📊 Exploring the data job market! This project focuses on data analyst roles, digging into 💰 the highest-paying positions, 🔥 the most sought-after skills, and 📈 where strong demand and strong pay overlap in data analytics.
🔍 Want to see the SQL queries? Find them here: project_sql folder
This project grew out of a personal goal — to better understand what it actually takes to land a well-paying data analyst role. By analysing real job posting data, I wanted to figure out which skills are most valued and which ones lead to the best salaries.
- Which data analyst jobs pay the most?
- What skills do those top-paying jobs require?
- Which skills appear most often in data analyst job postings?
- Which skills are linked to the highest salaries?
- What are the smartest skills to learn for maximum market value?
To carry out this analysis, I relied on a set of tools that work well together:
- SQL: The core of my work — used to query, filter, and extract meaningful insights from the data.
- PostgreSQL: The database management system I used to store and manage the job posting data.
- Visual Studio Code: Where I wrote and ran all my SQL queries.
- Git & GitHub: Used for version control and to publish my work so others can view and follow along.
Each query was designed to answer one of the five questions above. Here's a walkthrough of what I did and what I found:
I filtered the data to show only remote Data Analyst positions with a listed salary, then sorted by highest pay to find the top 10.
SELECT
job_id,
job_title,
job_location,
job_schedule_type,
salary_year_avg,
job_posted_date,
name AS company_name
FROM
job_postings_fact
LEFT JOIN company_dim ON job_postings_fact.company_id = company_dim.company_id
WHERE
job_title_short = 'Data Analyst' AND
job_location = 'Anywhere' AND
salary_year_avg IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY
salary_year_avg DESC
LIMIT 10;Key takeaways from the top-paying roles in 2023:
- Huge salary range: The top 10 remote data analyst roles ranged from $184,000 all the way up to $650,000.
- Variety of employers: Companies such as SmartAsset, Meta, and AT&T all appeared, showing that high-paying DA roles exist across many industries.
- Diverse job titles: Roles ranged from standard Data Analyst to Director of Analytics, reflecting how broad the field really is.
Bar chart showing salaries for the top 10 highest-paying remote data analyst roles in 2023
I joined the top-paying jobs with their associated skills to see what employers at the top end of the salary scale are actually looking for.
WITH top_paying_jobs AS (
SELECT
job_id,
job_title,
salary_year_avg,
name AS company_name
FROM
job_postings_fact
LEFT JOIN company_dim ON job_postings_fact.company_id = company_dim.company_id
WHERE
job_title_short = 'Data Analyst' AND
job_location = 'Anywhere' AND
salary_year_avg IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY
salary_year_avg DESC
LIMIT 10
)
SELECT
top_paying_jobs.*,
skills
FROM top_paying_jobs
INNER JOIN skills_job_dim ON top_paying_jobs.job_id = skills_job_dim.job_id
INNER JOIN skills_dim ON skills_job_dim.skill_id = skills_dim.skill_id
ORDER BY
salary_year_avg DESC;What skills came up most among the top 10 highest-paying jobs:
- SQL appeared in 8 out of 10 postings.
- Python was close behind, showing up 7 times.
- Tableau featured in 6 of the top roles.
- Tools like R, Snowflake, Pandas, and Excel also made appearances with varying frequency.
Bar chart showing how often each skill appeared across the 10 highest-paying data analyst roles
This query counts how often each skill appears in remote data analyst job postings overall — giving a picture of what the market consistently asks for.
SELECT
skills,
COUNT(skills_job_dim.job_id) AS demand_count
FROM job_postings_fact
INNER JOIN skills_job_dim ON job_postings_fact.job_id = skills_job_dim.job_id
INNER JOIN skills_dim ON skills_job_dim.skill_id = skills_dim.skill_id
WHERE
job_title_short = 'Data Analyst'
AND job_work_from_home = True
GROUP BY
skills
ORDER BY
demand_count DESC
LIMIT 5;Top 5 most in-demand skills for remote data analysts in 2023:
| Skills | Demand Count |
|---|---|
| SQL | 7291 |
| Excel | 4611 |
| Python | 4330 |
| Tableau | 3745 |
| Power BI | 2609 |
Table showing the five most requested skills in remote data analyst job postings
- SQL and Excel are clearly foundational — they appear far more often than anything else.
- Python, Tableau, and Power BI round out the top five, showing that both programming ability and data visualisation are essential in today's market.
Here I looked at which skills are linked to the highest average salaries among remote data analyst roles.
SELECT
skills,
ROUND(AVG(salary_year_avg), 0) AS avg_salary
FROM job_postings_fact
INNER JOIN skills_job_dim ON job_postings_fact.job_id = skills_job_dim.job_id
INNER JOIN skills_dim ON skills_job_dim.skill_id = skills_dim.skill_id
WHERE
job_title_short = 'Data Analyst'
AND salary_year_avg IS NOT NULL
AND job_work_from_home = True
GROUP BY
skills
ORDER BY
avg_salary DESC
LIMIT 25;Top 10 highest-paying skills for data analysts:
| Skills | Average Salary ($) |
|---|---|
| pyspark | 208,172 |
| bitbucket | 189,155 |
| couchbase | 160,515 |
| watson | 160,515 |
| datarobot | 155,486 |
| gitlab | 154,500 |
| swift | 153,750 |
| jupyter | 152,777 |
| pandas | 151,821 |
| elasticsearch | 145,000 |
Table showing the top 10 skills by average salary for remote data analyst roles
Three clear patterns emerge:
- Big data and ML tools like PySpark, Couchbase, and DataRobot command the highest pay, reflecting how much the industry values advanced data processing.
- DevOps and pipeline tools such as GitLab, Kubernetes, and Airflow suggest that analysts who can also handle deployment and automation are well rewarded.
- Cloud platforms like Elasticsearch, Databricks, and GCP show that cloud literacy is increasingly important and well-compensated.
This final query combines demand and salary data to find skills that are both frequently requested and well-paid — the sweet spot for skill development.
SELECT
skills_dim.skill_id,
skills_dim.skills,
COUNT(skills_job_dim.job_id) AS demand_count,
ROUND(AVG(job_postings_fact.salary_year_avg), 0) AS avg_salary
FROM job_postings_fact
INNER JOIN skills_job_dim ON job_postings_fact.job_id = skills_job_dim.job_id
INNER JOIN skills_dim ON skills_job_dim.skill_id = skills_dim.skill_id
WHERE
job_title_short = 'Data Analyst'
AND salary_year_avg IS NOT NULL
AND job_work_from_home = True
GROUP BY
skills_dim.skill_id
HAVING
COUNT(skills_job_dim.job_id) > 10
ORDER BY
avg_salary DESC,
demand_count DESC
LIMIT 25;Top 10 optimal skills ranked by average salary:
| Skill ID | Skills | Demand Count | Average Salary ($) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | go | 27 | 115,320 |
| 234 | confluence | 11 | 114,210 |
| 97 | hadoop | 22 | 113,193 |
| 80 | snowflake | 37 | 112,948 |
| 74 | azure | 34 | 111,225 |
| 77 | bigquery | 13 | 109,654 |
| 76 | aws | 32 | 108,317 |
| 4 | java | 17 | 106,906 |
| 194 | ssis | 12 | 106,683 |
| 233 | jira | 20 | 104,918 |
Table of the most optimal skills for data analysts, sorted by average salary
What this tells us:
- Python and R are highly in demand (236 and 148 postings respectively), with solid average salaries around $101,000 — great foundational investments.
- Cloud skills like Snowflake, Azure, AWS, and BigQuery consistently show up with strong salaries, confirming the growing importance of cloud-based data work.
- BI tools like Tableau and Looker are also worth prioritising, with strong demand and competitive pay.
- Database skills (Oracle, SQL Server, NoSQL) remain relevant across the board, with average salaries ranging from roughly $98,000 to $104,000.
Working through this project sharpened my SQL skills considerably:
- 🧩 Advanced query writing: Got comfortable with CTEs (WITH clauses), multi-table joins, and structuring complex queries cleanly.
- 📊 Aggregation and summarising: Used GROUP BY, COUNT(), and AVG() extensively to turn raw data into meaningful summaries.
- 💡 Turning questions into queries: Practised the skill of taking a real-world question and translating it into working SQL — which is ultimately what data analysis is all about.
- Top salaries are very high: The highest-paying remote data analyst role in 2023 offered $650,000 — showing there's serious earning potential in this field.
- SQL is non-negotiable: It appeared in 8 of the top 10 highest-paying jobs and leads all skills in overall demand.
- Foundational skills dominate demand: SQL and Excel are by far the most requested skills across all job postings.
- Niche skills pay a premium: Specialised tools like SVN and Solidity are linked to the highest average salaries, suggesting that going deep on a specific technology can pay off.
- SQL is the best starting point: It leads in both demand and average salary, making it the single most valuable skill for an aspiring data analyst to master.
This project gave me both technical practice and real insight into what the data analyst job market looks like. The analysis points clearly to where a job seeker should focus their energy — high-demand, high-salary skills like SQL, Python, and cloud tools. As the field keeps evolving, staying current and continuing to build specialised skills will remain the key to standing out.