Data Analyst vs Business Analyst - What’s the Difference?

The core differences between data analyst and business analyst are, a business analyst focuses on understanding business needs, a data analyst on the other hand, focuses on data. Business analysts work across the organization to work with multiple stakeholders to gather requirements. They are like the social people who work with different stakeholders and are able to manage them and get the requirements for the business.

Whereas, the role of a data analyst is to solve problems using data by doing data analysis and data visualizations and supporting all the business needs using data.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities of both the roles may include some additional tasks depending upon the nature of work and type of industry. But in general the following are common responsibilities of both business analyst and data analyst.

Responsibilities of a Business Analyst:

• Gathering Requirements
• Doing Analysis
• Making Recommendations
• Managing Stakeholders

The work of a business analyst is surrounded around the business. They may use data but data is not the focus of their role.

Responsibilities of a Data Analyst:

• Data Collection
• Data Analysis
• Data Visualization
• Reporting

A data analyst may work closely with the business but their role is to really be able to pull the insights out of data.

Skills

Not all individuals in these two roles will have the same skills as it depends a lot on the experience they had before. Here are the most commonly required skills in these roles:

Skills of a Business Analyst:

The skills of a business analyst range from a developer with people skills to business-oriented people who are really good at documenting the customer needs.

Soft skills:

• Communication Skills
• Critical Thinking
• Problem Solving
• Detail Oriented

Technical skills:

• Excel
• Basic SQL
• Basic BI Visualization Tool like Tableau

Skills of a Data Analyst:

The key soft skills for a data analyst:

• Communication Skills
• Domain Knowledge
• Problem Solving

Data analyst role is much more technical than a business analyst role and it will require the following technical skills:

• Stronger Excel
• Stronger SQL
• Stronger BI Visualization
• Python
• Statistics

Overall, the data analyst is expected to know the data much better than a business analyst.

Salary

According to Glassdoor the average salary of a business analyst in Malta ranges from €34k to €49k. Whereas, the average salary of a data analyst in Malta ranges from €29k to €46k. These are gross figures, you can use a Malta salary calculator to calculate the net values.

Any of these roles can be making more than the other depending upon various factors. Here are a few factors that can affect their salary:

• Location
• Level of Experience
• Industry

Salary also depends on the skills required for the role, going through the job description carefully will give you a better idea.

A business analyst that requires more technical skills is more likely to get paid more. Similarly, a data analyst that requires machine learning skills would also get paid more than the average.

Can these two Roles work together?

Despite the difference between business analyst and data analyst roles, these two roles work together often and are able to collaborate. Business analysts usually have stronger domain knowledge, so they work with different stakeholders and gather the requirements from them. These requirements are then passed on to the data analyst, who will then perform the data analysis, data cleaning, data gathering and will put it together into a data visualization.

The visualized data will then be provided to the business analyst who will interpret it from a business context and present it to the various stakeholders. This is a very general flow of business analyst and data analyst working together but there can be different scenarios as per specific business requirements.