What Jobs Can You Get With Microsoft Power BI Skills?
There are lots of great reasons to learn Microsoft Power Bi. But one of the most compelling things about the software is how it can unlock a whole new world of career options.
But you don’t have to take our word for it! In this article, we’ll look at a bunch of different jobs that all use Power BI skills, based on real job titles and descriptions pulled from Indeed.com.
This is really just scratching the surface; as we’ll see, Power BI skills can be useful in almost every job. But first let’s take a look at some real-world job roles where having Power Bi skills could help place your application at the top of the heap.
A quick note on job titles: job titles in the data science industry can be fuzzy, and different companies may call the same job different things.
Business analyst
Job basics: Business analysts are tasked with acquiring, cleaning, transforming, and analyzing company and industry data to mine valuable business insights and then report on those insights to the relevant stakeholders.
Often, business analysts will collaborate with and analyze data from a number of different teams across the company, so they have to be proficient at working with different kinds of data and must understand how to use data to answer a wide variety of business questions.
Why Power BI skills are required: While there are a variety of tools for analyzing data, none of them make sharing reports and dashboards with coworkers as straightforward as Power BI, particularly for companies that are already bought-in to the Microsoft ecosystem and are regularly using other Microsoft products like Teams.
Average annual salary (US): \$87,254 (including average \$3,500 annual cash bonus)
Data analyst
Job basics: The job of a data analyst is very similar to that of a business analyst: data analysts acquire, clean, transform, and analyze data.
At some companies, there’s no meaningful difference between a business analyst and a data analyst. At companies with both roles, the difference is often that a data analyst is more focused on the analytical and statistical work, and may spend less time trying to understand specific business problems, building reports, and communicating with stakeholders.
However, the difference between these roles is company-dependent, and in many cases they are functionally the same or very similar.
Why Power BI skills are required: Data analysts need to acquire, clean, analyze, and visualize data – the tasks that Microsoft Power BI was built for. Other skills like Python and R programming can be very valuable for data analysis too, but some companies may prefer Power BI, particularly if they already use other parts of the Microsoft software suite.
Average annual salary (US): \$76,818 (including average \$2,000 annual cash bonus)
Data manager
Job basics: A data manager is responsible for overseeing the organization, storage, and analysis of data within a company. Their role involves managing and maintaining databases, ensuring data integrity and security, and developing and implementing data policies and procedures.
Why Power BI skills are required: Power BI includes robust tools for data governance and management. Particularly at companies that are using Power BI for analysis and reporting, a data manager would need Power BI skills to ensure that the analysts have access to the data they need, employees can’t accidentally access and contaminate important data, key dashboards and reports are updating and accessible as needed, and more.
Average annual salary (US): \$82,962
Power BI Developer
Job basics: A Power BI developer designs, develops, and builds data visualizations, reports, and dashboards using the Power BI platform. They actively collaborate with stakeholders to understand data requirements, gather and transform data from various sources, and proactively create visualizations that empower data-driven decision making.
In many ways, this role is similar to that of a business analyst, but Power BI developers may be less focused on answering specific business questions and more focused on building tools like dashboards that will enable coworkers to answer those questions on their own.
Why Power BI skills are required: As the name suggests, Power BI is the primary tool that a Power BI developer uses, as the software enables users to build interactive, shareable, data tools such as dashboards that will automatically refresh themselves as new data is generated.
Average annual salary (US): \$93,189
Business Systems Analyst
Job basics: A business systems analyst is an analyst whose primary focus is typically to understand and analyze the relationship between a company’s business objectives and its IT tools, and processes. They can serve as a bridge between business and tech teams, helping translate business goals into technical specs, and analyzing system performance to optimize it towards achieving business goals.
Why Power BI skills are required: Analyzing data related to IT systems and processes, and building reports that can translate that data into business outcomes for key stakeholders, is an important part of the role of a business systems analyst, and Power BI is an extremely useful tool for those tasks.
Average annual salary (US): \$95,119 (including average \$5,000 annual cash bonus)
Intelligence Analyst
Job basics: Intelligence analysts work for governments or companies to collect and analyze a broad spectrum of data. The role could include collecting and analyzing data about a specific location or subject for a government organization, or it might involve collecting and analyzing data about specific markets and industries for a company.
Why Power BI skills are required: While the job title “intelligence analyst” is broad enough to cover a wide variety of jobs, these days most of them will require applicants to have some experience with tools that facilitate quantitative analysis and data visualization. Microsoft Power BI is one of the most popular tools for doing those things.
Average annual salary (US): \$62,019 (including average \$10,000 annual cash bonus).
Data Visualization Specialist
Job basics: A data visualization specialist focuses on transforming complex data sets into visually appealing and easily understandable visualizations. Their primary role is to communicate insights and patterns effectively through visual means, enabling decision-makers to grasp information quickly and make informed decisions.
At some companies, this role may require doing most regular data analysis tasks, including accessing, cleaning, and transforming data. At others, the data visualization specialist may be passed complete or near-complete analysis and tasked with visualizing it in a compelling way.
Why Power BI skills are required: Power BI is a powerful tool for creating robust, interactive, and self-updating data visualizations, so it’s a logical tool that many employers will expect to see in the toolbox of aspiring data visualization specialists.
Average annual salary (US): Not enough data to compile an average salary.
Financial Analyst
Job basics: A financial analyst examines financial data, market trends, and micro- and macroeconomic factors to uncover valuable insights and provide recommendations for investment decisions. Utilizing advanced techniques, financial analysts proactively forecast financial outcomes often developing custom financial models. Their expertise and reporting may be used to drive company financial decisions, or it may be a product in itself that can be packaged and sold to retail investors.
Why Power BI skills are required: Power BI is built for analysis, and allows for the creation of robust forecasting models. Its ability to integrate Python and R scripts also allows it to be used in tandem with even more powerful custom models
Average annual salary (US): \$74,543
Many, many, other jobs
Other analytics jobs
Although we’ve listed a few specific job titles here, the reality is that there are probably hundreds if not thousands of different job titles whose job description essentially boils down to some form of data analyst. And many of these jobs, by extension, will require skill with an analytics tool such as Power BI.
If you’re familiar with a particular area of business, searching for job titles that connect it with “analyst” can help you find jobs where both your previous experience and your Power BI skills will be valued. For example, a marketer who’s interested in transitioning into business analysis or data analysis should consider searching job sites for titles such as “Marketing Analyst” or “Marketing Analytics Specialist”.
Non-analytics jobs
In our data-driven world, job roles that aren’t directly related to analytics still often involve working with data. Even at companies with dedicated data teams, many employers appreciate a candidate who has the technical skill to pull their own data and analyze it.
This skill is a force multiplier, because at many companies the demand for data analysis is massive, and it’s only growing. Data teams are struggling to keep up. A marketer, for example, who can dig into the data of their own campaign to figure out what worked and what didn’t will be able to iterate more quickly, and the fact that they’re doing it themselves unblocks access to the data team for someone else who might need help.
And of course, these skills are also useful from the employee’s perspective. Having Power BI skills on your resume can make you more flexible if you choose to change careers, and analytics skills can also help you advocate for yourself and your own work, allowing you to build compelling, data-based visualizations to support your point of view or showcase your accomplishments.
Long story short: Microsoft Power BI is a valued skill across a wide variety of job roles both in the field of analytics and beyond it. Want to get it onto your resume fast? Check out our Analyzing Data with Power BI skill path and start learning today!
