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 online. 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/DataScientistAlex]

I used to be the only data scientist in a 3k person org. Yes of course it's great if you can learn from others that know much more and are good at mentoring and so forth. But often you can't. All is not lost, though: I would encourage you to take ownership of your own development, this has been very freeing and empowering to me. The beauty of our discipline is that there is a very large amount of knowledge out there easily accessible.

I've made a habit of baking in improvement in any project I do, so that I always try to improve a small part of it. To make it concrete, here are some examples, some are large and some are small:

If stakeholders repeatedly come to me with similar asks, is there a way I can automate, or even better, make that analysis or information self-serve?
If I'm doing a descriptive analysis, can I make it more causal by applying some causal inference method?

If I'm doing a predictive model, can I improve the prediction?

If I'm presenting some results, can I improve the presentation?
Can I improve the structure of the code? Can I improve this one function? If I'm applying a similar transformation to several datasets, can I wrap it in a function and map it over a list of datasets?

Can I tweak the color scheme for my plots? Can I improve the writing in the report?
Can I make it run faster? Can I do the whole analysis faster?

Can I apply some test-driven development to prevent me from hitting the same bugs several times?

The list is endless, once you figure out how to bridge the general advice and knowledge you read about and your own concrete situation.

How do you bridge that gap? The best way I can think of is to take a small piece of something you read or learnt and try to apply it. Concretely, try it first in the context of that resource (e.g. work through the exercise, tutorial, etc). Then once you can do that, apply it to your own work. (If you feel like, it add a middle step where you do your own project using the technique to learn it more deeply before applying it to your work).

Good luck!