Making data analytics clearer for beginners 📊 | Data career insights & practical business examples.
Nigeria
Joined September 2019
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Learning data analytics in public has taught me something deeper than Excel or SQL. 📊
You can start from somewhere completely different and still build something meaningful.
I studied Animal Science.
I taught in classrooms.
I worked in customer service and sales.
Now, I'm learning data analytics.
And honestly, starting over isn't always easy.
There are days when you feel behind.
Days when you wonder if you're learning fast enough.
Days when the people around you seem miles ahead.
But I'm learning that progress doesn't require you to have everything figured out.
It starts with asking better questions.
1. Start with the question, not the tool.
Before opening Excel, ask:
What decision will this analysis help someone make?
2. Understand your data.
Where did it come from?
What does it leave out?
Can you trust it?
3. Learn the fundamentals.
Tools will change.
AI will get better.
But the ability to think clearly will always matter.
4. Learn to communicate.
Finding an insight is one thing.
Explaining it clearly enough for someone to act on it is another.
5. Build by solving real problems.
Don't just learn formulas.
Don't just watch tutorials.
Take a messy problem.
Work through it.
Make mistakes.
Figure it out.
Share what you learned.
AI can write a formula or SQL query in seconds.
But knowing what to ask, what to investigate, and what the answer actually means is the skill I'm building.
I'm Obinna.
I'm learning data analytics in public, one real problem at a time.
If you're learning a new skill, changing careers, or starting over too, you're not alone.
We're building from where we are.
What are you currently learning that could change your career?
Entry-level at that band is rare. Do you know if they take applicants who'd need sponsorship, or is it US-only?
YouTube has a $113k-$162k entry level Analytics position in San Bruno, California. If you Are into Data Analytics or AI engineering or just want to learn, let’s connect, send a dm - follow along!
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Before you build a single chart, do two checks in Excel.
Rows: does the last row number match what you expect? 9,995 rows, not 10,000, is worth knowing.
Blanks: COUNTBLANK on each numeric column.
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Five years in a classroom & I never once had to explain what I did with my day.
In data nobody can see the work. The cleaning, the wrong turn, the number you don't trust and rebuild.
Almost every skill I had as a teacher is invisible here. That is the part I am getting used to.
The hidden sheet with the formula nobody can trace is where the real version lives. Every time.
I stopped trusting a total the day a dashboard tile said 442,528 and the column underneath summed to 286,397.
You know those Excel files where nobody is completely sure which version is the real one?
You open it and there are about 17 tabs, a few hidden sheets, some merged cells, and formulas pulling from another workbook that nobody seems to have.
Then you notice tabs called “FINAL”, “FINAL 2” and “FINAL OLD”, and somehow “FINAL OLD” is the one people still use.
That is usually when you realise the “quick check” is going to take a bit longer than expected. 😂
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I teach in a rural school in Nigeria and some of my students walk an hour to get there. The ones with the least would call themselves rich before I would have at their age.
That reframe is the whole thing.
What does it mean to be rich?
To me, it is not about money in the bank or a giant house. If I had all my possessions taken away from me tomorrow, I would still be very rich.
Being rich is having your kids run up to you to give you hugs after they get home from school. It’s sitting with your family at a dinner table and laughing the whole time. It's being healthy enough to go for a bike ride. It's knowing you are loved.
There are some of the wealthiest people in the world who are extremely poor. And I would not trade my life for theirs in 1 million years.
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Number 2 took me months to notice. I could build a dashboard before I could say what question it was answering.
What changed it was asking why the number looked wrong, not how to make the chart look right.
If these things sound familiar, you might be learning data analytics in a way that's making your journey harder than it needs to be.
1. You can only work when you're following a tutorial.
You understand the steps when someone shows you what to do, but struggle to make decisions independently.
2. You're learning tools without understanding the problems they solve.
You know how to build a dashboard, but can't explain the business question it answers.
3. You're completing courses but not applying what you've learnt.
You keep moving from one course to another without building projects or practising independently.
Instead, start practising with datasets without following a step-by-step guide, know the problems you're trying to solve and after learning a concept, find a way to apply it.
Your goal shouldn't have to finish as many courses as possible. It's to become confident enough to use what you've learnt to solve problems with data.
So, if you're currently learning data analytics, pay attention to how you're learning, not just what you're learning.
Follow for more practical tips on how to become a job-ready analyst and land your first role.
Have a productive week ahead.
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Bookmarks over likes is the part most people skip. A like costs nothing. A bookmark means someone meant to come back to it.
Mine went up the week I stopped posting summaries and started posting the actual numbers.
99% of advice on how to build on X.
• 3 tweets a day
• Focus on virality
• Engage like crazy
My advice:
• Post as many times as you can (value, personal & proof)
• Focus on inbounds and bookmarks, not likes
• Engage to build relationships
Follow my advice.
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1,871 of Superstore's 9,995 order lines lost money. That's 18.7% of the table.
Not a few bad orders. Nearly one in five.
At that size it stops being an exception you clean up and starts being a category you have to explain.
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I sorted Superstore by sales first, then by profit.
Different orders came to the top.
The biggest sellers were not the biggest earners.
Some of the top-selling lines were losing money on every unit, and nothing on a sales report would have told me that.
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2019 excitement, 2020 quit in your heart, 2021 back as a beginner is the part nobody posts. Mine went the other way round: years in a classroom before I touched Excel properly.
Starting late still counts as starting.
My data journey in 6 lines:
- 2019: Started with pure excitement.
- 2020: Quit in my heart.
- 2021: Came back as a complete beginner.
- 2022: First data job.
- 2023: Senior Analyst.
- 2024: Left the office and became my own boss.
Just never give up.
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I split Superstore profit by discount in Excel.
Full-price orders made 320,987.
Discounted orders lost 34,590.
Same products. Same customers. The discount column was quietly eating the profit the sales column was bragging about.
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The stuff that breaks in front of you is the only stuff you really learn. Courses teach the clean path.
In our training session today, we hit a real life challenge pipeline not detecting the new table created.
We tried everything didn’t work out. Found out after the session what the issue was and that’s a learning experience that in real life our work entails debugging the unusual.
Many of such you won’t find in a regular YouTube well curated video.
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A dashboard that only counts rows where profit is positive is not measuring profit. It is measuring your good days.
Mine said 442,528. The full column was 286,397.
The difference was 1,871 loss-making orders nobody was showing me.
