Showcase your data analytics skills with a portfolio that demonstrates your abilities. Build a job-ready portfolio with these five beginner-friendly data analytics projects.
If you鈥檙e getting ready to launch a new career as a data analyst, you can build a portfolio that demonstrates your skills in a more interactive way than a resume or a CV. The projects you include in your portfolio demonstrate your skills and experience鈥攅ven if it鈥檚 not from a previous data analytics job鈥攖o hiring managers and interviewers. Populating your portfolio with the right projects can go a long way toward building confidence that you鈥檙e the right person for the job, even without previous work experience.
Explore five types of projects you should include in your data analytics portfolio, especially if you鈥檙e just starting out. You鈥檒l see some examples of how these projects are presented in real portfolios and find a list of public data sets you can use to start completing projects.聽
Tip: When you鈥檙e just starting out, think in terms of 鈥渕ini projects.鈥 A portfolio project doesn鈥檛 need to feature a complete analysis end-to-end. Instead, complete smaller projects based on individual data analytics skills or steps in the data analysis process.
As an aspiring data analyst, you鈥檒l want to demonstrate a few key skills in your portfolio. These data analytics project ideas reflect the tasks often fundamental to many data analyst roles.聽
While you鈥檒l find no shortage of free public data sets on the internet, you might want to show prospective employers that you鈥檙e able to find and scrape your own data as well. Plus, knowing how to scrape web data means you can find and use data sets that match your interests, regardless of whether or not they鈥檝e already been compiled.
If you know some Python, you can use tools like Beautiful Soup to crawl the web for interesting data. If you don鈥檛 know how to code, don鈥檛 worry. You鈥檒l also find several tools that automate the process (many offer a free trial), like Octoparse or ParseHub.
If you鈥檙e unsure where to start, explore聽 websites with interesting data options to inspire your project:
Wikipedia
Job portals
Tip: Anytime you鈥檙e scraping data from the internet, remember to respect and abide by each website鈥檚 terms of service. Limit your scraping activities so as not to overwhelm a company鈥檚 servers, and always cite your sources when you present your data findings in your portfolio.
Example web scraping project: Edward Crowder and Jay Lanisquot explored data mining the darknet to assess cybercrime in Canada for an . The duo used a multi-stage processing pipeline in their research, including data crawling, web scraping, and parsing of information from web forums, chatrooms, and emails.聽
A significant part of your role as a data analyst is cleaning data to make it ready to analyse. Data cleaning (also called data scrubbing) is the process of evaluating and removing incorrect and duplicate data, managing any holes in the data, and making sure the formatting of data is consistent.聽
As you look for a data set to practise cleaning, look for one that includes multiple files gathered from multiple sources without much curation. Some sites where you can find 鈥渄irty鈥 data sets to work with include:
Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)
Government of Canada's Open Government Portal
World Bank
Data.world
/r/datasets
Data analysis is all about answering questions with data. Exploratory data analysis, or EDA for short, helps you explore what questions to ask. This could be done separately from or in conjunction with data cleaning. Either way, you鈥檒l want to accomplish the following during these early investigations.
Ask lots of questions about the data.
Discover the underlying structure of the data.
Look for trends, patterns, and anomalies in the data.
Test hypotheses and validate assumptions about the data.
Think about what problems you could potentially solve with the data.
An EDA project is an excellent time to take advantage of the wealth of public data sets available online. Explore 10 fun and free data sets to get you started in your explorations.
1. : Dig into Canada鈥檚 largest provider of weather and climate data.
2. : What makes the world鈥檚 happiest countries so happy?聽
3. : If you鈥檙e interested in space and earth science, see what you can find among the tens of thousands of public data sets made available by NASA.
4. : Learn more about the people and economy of Canada with the latest census data from 2021.
5. : Explore crime data collected by Canadian law enforcement.
6. : Track the latest coronavirus numbers by country or WHO region.
7. : This Kaggle data set (updated in April 2021) includes movie data broken down into 26 attributes.
8. : Download the raw data from the Google Books Ngram to explore phrase trends in books published from 1960 to 2015.
9. : Discover New York City through its many publicly available data sets on topics like the Toronto beach observations to city vehicle availability.
Sentiment analysis, typically performed on textual data, is a technique in natural language processing (NLP) for determining whether data is neutral, positive, or negative. It may also be used to detect a particular emotion based on a list of words and their corresponding emotions (known as a lexicon).聽
This type of analysis works well with public review sites and social media platforms, where people are likely to offer public opinions on various subjects.
To get started exploring what people feel about a certain topic, you can start with sites like:
Amazon (product reviews)
Rotten Tomatoes (movie reviews)
News sites
Humans are visual creatures. This makes data visualisation a powerful tool for transforming data into a compelling story to encourage action. Great visualisations are not only fun to create, they also have the power to make your portfolio look beautiful.
You don鈥檛 need to pay for advanced visualisation software to start creating stellar visuals either. A few of the free visualisation tools you can use to start telling a story with data include:
1. Tableau Public: Tableau ranks among the most popular visualisation tools. Use the free version to transform spreadsheets or files into interactive visualisations ( from April 2021).
2. Google Charts: This gallery of interactive charts and data visualisation tools makes it easy to embed visualisations within your portfolio using HTML and JavaScript code. A robust Guides section walks you through the creation process.
3. Datawrapper: Copy and paste your data from a spreadsheet or upload a CSV file to generate charts, maps, or tables鈥攏o coding required. The free version allows you to create unlimited visualisations to export as PNG files.
4. D3 (Data-Driven Documents): With a bit of technical know-how, you can do a ton with this JavaScript library.
5. RAW Graphs: This open source web app makes it easy to turn spreadsheets or CSV files into a range of chart types that might otherwise be difficult to produce. The app even provides sample data sets for you to experiment with.
You can populate your portfolio with mini projects highlighting individual skills. However, if you鈥檝e scraped the web for your own data, you might also consider using that same data to complete an end-to-end project. To do this, take the data you scraped and apply the main steps of data analysis to it鈥攃lean, analyse, and interpret.聽
This can show a potential employer that you not only have the essential skills of a data analyst but that you know how they fit together.
The amount of data available is staggering, and you can do a lot with it. If you need a little direction for your next project, consider one of these data analysis Guided Projects on 糖心vlog官网观看 that you can complete in under two hours. Each includes split-screen video instruction, and you don鈥檛 have to download or own any special software.
Building a portfolio with data analytics projects is a great way to demonstrate your skills to potential employers when you don鈥檛 necessarily have a lot of professional experience. Another great way to build some portfolio-ready projects is through a project-based online course. By completing the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate on 糖心vlog官网观看, you can complete hands-on projects and a case study to share with potential employers.
You can find many great books for those just starting out in data analytics. The following three books, in particular, offer accessible introductions to key aspects of the field: Data Analytics Made Accessible by Dr. Anil Maheshwari Numsense! Data Science for the Layman: No Math Added by Annalyn Ng and Kenneth Soo Python for Everybody: Exploring Data in Python 3 by Dr. Charles Russell Severance To supplement their reading, beginners may also consider taking the online Python for Everybody Specialisation offered by the University of Michigan and taught by Dr. Severance himself. 鈥 鈥
Data visualisation is the process of graphically representing data through visual means. Common forms of data visualisation include the use of graphs, charts, and diagrams to visually represent otherwise abstract data sets. Today, data visualisation is considered a key skill in the world of data analytics. 鈥 鈥
Beginning data analysts should make sure they have a solid technical understanding of Structured Query Language (SQL), Microsoft Excel, and either R or Python. Additionally, they should be able to think critically, present confidently, and know how to tell their data鈥檚 story visually. Read more about these and other key data analyst skills.聽 鈥
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