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Writer's pictureolidarley

Data visualisation job titles

In the context of Data Visualisation, what exactly is the difference between a DV analyst, a DV designer and a DV developer? The skills? The tools? Does the analyst use R, the designer use Adobe Creative Suite and the developer use d3? Unless you work in an organisation with a large dedicated data viz team, more often than not there is a massive amount of overlap between what these roles require. You'll probably need to do everything, or at least bits of everything.


I scraped LinkedIn for jobs with 'data visualisation' or 'data visualization' in the title and found that the most common job title was in fact none of these.

What about desired skills?

Tableau was a 'desired' skill in more than three quarters of data viz jobs which just goes to show how much they dominate the market. Most people I know in the field use both BI tools (usually Tableau) and at least one programming language and most dataviz jobs would ask for both in some way or other.

Writing skills, statistics and presenting were fairly low on the list. This made me wonder about potential variation in skills rankings across job titles. Coding skills would presumably be high for a data visualisation developer, and strategic skills higher in management focused roles.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most desired skills for Designers include design flair, storytelling and data viz best practices. Managers need to be focused on using Tableau to build (or oversee as their team builds) dashboards and KPIs. Developers and Engineers have to have expertise in Cloud computing and Big data and web-based visualisation. Requirements for Analysts are more dispersed across skills, top of the employer wishlist being experience in gathering and delivery of stakeholder requirements.


For Consultants two skills stood out a bit. 45% of consultant positions required writing skills, much higher than the other job titles. Also 55% of consultant roles required a masters, a qualification mentioned far less elsewhere.

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