The Analytics Engineer from within your own organization

Know the problem? Your organization is too small for a complete data team, but your ambitions are too big to keep things small. In earlier blogs, I already showed how low-code tools such as TimeXtender enable a new generation of Analytics Engineers. In this blog, I want to show why these Analytics Engineers are the answer to this situation.

The Analytics Engineer I'm referring to is a professional who takes on multiple roles: talking to the business, building data warehouses and developing front-ends. This is possible today thanks to new technologies such as TimeXtender.

No more single point of failure

Those who start with data often begin with a front-end specialist, someone who is handy with a data visualization tool such as Power BI. This colleague often starts building on a single application and a whole lot of Excel files. They are also the point of contact for the organization. After the first successes, this grows organically and soon further applications are being connected. That is usually the moment a tool like Power BI becomes too limited, and demand for a data warehouse arises.

In the past, you solved this by hiring an extra Data Engineer with different expertise from your existing employee. In effect, you remained just as vulnerable, because each role was still filled by one person. If you want to reduce risk, knowledge shouldn't sit with one or two people, but be shared across several employees.

This is exactly where the Analytics Engineer offers a solution. By hiring just one extra employee in this case and training your own front-end specialist, you quickly have two employees who understand each other's work and can take it over. This way, you can grow without having to grow big right away.

Growing from within your own organization

It used to be much harder to become a Data Engineer. You had to study programming and have extensive knowledge of databases and administration. Today, data warehouse automation tools such as TimeXtender solve these problems for you, largely without you noticing. This creates room for colleagues who already work in the organization to grow into the role.

For Analytics Engineers who also gather the needs of the business, it's worth a lot if they already know the organization. This makes upskilling your own employees very attractive: thanks to the automation TimeXtender offers, they get up to speed quickly, and thanks to their experience in the company, they are effective right away. This shows how the Analytics Engineer role is ideally suited to career changers entering the data profession.