📊 Data Analyst Job Market SQL Project

A complete SQL analysis project exploring salaries, skills, and opportunities in the data job market.

---

🔍 Introduction

This project is my deep dive into the data analyst job market using SQL. I explored:

• Top-paying data analyst roles
• Skills required for those roles
• Most in-demand skills
• Highest-paying skills
• Skills that are both high-demand and high-paying

The dataset includes job titles, salary ranges, skills, posting dates, and more.
All analysis was done using PostgreSQL and VS Code.

👉 All my SQL queries are stored inside the Project_SQL folder.

---

🎯 Objectives

Using SQL, I answered the following five questions:

1. Which data analyst jobs pay the highest salaries?
2. What skills do these high-paying jobs require?
3. Which skills are most in demand overall?
4. Which skills are associated with higher salaries?
5. Which skills are both high-demand and high-paying (optimal to learn)?

---

🛠 Tools Used

• SQL – data exploration & analysis
• PostgreSQL – database engine
• Visual Studio Code – environment for writing queries
• Git & GitHub – version control & project hosting

---

📈 Analysis

1️⃣ Top-Paying Data Analyst Jobs

Filtered by:

• Job title = Data Analyst
• Job type = Remote
• Salary_year_avg IS NOT NULL

This query returns the top 10 highest-paying roles across different companies.

Key Insight:
💰 Salaries range from $184,000 → $650,000.

---

2️⃣ Skills Required for the Top-Paying Jobs

Joined job_postings_fact + skills_job_dim + skills_dim
to list all skills that appear in the highest-paid roles.

Most frequent skills in top-paying jobs:

Skill	Count
SQL	8
Python	7
Tableau	6
R, Pandas, Excel, Snowflake	Varying

---

3️⃣ Most In-Demand Skills for Data Analysts

Based on all data analyst job postings.

📊 Visualization:

➡️ Top 5 In-Demand Skills Plot:

Results:

Skill	Demand Count
SQL	7291
Excel	4611
Python	4330
Tableau	3745
Power BI	2609

Insight: SQL + Excel remain foundational. Python + visualization tools follow.

---

4️⃣ Highest-Paying Skills

Average salary per skill across remote data analyst jobs.

📊 Visualization:

Top Paying Skills:

Skill	Avg Salary ($)
PySpark	208,172
Bitbucket	189,155
Couchbase	160,515
DataRobot	155,486
GitLab	154,500
Jupyter	152,777
Pandas	151,821

Insight: Big Data, ML tools, and backend engineering tools command the highest salaries.

---

5️⃣ Optimal Skills to Learn

These skills are high demand AND high paying (appearing in >10 postings).

Examples:

Skill	Demand	Avg Salary
Go	27	115,320
Confluence	11	114,210
Hadoop	22	113,193
Snowflake	37	112,948
Azure	34	111,225

Insight: Cloud + data engineering skills significantly boost earning potential.

🧠 What I Learned

• Writing complex SQL queries using JOIN, CTE, and grouping

• Understanding how skills correlate with salary

• How to break a real-world question into step-by-step SQL analysis

• Improved query optimization and analytical thinking

✅ Conclusion

This project strengthened my SQL skills and gave me practical insight into the data analyst job landscape.

Main Takeaways:

• SQL is both the most in-demand and most required skill

• Cloud tools (Snowflake, AWS, Azure) have strong demand + high salary

• Big data + ML tools (PySpark, Pandas, Jupyter) show the highest earning potential

• Learning a mix of core + cloud + engineering skills provides the best value

🎥 Credits

This project was inspired by the YouTube tutorial by Luke Barousse, whose walkthrough helped me structure and analyze the dataset effectively.