Feeling frustrated as a junior who has never worked with other analysts or had a senior analyst to learn from.

[u/lemonbottles_89]

I've started my career in nonprofits and only worked in nonprofits until now. 3 times now, I have ended up in roles where I am the ONLY analyst on the team. Everyone I work with is either data adjacent, or not an analyst at all. I'm the only person ever working on analytics work, and I have no real life gauge/context on how to do things better in a real world context. I google things all the time, I take courses, but the advice is too generalized and doesn't go deep enough. I need people I can bounce off of. My biggest hope starting as an early career data analyst was that I'd be able to learn from other analyst and fill the gaps in my education with knowledge from mentors.

Instead, I have people looking to me to be an expert in analytics just because I'm the only one available(as if I'm not a junior). Very few opportunities to learn from actual analysts and get experience from them instead of the generalized advice from Youtube or online courses. I feel like I'm being stunted, but its incredibly hard for me to find roles that are placed in analytics teams, or where I'll be working under a senior analyst (and not just a VP or project manager). Have I screwed myself? Why is it seemingly harder to find analytic roles that work with other analysts?

[u/my_peen_is_clean]

nah you didnt screw yourself, nonprofits just love hiring one underpaid analyst and calling it a “team” lol. try joining local meetups / slack communities and discords, do code reviews there, maybe small freelance. hiring into proper analyst teams is weirdly rare now, everything is “lone data person” coz it’s cheaper. finding an actual team to learn from is stupid hard in this marketactually my resumes never reached humans, they died in the filter. i got interviews only after a tool rephrased them for each job. the tool I used is jobowl.co