Data plays an important role in our lives. It answers questions. It informs decisions. It replaces opinions and emotions with objectivity.

Data is valuable. Nothing you do online is free. Digital services that we use every day (Facebook, Instagram, Google, Outlook, etc.) might not cost money, but we pay with our data.

The data we provide to these companies is sold for obscene amounts of money to advertisers, who then use this data to sell us goods and services. In the end, the information we yield freely to these companies is worth way more than a small monthly fee if that were an alternative.

However, this important data about us that we hand over to companies isn’t immediately valuable. There are numerous steps between the creation of the data and the sale and use of the data.

First, we use “free” services with the agreement that they may collect and sell our data. This happens when we sign up for many services especially social media. These companies gather an incredible amount of data about us based off what we follow, like, post, comment on, and do on our other browser tabs.

At this point, however, the company just has a large quantity of numbers and information with really no way to use it which brings us to the second step. Data engineers and data analysts then create databases and other systems of management to corral the data and put it into a usable form.

Now that the data is workable, data analysts and data scientists can now query the data, clean the data, analyze the data, and create reports showcasing the information the data represents. Using Facebook as an example, when this stage is done, data is now available about where users live, what they like, what they don’t like, who they voted for, what they want to buy, and so on and so forth.

Now the data is incredibly valuable and is able to be sold to companies who purchase ads on these services. Without all of the previous steps, companies would be forced to advertise to the general public which is highly inefficient. Because of the work of the data analysts, engineers, and scientists, the data can be utilized to accomplish company goals. If the company is a national pizza chain for example, they can use the data available to market directly to people who like pizza and live in an area with one of their franchises.

That is the value of data. That is the value of data workers.

For information about how to become a data analyst, check out the social media below.

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