Recently I came across a nice illustration which captures the work of a data analyst. Each of the tasks mentioned below requires a specific set of skillsets and if one can work on learning at least 30-40% of skills from each of the disciplines mentioned, then data analysis becomes really interesting. One can walk through the entire task list and subsequently hope to understand things and probably build some useful models.

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If one lacks skills in any of the areas, then one has to depend on others for expertise. Depending on others means , sometimes, time lags, sometimes coordination problems etc etc. If one want to avoid that route , then one has to spend a LOT of time in gaining at least working knowledge in all the areas mentioned and be really really good at one of the aspects, be it acquiring data / parsing / filtering / mining / representing / refining / interacting with data.

It can easily be a life time effort to achieve expertise in each of the areas but at the end of it , the whole process might turn out to be a very satisfying journey.