What is the Difference between a Data Analyst, Data Scientist, and Data Engineer?

All of you have already heard about data analysts, data scientists, and data engineers. But do you know the difference between these three job roles? No doubt, the difference lies in their core task. The role of a data scientist is to gather and analyze large sets of structured and unstructured data for unearthing future insights. In contrast, a data engineer takes responsibility for developing and maintaining data pipelines, and a data analyst collects and analyzes all the relevant data to solve a specific problem.

Still needs to be clarified? Don’t worry, as this is just a brief. This article will give you a detailed insight into the difference between a data analyst, a data scientist, and a data engineer.

Who is a Data Analyst?

Data analytics is the process of extracting data from a given pool of data. In this regard, data analysts are responsible for analyzing those data. They use various data cleaning, conversion, and modeling methodologies to extract the information. Besides that, they have good communication and presentation skills to communicate the result of data analytics with the other team members to implement the proper solution.

Nowadays, data analytics is used in almost every sector across various industries. These include banking and securities, media & entertainment, pharma & healthcare, manufacturing, and many more. Undoubtedly, all these sectors need to analyze the current trend and their client requirement to overview their performance. So, data analysis is a must-have consideration for them. As a result, these days, the demand for data analysts is growing more and more.

Average Salary of a Data Analyst

If we look at the data analyst salary, an entry-level data analyst in the US with less than one year of experience can earn up to $56k per year as the starting salary. However, big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, etc., offer a starting salary of $101k per year. As per Indeed, the average salary of a data analyst is $71,413 per year.

Who is a Data Scientist?

There is no doubt that the data scientist job is treated as one of the most trending jobs in the IT sector. This profession has earned so much popularity recently that it has been crowned the “Sexiest Job of the 21st century”. Nowadays, more and more companies are looking for data scientists to increase and improve their performance and optimize their production. However, this profession is still in its infantile stage but occupies almost all industry sectors.

Companies must extract data to analyze and gain insights into different trends and practices. And data scientists are ideal for this role as they have proficiency and knowledge of statistical tools to analyze those data by implementing their programming skills. Besides that, they should know different machine-learning algorithms.

No doubt, these algorithms play an important role in predicting future insights. So you can consider this profession as an ocean consisting of every data operation, such as data extraction, processing, analysis, and prediction, to offer you necessary and valuable insights.

Average Salary of a Data Scientist

Unfortunately, there is a shortage of data scientists worldwide because of the high learning curve. As a result, this profession offers a lucrative salary for data scientists. According to Indeed, the average salary of a data scientist in our country is $144,975 annually.

Who is a Data Engineer?

As mentioned earlier, a data engineer is a professional preparing data to reveal future insights. Besides that, they also take responsibility for developing data platforms and architectures for data processing. Furthermore, a data engineer designs the format on which data analysts and scientists will work.

No doubt, data engineers have to work with both structured and unstructured data. So, they should have a good command of SQL and NoSQL databases. Besides that, they often have to deal with Big Data in which they have to take responsibility for various operations. These include data management, cleaning, transformation, data deduplication, etc.

There is no doubt that a data engineer must have proficiency in core programming concepts along with algorithms. Sometimes they have to play a similar role, just like a software engineer. This means data engineers have to take responsibility for developing platforms and architecture that follow software development guidelines.

Average Salary of a Data Engineers

There is no doubt that the data engineer job is considered one of the top emerging jobs. So, the demand for data engineers is ever-increasing. No doubt, this profession offers a good salary. As per Indeed, a data engineer in Texas can earn $126,871 per year on average.

Final Thoughts

We hope you have understood the difference between a data analyst, a data scientist, and a data engineer. Besides that, you have gained knowledge about their roles and responsibilities and their average salaries. Now, choosing the role based on your knowledge and skill is completely up to you. However, becoming a data scientist is the most interesting career among these three professions.