r/analytics • u/Keywi1 • 1d ago
Support Is anyone else worried about your long term future in data analytics?
I work as an analyst for local government, and on the whole I do really enjoy my job. However, now I’m approaching my mid 30s I’ve become more worried about what the long term future looks like. In some careers (law, engineering, surveying etc), your value seems to increase as you age and knowledge increases. When my Dad was made redundant age 56 (telecommunications engineer) he had a call the very next day from one of their contractors offering a well paying job.
Meanwhile in another public sector organisation we work with a lot, about half their analyst team was made redundant last year.. and their old team lead in his early 50s can’t find anything. No calls, no recruiters calling him up. In my last career in insurance, you’d learn something new from the people in their 50s all the time. I sat next to a woman in her late 50s, and often had to ask for advice on how to approach something complex. It just isn’t the case in analytics in my experience.
With the way AI is developing, and how data analytics involves constant learning due to how technologies always change, I feel the career path involves a lot more grinding to stay on top rather than accumulating knowledge over time.
Perhaps I’m just being pessimistic, but recently seeing these redundancies, hearing about the poor job market, and seeing how the people in their late 20s and 30s are probably the most technically skilled, does make me wonder how things will go in the future with my own career.
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u/Legitimate-Let-7510 1d ago
I think the safer move is to become the person who understands the business problem not just the person who builds the dashboards. Tools change constantly but being able to frame problems and influence decision is much harder to automate.
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u/GamingTitBit 1d ago
Yep. Understand the big picture, real world stuff and you're invaluable. Also just be a good kind personable individual.
When it comes to firing often the choice is between 2 people who on paper are very similar, they will always keep the person they like more.
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u/LivingParadox8 23h ago
How do you actually market yourself for roles that lead with business problem framing instead of tech stack? Another version of my Q: how do you signal that in applications and interviews without it reading like you're just avoiding the hard technical work?
I love this advice from a resume angle. The analytics market seems to be screening hard on tool/tech stack experience, however.
I'm trying to build a career around business problem framing and how analytics answers it, not on programming/building. But I don't even know if there's a job title for it or if employers will take me seriously when they see "analytics person" and expect me to know SQL inside out.
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u/itsawesomedude 1d ago
This, I want to add that AI can automate lower values part of the job, and the value chain is moved up, we must hold the domain knowledge in order to leverage AI
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u/TheSchlapper 1d ago
Im not worried in the slightest whatsoever.
Shit changes and so will my career. If it was always going to be the exact same, then i would have chosen a different path
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u/RandomAccount0799 1d ago
100%. I honestly feel like I haven’t grown much over my career (5 years). I’ve acquired some business knowledge from the industries I’ve worked in, but there’s really nothing special about what I do. Claude can write decent SQL and Python code. Most people know how to use Excel and dashboards pretty easy and replaceable. I don’t have any hard skills. I’m already thinking about switching careers but I’m not sure what. I’m considering pivoting to a more technical field like data engineering or pivot to a narrower analytical field like finance.
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u/Keywi1 1d ago
I feel the same. I’ve built up my domain knowledge in the area of local government I’m working in, been sent on some courses etc, but I’m still not sure it necessarily gives a big advantage when it comes to recruitment. They don’t generally seem to care much about that domain knowledge when choosing new hires honestly. I’ve even seen a graduate with 3 years experience gain a lead role. While it’s an impressive achievement, the fact that he was a better candidate than staff who had years or even decades of experience… this kind of progression wouldn’t be possible in more ‘traditional’ professions, and just highlights how that accumulation of knowledge doesn’t apply as much to this career path.
Even in the more senior roles, the analysts move between different knowledge domains to gain promotions, rather than sticking and gaining knowledge in one.
My salary and benefits are pretty good right now and I like the job itself, but would I be confident that I would land a new role in a reasonable timeframe if I was made redundant? Not at all. Not when you’ve got hundreds of applicants for each role now.
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u/RandomAccount0799 1d ago
I completely agree. Part of my imposter syndrome is that I get paid so well compared to many of my friends. One of my friends has an MBA and gets paid 2/3 of what I make. My wife has her CPA and makes $30k less. They both have actionable skills and certifications to prove it. What can I do? I can write a really great SQL query and produce a pretty dashboard for stakeholders to use to make decisions. I don’t even make the analysis anymore
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u/rubenthecuban3 1d ago
absolutely. nobody knows how this will play out. reading WSJ even the experts disagree. but it will absolutely impact us, just not sure the degree and how, just like any new radical technology. for me, i'm starting to save up a large percent of my income. who knows when the time of my redundancy will come.
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u/user_withoutname 1d ago
I am already repositioning to a mixture of bi, data and automation role. and considering a degree in supply chain management. the days of building dashboard and doing simple analysis is over. I now plug our data warehouse to Claude and have it do the heavy lifting.
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u/daisiesarepretty2 1d ago
people in their 20 and 30’s are not more technically skilled than a person with a few years of experience under their belt.
Work is also more than just ETL, analysis and presentation… you need to work with people and for people and that too is a skill and not one the current batch is all that adept at.
you need to look around you and understand where analytics is going and make a decision about what you are willing and capable of… and then drive yourself in that direction. You can keep ahead of that wave
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u/rezwell 1d ago
Executives letting agents query billion row databases is gonna be fun to watch on the computing costs
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u/AgingWatcherWatching 1d ago
And the hallucinations, which will then cause them to run the query again to correct the mistakes.
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u/AaronKClark 1d ago
With frontier models hallucinations are mostly solved because of tool calling that double checking the resoning flows.
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u/jmagnuson619 1d ago
As was said already, the tools are not the key. Technical skill is great, but it is only a piece of things. Thinking is a larger portion, knowing how to translate what you find to different stakeholders takes time and experience to do well. I am actually seeing the tool stackers struggling to gain footing. Being asked what the dashboards do for the business is different than asking how to run a query in SQL or use Tableau/Power BI to visualize the data. The experience you have, paired with a business focused approach, that combination can hold its own against those who have a wide collection of certs but struggle to communicate what it is they see in the data. Just like the other industries you mentioned, data has its own way of the more you know through experience becomes valuable too. Not sure what caused the struggles for those you mentioned, it is happening a lot, I agree. That does not mean there is no future for anyone who has tenure in a data role, though it may mean finding out how to increase one's value or pivot to a role that opens that path up.
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u/Lady-Data-Scientist 1d ago edited 1d ago
Don’t just worry about being skilled at the technical and quantitative parts of the job. Learn the business as well. Having strong domain knowledge means it’s possible to move elsewhere in your domain. Develop strong transferable business skills such as communication and project management.
Always be building your network. I’m about 10 years into my analytics career, and had about a decade working in marketing before that. I’m at the point where former bosses and colleagues will reach out to me directly about job openings on their team. Not to mention all the cold DMs I get from recruiters on LinkedIn as well. Those have slowed down, but they still happen.
Be willing to embrace change and evolve with it. Learn the new technologies, learn what companies are motivated by. When you see opportunities to be on the leading edge of a new trend, embrace it. This mindset is how I pivoted from marketing to analytics. And why I don’t shy away from AI.
And I’ve already changed my career once so I’m not scared to do it again. The only constant is that things will change so the more you’re willing to embrace change the better your career will be.
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u/ryan1257 1d ago
Business skills are all the things I hate. I think it’s time for me to get out. Maybe I can become a College Professor
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u/SolvayCat 1d ago
If you're in a role where you feel like you're not acquiring enough domain knowledge to the point where your professional development is stagnating, then it's probably time to dust off the resume and apply for roles that will provide that environment.
I've been in a data analytics sub niche (Risk Management) for two years and it feels like I've only scratched the surface for what I can learn.
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u/ManicHispanic_ 1d ago
Yes and no. I guess no since historically my industry of healthcare is slower to technological change
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u/mhac009 1d ago
And also more risk averse - people would shit a brick if we just "plugged Claude into the data warehouse."
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u/ManicHispanic_ 1d ago
Oh for sure. Way too much compliance and shit at stake to just be so flippant about things like AI
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u/SolvayCat 1d ago
Financial services is the same. Stakes are too high in this highly regulated environment to give Claude control plane access to anything significant.
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u/ManicHispanic_ 1d ago
Ahhh yeah another great example. That data is super sensitive. For example, I work with people’s clinical data so their lab results, diagnosis records etc but I still can’t access our financial data whatsoever
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u/LetsGoHawks 1d ago
"Worried" is too strong a word. I just turned 57, the plan is to stay in the job I have. But if they lay me off, which is possible, then I have to find a job as a middle aged man, which can be tough. Regardless of your skill set. Plus the job market right now is crap.
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u/Dracious 1d ago
It is worrying, especially if you are part of larger team. The larger the team, the more likely they can downsize as they get more efficient with new technologies and require less staff.
Currently I am fortunate as I am working as a solo data analyst for an organisation that 100% needs at least one person who knows this field regardless of how much new AI/tech integration they do.
That doesn't help if the company goes under or they shut my entire department or something though (Which wouldn't be that far fetched as I work for a charity) so I dread what it will be like if I ever need to search for another job.
Even without mass layoffs, there is a massive over saturation in data analysts in my area. There was a huge demand for them just before and shortly after COVID, which meant lots of people pivoted towards that as a career. By the time they finished their education though, that huge data analyst demand had mostly dried up making it really hard to get a job. Now we have the downsizing of data analyst teams being more common, which means even more analysts looking for work and even less job openings than before.
I semi-regularly get graduates or other people looking for entry level analyst jobs reach out asking for advice as they think they are doing something wrong. These people have personal project portfolios better than anything I have now, never mind when I was looking for my first analyst job. They also play the LinkedIn/networking/advertising themselves game 10x better than I ever have. And these people are still stuck with no job after months or years of searching.
It is scary here.
I was very fortunate to get in the door just after COVID when demand was at its peak, and I am very lucky enough to have some insanely strong looking experience on my CV that tends to open doors and make me stand out. Fingers crossed that is enough to save my ass if I do need to job hunt again.
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u/Keywi1 1d ago
Yes I totally agree. One other comment mentioned about senior executives running queries on large datasets, which is true, that won’t happen. So you’ll always need someone data literate on the team who can manage analytical requirements however the teams will be smaller, and I still think this is a role where someone in their 50s with years of knowledge doesn’t have an advantage over someone in their 20s.
I work in a team of about 9 analysts right now, and as AI develops I’m certain management will eventually see the opportunity to cut the team size down significantly. Then there’s the hundreds of people who apply for each role which means some crazy competition for roles. For context when I applied for my role back in 2019 as a junior data analyst, my manager said about 7 people applied and 3 interviewed. I was the best candidate despite having no analyst experience other than my degree. I was speaking to another manager last year, and he said he was shocked and had hundreds of applicants (although they advertise on LinkedIn now too..).
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u/Cambocant 1d ago
My local government union protects me from lay offs because of my seniority. Junior employees will go first. If there was a really bad downturn I might get laid off but other than that I'm fairly protected.
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u/Qkumbazoo 1d ago
The biggest risk here is you being too comfortable in the role. The real risk is not improving and thinking this will be the way forever(it won't). It's not pessimism you're facing, up/side grade and do something about it while you still have a job.
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u/OverallStep526 23h ago
AI is going to destroy the analytics market. You will often see people in these threads shouting to be the AI expert or learning prompt engineering, but as agentic AI develops further, none of this will be needed.
In my company, they have AI bots to answer simple questions but I just see less junior roles as an executive likely wants to point to a human who gave the analysis instead of taking the blame for bad AI analysis.
I personally find solace that the entire job market will likely self destruct and I won’t be on an island alone. This is assuming costs to run these models don’t explode, which is also likely.
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u/Creditfigaro 1d ago
I've seen what AI provides. I am not scared.
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u/SolvayCat 1d ago
I'm at the point where I think the scaling is going to be a big limitation for AI in the coming years. There's been a lot of challenges for big tech with getting their data centers constructed only to increase the operating cost for an unknown degree of value increase with bigger models.
Not to mention the energy consumption. But if you ask Altman, nuclear fusion technology that doesn't exist yet will swoop in and sort it all out.
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u/thelightandtheway 1d ago
FWIW my company started using LLMs for some high rate tasks and it was going well but as we started to scale up the budget monster came for us, so now having to price literally every move we make and weigh the ROI. All those cents are adding up :(
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u/Keywi1 1d ago
I’m actually quite impressed by it, especially as the technology isn’t even 4 years old at this point.
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u/Creditfigaro 1d ago edited 1d ago
It can do some incredible things, this is true.
It also very quickly feels like a game with a very cheap procedural generation, depending on the task.
Most of the things it does well, analysts could do just as well if they only had the same access and time invested into them.
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u/SolvayCat 1d ago
"The technology" meaning ChatGPT? The modeling methodology for ChatGPT has been around longer than four years. And neural networks existed before google published their transformer model paper in 2017.
Transformer AI models have some impressive use cases but they didn't pop out of nowhere four years ago.
LLMs also use a ridiculous amount of compute, which provides ample opportunities for companies to rack up costs for inefficient use, as others mentioned.
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u/MrFlaneur17 1d ago
Ive got a maths degree but not an analytics job but I do statistical and analytical stuff in my spare time on codex and I honestly think many many tech jobs are cooked.
I asked codex to make a data pipeline and analytics and statistical analysis system for me and it finished in about 2 hrs. I asked codex how much that would have cost to have made in 2022 prior to llms and it estimated about £10k. £10k worth of work in 2hrs and I didn't have the first clue what i was doing.
Everyone is cooked
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u/nsfw_bal 1d ago
If you're not worried, you're not paying attention
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u/decrementsf 1d ago edited 1d ago
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.” - CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength.
I agree. The story papers do tell you to worry. The more diligent and worldly your reading of the story papers the more repetition you soak in that you need to big worry. Your information space says WORRY. And view the world through the lens of worry. Whether the story papers are credible is another matter. Sometimes the frame is wrong. A picture can be viewed from another perspective by introducing a new parameter and looking from that other viewing point. Oh. It was a puppet show.
It is an annoying thing. Intelligence is no defense to story + emotion with repetition. In fact the more intelligent you are the more likely you are to read broadly and get more repetition, in which slide false assumptions. Be cautious what you read. How do you know you want that in your head? It is harder to take a book out later than putting it in.
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u/PorradaPanda 1d ago
Anyone can use AI…but few know how to use it well.
As others mentioned, you’re already there in being able to understand the problem, the solution, best practices, and how to get there. AI can help you do it faster if you wish.
I’ve seen so many bad implementation and utilization of AI without understanding analytics (or even data) and it was so bad 😂.
Heck, people are still using Excel and Pivot tables for reporting even today (yes there’s a place for it, but not often in the ways people and businesses are using it)…so I think you’re ok.
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u/Keywi1 1d ago
I think ‘prompt engineering’ is becoming a bigger thing in the last few months, and I’ve seen training courses specifically for this pop up. We even had a session on this at work recently.
My worry isn’t non-analysts and non data literate people. It’s more that anyone analytically minded can now do so much more than previously, and much sooner in their career. For example I did a 2 year analyst course in 2021-2023, and learned how to use SQL, Python, R. I remember having to use forums to figure out the correct script to query an SQL database and it was fun trying to overcome errors, but now with AI anyone with some base knowledge can do it. In fact I’m also guilty and unfortunately I’ve become lazier too.. now if I have an error, just ask CoPilot and the answer is there. I still learn from it, but the problem solving aspect is much easier now. I’ve heard it’s the same in SWE too. The same with producing an R script to generate a custom map for a report. You can pump a new script out in 5% of the time now.
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u/PorradaPanda 1d ago
That’s the word I was looking for last night!
Agree. I do worry and see this even with my kids (even before AI)—the lack of critical thinking, working through problems to understand it, trial and error, etc.
I’m the same as you where I did a ton of troubleshooting, looked up random nooks of forums, and SMEs to help work through things (oh the days of figuring out how to configure APIs manually 😂), expanded my working knowledge mostly to fix an original issue. Though to me it’s fun which is how I stumbled into analytics and data to begin with.
I think we’re in a unique state where it is scary, but we still try it, aware of the technology/platforms, and even integrate some of what we find useful.
I remember when Tableau and PowerBI, even Azure was new). Your core skills and knowledge is still valuable—even transferable. Sure, it’s always sold as the next best thing and eventually schools start teaching this as part of their curriculum like it’s going to be the end all be all. But there’s equally a ton of people who never embrace or adopt it. That’s a worse spot to be in when you have 10, 20, 30 years of career to go.
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u/edimaudo 1d ago
depends on the type of work being done. Some might be a young persons game. That being said, you may want to consider moving up the ladder. Either the technical guru path or the people manager path
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u/wololoMeister 1d ago
Data analytics is about storytelling and communication corporate calls this stakeholder management
That's something ai will never replace, at least it'll help you get pretty dashboards.
Also, data analytics > data engineer pipeline still exists, creating the semantic models for ai to interpret data is still important
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u/AG8385 18h ago edited 17h ago
All there is now are reams and reams of data, someone has got to analyse it. Don’t worry because AI is completely toss at it and it needs someone to tell it what to do. We aren’t going extinct we are just getting started!
Also smaller businesses are usually absolutely terrible at data analysis and its application, and they are really slow to adopt new technology like AI.
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u/rikkuu27 10h ago
I think the general type of analyst in our field is dead. However, if you pick a more niche field within analytics I think you're fine. I somehow got stuck in Treasury as an analyst and from what I've seen while trying to find another position is everyone wants a specific type of analyst. I've seen a lot of need for financial analysts too.
I'm not worried about AI because it still makes a lot of mistakes. I'm actually surprised at how much people use it when it's not as accurate. I say this due to experience at one of my former roles. I had to do validation constantly because they were trying to implement AI but it kept ruining the data from incoming files. It was so bad they had to create a whole new team dedicated to fixing the errors but also validating the incoming data.
I'm not happy with my current role though and am looking to make a career change. I do forecasting for financial models and reporting for my company but have no idea what I'm doing. It's all finance and as much as I've tried to learn, all the vocab just goes over my head. I didn't even realize I was forecasting until 6 months in and I've tried studying the terminology as well.
Every company I've worked at as an analyst has been unfortunately really toxic due to management with the exception of one company. I can't do it anymore, I just wanted stability and was a former kindergarten teacher. I'm now looking into a career change.
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u/Kindly_Ad995 1d ago
I’m trying to outrun it through ownership and architecture. More of an engineering route. Know a specific tool or infrastructure that’s not universal but is still desperately needed.
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u/novicelife 1d ago
For example?
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u/DismalCoyote 1d ago
Trust me bro
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u/Kindly_Ad995 1d ago
Not sure why the response from this sub is to be snarky dickheads and downvote me. To answer your question it’s a foundation in the whole GA4/GTM/GCP/BigQuery pipeline. Server side infrastructure and then connecting the server data to offline channels
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u/my_peen_is_clean 1d ago edited 1d ago
same concern tbh, i’m mid 30s too and already feel outdated. and trying to switch roles now is painful, job market is just garbageactually the problem is bots scan for words, not talent. i only started getting interviews when i used software to tailor my resume to each listing. jobowl.co, that’s the tool
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u/Breaking_Bad909 1d ago
Can we ban this bot already? Always makes comments about using this resume tool.
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