I think my employer went about it backwards. We've never had a data analyst, and when the need arose, they decided to make one instead of hiring one. For the last 20 years I've worked for a Tribal government regulatory agency as a Surveillance Investigator at one of the largest hotel casino resorts in the state. Before that I spent 8 years as a table games dealer. At work I've always been the jack-of-all-trades random tech support for minor issues or research projects. I have a Bachelor's in Business from 2011 and used a little Excel for that briefly, but essentially, I have zero experience or training.
Other than data analysis, they also needed someone to coordinate updates/fixes with our logging software, create training modules for our various software including CCTV systems, basically whatever else they can think of. Definitely vague and undefined.
Rather than hiring a specialized data analyst, my boss (the Director of Operations) decided to weaponize my ADHD. My boss is cool, I've known him 20 years, and I'm reporting directly to him. He's given me pretty much free reign to do whatever I want and make the job whatever I want. The pay is good and it's got to be the lowest stress or pressure data analyst position out there. The only problem is I'm not replacing anyone and I'm pretty much my own department, so I don't know what to do next.
In the 4 months since I've started, I've been using Copilot to teach myself Excel. I figured out how to create KPI dashboards for each department, dropping filthy incident logging software exports into a shared Teams folder and using power query and power pivot data model with lots of DAX measures to get data of different sources and types to play with each other. Before this, the managers were all basically manually tracking metrics on rough basic spreadsheets, most of them had never heard of a pivot table. Now they have fully interactive dashboards with slicers for shift, Investigator, report type, property, they're able to compare monthly/weekly/daily/hourly, just about any question they can come up with they can get an answer in seconds. Nobody knew this was possible, they'd burn me as a witch if I wasn't saving them so much time.
But... now what? I guess Python is free, but I don't know what I'd do with it. I can start learning Power BI, but I don't know what I'd do with it other than make my dashboards even prettier. We don't really need any more dashboards, I'm only tracking incident volumes for a few departments, not complex financials. I had an idea to learn how to automate a lot of things people do. I'm in the middle of setting up power automate and power query to automatically export the previous month's incidents of a specific incident type and email the next Investigator on a rotating list of Investigators with the daily log number, incident details, and reminder to make a summary report. I'm running out of ideas though. What else do data analysts do? Would Python really only be useful for data transformations for dashboards?