TOOLS are Temporary; SKILLS are Eternal
TOOLS are Temporary but SKILLS are Eternal!
Does this sentence intrigue you?
If yes, please read the remaining article.
Nowadays a lot of courses are available for the top trending tools in the current job market like Power BI, Tableau, Big data, Cloud computing, etc.
All the courses are designed to master a specific tool/software with the help of some hands-on projects. While you’re learning a new tool, it’s better to understand the underlying skills behind each tool. And very few courses in the market would cater to teaching the skills behind each tool.
Let me give you an example from the analytics perspective.
Let’s say you want to become a data analyst/business intelligence analyst. What are the skills required for this role?
- Data literacy
- Data cleaning
- Data modeling
- Data visualization
- Basic math and statistics
I’ve excluded the soft skills part as it’s a whole different story.
For each skill mentioned above, you can achieve the results using a variety of tools. You can do data cleaning using Excel, SQL, Power Query, Python, etc. (depending on the source data).
But you need to learn the various data cleaning operations/logic to become a great data analyst.
- Removing duplicates
- Fixing nulls and missing values
- Pivot/Unpivot tables
- Merging/Appending tables
- Removing/Replacing characters in a column
- Filtering important values
are some examples of data cleaning operations.
These techniques can be achieved using any of the above-said tools but you need to be aware of these techniques first.
Similarly, for data visualization, you may use Excel, Power BI, or Tableau. But you need to know which visual should be used to depict certain types of data (line/area chart for time series data, bar/column chart for categorical values, etc.)
I hope you get my point by now based on these examples.
Tools may come and go but skills are transferable and eternal. Power BI and Tableau are doing well now. But if some AI-powered data viz tool arrives in a few years and these tools vanish, the skills we gained are still easily transferable even though our tool knowledge became outdated.
So the next time you’re going to enroll in a course for a specific tool, verify whether it teaches you the underlying skills used behind that tool.
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