Can you give me some tips and/or resources that will help me start to develop good analytical skills now, in high school?

Hi Brodrick,
An important aspect to analytics is how you present the results in a clear and compelling way. I would encourage you to read Edward Tuffte's work on Data Visualization and Infographics. They are beautiful books that will give you principles to use throughout you career.

All the best,
Jim

Hey Brodrick,

Good for you for taking an interest in developing good analytical skills. This is a great skill to have especially when there is a decent size of the population that are math-phobic.

I believe you should get into data visualization first as analytic analysis is a natural progression. I would advise you to look into Tableau; lead data visualization software. There are tons of resources discussing Tableau and you can easily learn how to build infographics that will allow you to analyze the dataset that you have.

Tableau is how I started my professional career and in a very short time I was able to become a Business Analyst for Airbnb.

There are many analytics and business management courses offered by Coursera and edX. courses are good and some of courses also have high end analytics contents including machine learning, AI etc. Also they have separate courses for R & Python. definitely recommend these courses.

Definitely recommend Benoit Mandelbrot's "The (Mis)behavior of Markets" and Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan" for books that are both interesting reads and provide an analytic perspective. These would be completely interesting reads at a high school level, not math heavy in themselves, but give an insight into financial modeling, trading, and I think would spark a real interest in exploring maths afterward.

I would recommend that you find a topic that is of interest to you, see what data you can download easily about that topic and start digging into that data. First, learn simple pivot tables in Excel, then move to more advanced tools such as R or Python.

You could also try to take a class on Coursera that would have you work on a specific project. I recommend project work because you will catch things much faster.

Go to reddit. Search for subreddits for excel and sql. There's plenty of links to get you started on practicing. This will help you build the technical skill.

Whether you do analytics in finance, sales, HR, accounting... the stories you tell from the data may be different, but the technical skills are going to be very similar.

Finally, don't pidgeon hold yourself to thinking you only want to do one thing. I know plenty of people that wanted to be an account, lawyer, doctor, etc... and many of them now do something totally different; successful people too. You're young. Explore lots of different things!

I wanted to be a software developer. 2 semesters into college I quickly found out I hated it. Keep learning many different things. That way you won't feel "stuck" into a specific occupation.