But you guys came into this from sales, right?

00:13:49.04 [Michael Helbling]: I can never forget, unfortunately.

00:13:53.58 [Jim Cain]: I don’t think I’ve actually heard that story.

00:13:53.82 [Tim Wilson]: No.

00:14:47.63 [Jim Cain]: I was selling web personalization software, and I wasn’t selling any of it because this is 10 years ago. and the companies I was trying to sell it to said, great, so I can personalize messages to who, because I don’t know who to point it at. So I misquoted for about two quarters, and I finally started to say to people, if you let me look in your web analytics data and I could build you a five times return on your investment use case, what could I say to the software? And I figured they’d say no, because NDA and sensitive business data, like it was a bluff. And 10 years ago, nobody gave a crap. So people started going, yeah, here’s my login to web trends, to urchin, to core metrics. So I kind of had to learn how to do it. And I started crushing pipe. I mean, I was just closing deal after deal because people were going, finally, someone is doing something with this data. And it was a lot of fun. I like data because it helps me win arguments.

00:15:30.06 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah. So it does seem like it’s coming back to there’s a little bit of an introspection. And if anybody’s sitting through listening to the three of us drone on that probably is a pre-qualifier that they really do care about the space or they’re our mom. And I don’t think my mom needs to know how to be a better analyst. But I guess this is going to wind up being like a soft answer, like there are resources out there, but man, there’s an introspection part that says, am I hungry for doing this stuff?

00:15:53.69 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I mean, when I think about the characteristics that I look for an analyst, none of them are hard skills almost. Like, certainly there’s a modicum of, you know, facility with mathematics and statistics and numbers, but I find that intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and business acumen are kind of the, like, top-level stuff that I’m looking for.

00:17:03.58 [Tim Wilson]: That’s actually, that’s drawing an interesting parallel to, early in my career, kind of pre, one of those technical writers who were recruiting technical writers at a So we were talking to journalism, we were going on campuses talking to journalism majors and English majors. And one of the questions we’d asked was, you know, tell us about your computer. And this was late 90s, early 2000s or early, early aughts, as Jim would probably say. And one of the things we were looking for, like we would say, have you ever done, have you ever taken the back off your computer? And the fact is, if somebody said, oh no, like my dad, my dad takes care of that, or my girlfriend, or my boyfriend does that, it was like a killer. Cause like we’re hiring you to be a technical writer at a technical company and you don’t have a passion for technology. And I think that’s the same. When I talk to people about getting into the field, it’s like, Yeah, better go get Google Analytics on something. Start here on site.

00:17:09.24 [Michael Helbling]: Do you have a website? If the answer to that question is no, that’s a problem for you.

00:17:34.39 [Tim Wilson]: Or do you have a relative or a friend who has a website and you’ve got Google Analytics on it? So that’s the bar for entry. But I think there’s this other part. If an analyst, I guess this is a hugely roundabout way of saying, yeah, there are soft skills. But I really want people to actually understand the ins and outs.

00:18:04.85 [Michael Helbling]: But that’s where the intellectual curiosity comes in. There are certain personality types that just want to know the answer to the question, why? Why is it doing that? Well, let me see if I can figure that out. Couldn’t that be better? Those kinds of questions, those have to drive you. They really have to drive you. The weird part or the balancing act is that they can’t drive you so hard that they make you alienate all the people you work with. That’s the skill that you have to learn as an analyst.

00:18:23.33 [Jim Cain]: That’s why I was asking about origin stories because I had a feeling we were all going to start to go off in directions that are kind of close to how we tick. When I’m looking at our analysts, I love philosophy degrees and I love bartending experience. The bartending has nothing to do with them.

00:18:28.30 [Tim Wilson]: Their skill as an analyst is just kind of useful. You want to have a lot of those people around you.

00:19:01.57 [Jim Cain]: I’m a double CEO. I’m not going to mix my own drinks. Let’s be honest here. Former bar staff made great analysts because they know how to get people to talk and then listen to what they want and give them what they need so they can move on. It’s a funny skill set. I’m not even kidding. The ability to be a great listener and then give someone what they want is a hard skill to develop. And people with two years of bar experience are really good at it.

00:19:42.87 [Tim Wilson]: But what if you’re an analyst now and you say you know that you are not the super well-liked sought out to have people tell you what their problems, their business problems are, And should you go 10 bar? Should you go 10 bar? I mean, what’s the 10 and bar equivalent? I mean, I’ve struggled with that, because there’s how much of that is a talent, which is not teachable, versus how much is a skill that can be taught. If I go it, absolutely. You know how you need to be a better analyst? You need to get better at communication and people skills. OK, so what do I do? Well, I mean, they’ll kind of be.

00:19:44.08 [Jim Cain]: You go 10 bar.

00:19:50.17 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, go 10 bar in the evening. Or just keep some booze in your desk at work.

00:19:54.19 [Jim Cain]: I’ve never done a totally different skill set. That doesn’t necessarily work out.

00:19:57.42 [Michael Helbling]: I’ve found it’s not really a skill set at all. It’s pretty easy.

00:20:03.88 [Tim Wilson]: Are you guys still Carnegie? Carnegie? He’s my inimitable. I don’t know how to pronounce his last name.

00:21:13.65 [Michael Helbling]: I’ve read the book. I’ve never attended the courses, but it doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re awesome. How do you become a better communicator? I think your boss or mentor is going to be one of the biggest drivers of that capability, honestly, because they’re going to see what you need to do and they’re going to guide you in that path. What I would say to people is, hey, if your mentor or your boss is not making you better, find other mentors in the community that will spend some time with you, talk to you about what you’re working on and what you’re trying to do. I’ll just be really blunt. How I learned to do analytics was to go seek out people I thought had good information that I could learn from and spend time with them. Just go hang out, listen to what they talk about. How do they act? I’m a huge observer of behaviors. I just go out there and pick stuff up from people. But I’ve had bosses and mentors along the way who’ve also helped me kind of, here, Michael, here’s what’s happening when you do this. Here’s what you could do to make yourself more effective in these scenarios. That’s a huge help.

00:21:19.62 [Tim Wilson]: If somebody says, I want to be a better analyst, you can’t say, well, make your boss help you be a better analyst, right?

00:21:30.38 [Michael Helbling]: People can say, hey, I’ve got a terrible boss. Maybe I need to think about getting a new one. Well, I can just plug the fact that search discovery is always hard now.

00:21:33.22 [Jim Cain]: Really?

00:21:34.67 [Tim Wilson]: Boom!

00:21:36.77 [Michael Helbling]: Well played.

00:21:40.13 [Tim Wilson]: That concludes episode one. That’s right.

00:22:52.03 [Jim Cain]: The mentorship and the good boss thing is important, and let’s be honest, most analysts don’t stick for longer than six months at a company because of a combination of good recruiters and not having those people. If you go into an organization as an analyst, even if you’re junior, you need to behave in a kind of mature way to be able to win. And I actually think that there are tricks, like not sneaky tricks, but like in sales, there’s a thing called feel felt found when you’re overcoming objections. I’ve provided some training to my staff and, you know, Tim, virtual high five, but I like your hypothesis generation requirement for a question. I think it works really well and my staff now do it. um… with our stakeholders you know the the ability to say if you ask a question like this and you say sorry i can’t do it until we figure out the question together like you can train people and how to solicit requirements doesn’t just need to be like an apprenticeship you know that’s those listening skills right but with a lot of structure like madlib selling skills like you just said and that’s literally like

00:23:06.55 [Michael Helbling]: listen well and learn to sell are actually two really major aspects of becoming a better analyst, in my opinion. So I think you and I are actually pretty aligned on some of that.

00:23:47.70 [Tim Wilson]: I’m gonna pick up some things that I need to, it’s a great, I mean I look at the sales guys I know who are relatives or in the industry who are the ones who I want to actually continue to hang out with. Some of them are wired for sales, but I think that’s actually a good… There’s training on that too, right? If you’re selling, I’ve read enough to know that you’re saying you don’t sell… You don’t sell your features. You don’t even sell benefits. You understand what their problem is, and then you are to solve a problem.

00:25:44.36 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, and let’s distinguish between what it means to learn to sell. It doesn’t mean just like sell for selling sake or to close a deal. But sales in this construct is what you just said. It’s that consultative approach to let me understand your problem fully and then bring you the right solution to that and then show you how to connect those dots. Because that’s really what I think of when I think of sales, because I am not a sales guy. I couldn’t cold call people that would huddle me into a little ball and I’d go hide somewhere. But if somebody says to me, hey, I’ve got this problem, well, OK, let me dig into that with you. And let’s see. And then suddenly it’s like, oh, we’ve got a solution for this. We can help fix that problem. Suddenly I’m selling something to someone. And I didn’t even enter the conversation with that in mind. And that as an analyst, I think that’s how an analyst wants to think as well. You know, when somebody comes in with a here’s here’s what we see as our problem. All right, perfect. Let me tackle the problem in a number of ways and give you some options about here’s how I think we can solve it. You know, whether that be a specific optimization approach or a specific way of structuring data or whatever that is. And then on the other side, the analyst is also learning. All the stuff they can learn about how to be a better analyst in terms of just analytical skills, approach to data problem solving, all those kinds of things, data visualization, all these other aspects of the job. Really, when you think about it, guys, not to pat ourselves on the back too hard, but we do pretty cool stuff. Just the three of us, right? Well, all analysts. I mean, we’re examples of what you could possibly become as an analyst. Sorry to disappoint.

00:25:48.37 [Jim Cain]: Or what it looks like when you peek. Yeah, that’s right.

00:25:53.69 [Michael Helbling]: Ruin it. And on that bombshell. Yeah.

00:25:59.02 [Jim Cain]: You know what I think is interesting? No one’s talked about technology once.

00:26:03.09 [Michael Helbling]: Because after your first technology, it does not matter. Well.

00:26:16.54 [Jim Cain]: But all the job descriptions that are out there for analysts have implementation skills required, JavaScript skills required. The marketplace is looking for it, but we’re not talking about it. I think that’s interesting.

00:27:53.67 [Tim Wilson]: But I think we might have hopped on our on our perfect world ideal. Yeah, maybe too soon. A high horse, right? Because I do, and I’ll say, I’m probably going to wind up, well, so Josh West, who’s a domestified, has written two or three, at least like this ongoing blog post. He is just going to describe how cookies work, come hell or high water, and every aspect of cookies. And if you’re an analyst for the next five years at least, you’re going to need to understand how cookies work. Yeah. And so there’s, how do you get hired? If we said, how do you get a job? Well, we can say all day long that, well, it’s more about the talent and the intellectual curiosity. But the fact is, if you can’t list specific tools, you’re going to have a hard time getting that conversation. You know what? If you’re an analyst, it behooves you to know your way around JavaScript a little bit. Know your way around cookies a little bit. communication, and presentation, and statistics, and all of those fall in, but you do kind of need to know the tools. So yeah, dig deeper on your tool. If you’re using the study you say, survey say, that if you have Adobe Analytics installed, you were using less than 50% of the possible functionality. You should dig in and figure out, you’re not using Fallout reports, are you not doing anything with pathing? Right. Come for zone and figure out what those things do.

00:28:37.52 [Michael Helbling]: And it also goes back to kind of, well, my description of a well-rounded analyst lives on sort of this continuum, right, from the very technical all the way up to, you know, the more, I guess, functional analyst, right, or the business problem solver. And so I think all analysts kind of start out on that continuum. But the ideal would be to become well-rounded across that continuum or across that spectrum. Develop the technical skills you need to really understand, hey, is this a good opportunity for me to use the new ListVar thing that I heard about for Adobe Analytics or whatever. Knowing the tools in that capacity is very much so a thing that you should develop.

00:29:19.27 [Tim Wilson]: It does seem like there’s If we accept the premise, I don’t know that you guys entirely have, if you need to push yourself, there is a whole other world of if you’re a practitioner inside a large company that moves slow, and how do you push yourself, and there is kind of the, it almost sounds like a laundry list, take classes. You got, you know, learn, go take the Coursera class on R. You may not use R, but it is going to force you to think a little bit different to a conference because you’re going to talk to somebody who’s doing something that you hadn’t really thought of.

00:29:55.46 [Michael Helbling]: I completely agree with that. The e-metrics conference and other conferences, when I was first becoming an analyst, were very influential to the way that I thought about it, both from the interactions of the people I had and even the speakers at the time. The whole concept of creating dashboards and things like that. Well, back in that day, well, not everybody was doing that. We’re just generating reports. And I went and I saw Clint Ivy do a dashboard presentation. And I was like, I’m going to go back and I’m going to build dashboards, you know? And that started a whole journey, right?

00:30:03.29 [Tim Wilson]: And was it successful? Would you fall flat on your face, but learn from it or fall forward in the field?

00:30:20.85 [Michael Helbling]: I went right back into a meeting and I started getting post-it notes out and I started saying, okay, what metrics are we going to put in this dashboard? I started slapping post-it notes down the table with different metrics and we like storyboarded that thing out. I had no idea what I was doing. It was blast.

00:30:37.50 [Jim Cain]: Now, Michael, I say this to everybody. Get out of pen. This is classic Jim Cain right here. The K and KPI doesn’t stand for a thousand. All right. You just write that down.

00:31:27.64 [Michael Helbling]: You just blew a few minds out there. But yeah, there’s more and more classes available. There’s more and more opportunities to do things like Code Academy and get really easy and easy to understand lessons and things like JavaScript and jQuery and those kinds of things to develop your skills. And I think it comes with sort of like What’s the right next step? Should I get into the data science side of things? What does it even mean to do that? Should I be trying to learn R? Or should I be specializing in visualization of data? To me, each person has to figure out, hey, I’m going to put my flag down in one spot, or I’m going to continue to develop a general skill set. and everybody’s gonna have to figure that one out, I think.

00:32:41.80 [Tim Wilson]: I mean, I think you actually really hit on it. It’s like, find, it doesn’t, I don’t think it really matters because there’s too much breadth and depth for you to be a master of all. So figure out what it is you really kind of have a hunger for. I mean, you gotta cover the bases. If you’re like Java, what? If you actually don’t know the difference between Java and JavaScript, you need to go chase some technical stuff. But if you say, I’ve got a basic grounding, and you know what, the statistics like correlation versus regression, which one do I do first? You know what, that is the clue to you that you need to go take a free course on statistics in the evenings, or take a local community college, get your however your company works. It is a, I mean, maybe I’m going to sound like a broken record. It’s like, you better be self-driven. Like that to me is probably the number one thing, self-driven in a meaningful direction, you know, going and finding out, you know, well, you know, better underwater basket weaving techniques, no, but you can paint what you could be better at and what do you want to pursue and challenge yourself.

00:33:12.24 [Michael Helbling]: Yep, and I also, you know, I think it also goes back to the people again in a big way. Like I look at specific people at different points in time and they’ve had a big influence on kind of how I’ve directed things, things like that. So like, if we look back at our last 20 minutes of conversation, we’ve ranged all over, right? What can we take back as like a punchline to somebody who didn’t want to listen to that and just tell them to skip to the end of the show?

00:33:36.94 [Jim Cain]: I mean, my recaps would be that, you know, I think, again, it’s interesting that we kind of hedged at the end and said, yeah, you need technical chops. But at the end of the day, being a successful analyst in 2015, it’s a qualitative skill that requires a lot of business person skills and not a lot of server room skills.

00:33:43.51 [Michael Helbling]: I think our data scientist friends are going to not be happy with that assessment.

00:33:45.83 [Jim Cain]: You mean our Y2K programmer friends?

00:33:51.24 [Michael Helbling]: No, the people who think eventually our jobs will be replaced by machines, right?

00:33:54.97 [Jim Cain]: Yeah. That’s a debate for another day.

00:34:00.73 [Michael Helbling]: I know. I’m just saying, I love how we’re going to polarize the marketplace with our opinions here.

00:35:00.71 [Jim Cain]: I would roll up. I wrote a blog post back in April for the napkin blog. And I said that there’s a big difference between an analyst and a senior analyst. And I see a lot of people in the marketplace who, you know, it’s almost like I worked at the grocery store for five years so I could be a manager now, you know? And this concept of senior analyst or senior digital analyst to me is like being a senior developer at IBM. You know, you don’t get it based on tenure. You get it based on skill set. And I think that if you can do four other people’s jobs, you get to be a senior analyst. You need to be a basic web analyst who pulls reports together. You need to be an entry-level salesperson. It’s a requirement solicitation convincing people of value. You need to be an entry-level project manager. And you need to be able to operate as a director of marketing or marketing manager. If you can do those four jobs, you can be a senior analyst in any business out there. And I didn’t say technology once. I mean, that’s really the wrap up from what I was hearing from you guys and what I was trying to focus on today.

00:35:41.59 [Tim Wilson]: I’m probably going to leave a little bit of a degree to disagree or we’ll cover this over again as at the next few metrics. I think technology matters. I think I’m going to stick with where I unintentionally started which was push yourself and that’s a generic kind of broad thing, but if you can’t point to what have I done this week that where I consciously got myself out of my comfort zone, knowing that it would make me a better analyst, then you’re not trying.

00:36:00.43 [Michael Helbling]: All right. And around the horn, really quick, if an analyst wanted to get better, and there was one blog that you recommend they read to do that, what would it be? Go. Only one, just one.

00:36:31.61 [Tim Wilson]: Oh my god. Jim? I mean, honestly, I would actually probably point them to a flowing data, flowing data.com, because I think that’s one aspect, which is data visualization and effective communication. But it’s a high volume of content. there’s no way you wouldn’t get better if you don’t follow the stuff that he posts, and it’s fun and enjoyable.

00:37:05.28 [Jim Cain]: You know, I think Michael kind of nailed it earlier when he said that there’s a small group of people like us who have been in the game for a long time. I mean, there aren’t a lot of us is out there, people with 10 to 15 years of experience. And I think everybody’s got a good week on their block, you know? I find that the hash mark measure, like, I find Twitter to be much more valuable to me than any one blog. So I’ll find two or three things a day where I go, there it is. But I don’t know if I’d focus on a particular source.

00:37:11.95 [Michael Helbling]: Let’s see, way to really cop out there. I was going to say Tim Wilson, but you know, it’s OK.

00:37:20.27 [Tim Wilson]: Well, so was I, but you know. OK. Yeah, there you go. The big part is, I haven’t written anything in like a month that will reach the content.

00:37:27.88 [Jim Cain]: If you want to do some work around my concept of K not standing for a thousand Tim, you take that. You’re wrong with that. You’re wrong with that. You know what?

00:37:40.75 [Tim Wilson]: Done. Since we’re going to be unspecific of when we’re recording this post, I’m going to say I’m going to publish that tomorrow. If you go to tim.webeanalyticsdemystified.com and search for that, you’ll find it. That’s a great idea. Thanks, Jim. I appreciate it.

00:37:42.15 [Jim Cain]: Great. Visit him online.

00:38:21.08 [Michael Helbling]: Alright, so wrapping up, obviously what it takes to become a better analyst is something that we’ve given a little thought to and hopefully a little help for those listening, but there’s obviously always more. We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments. We’ve got a Facebook page that you can check us out on, and we’d love to hear your questions. Give us some ideas about other topics we could cover. Thank you for listening. Get out there and analyze some stuff. If you’re not doing it this week, you’re not doing it. In the words of Tim Wilson. All right. See you next time.

00:38:27.27 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter.

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