Why Technical Skills Won’t Take You All the Way.

I still remember a meeting early in my career that changed the way I saw analytics. I was presenting the results of a detailed analysis, confident that my SQL was clean, my visualizations were polished, and my model predictions made sense. I had spent hours validating data, checking assumptions, making sure every number added up. Everything was going smoothly until someone asked a simple question:

“So… what would be best for the business?”

I froze for a second. I knew the data inside out, but I didn’t know how to answer that question. My slides showed what was happening, and even why it was happening—but not what we should do next.

That’s when it clicked for me: technical skills can make you a good analyst, but they won’t make you grow. At least not beyond a certain point.

In many analytics careers, we focus so much on mastering tools—learning SQL, Python, Power BI, Tableau—that we forget the real purpose behind the work. Stakeholders don’t come to us because they want a dataset cleaned or a model deployed. They come to us because they need clarity to make decisions.

It’s easy to fall into the comfort of technical mastery. You can hide behind your code or your dashboards and feel productive. But growth happens when you start connecting those technical outputs to business outcomes. When you start asking questions like: What are we trying to achieve? What metric truly defines success? What would I recommend if I owned this decision?

I began practicing this shift intentionally. In every project, after completing the technical work, I would ask myself: If I were the decision-maker, what would I do with this information? Sometimes I didn’t have a perfect answer, but the habit changed how I thought about my work. Instead of stopping at “what the data says,” I began moving toward “what the business should do next.”

Over time, that mindset started to show up in meetings. When someone asked, “What would be best?” I didn’t look down at my notes anymore. I could connect the numbers to a business context. I could explain trade-offs, predict outcomes, and most importantly—give a point of view. That’s what leadership in analytics looks like: the ability to use data to move the business forward, not just to describe it.

You can be the most technical person in the room, but if you can’t translate data into action, your impact will always be limited. Growth comes from building that bridge between analytics and strategy. It’s not about knowing every Python library or every DAX function—it’s about understanding what matters most to the business and using your skills to guide it there.

So if you’re an analyst looking to grow, don’t just focus on becoming more technical. Get closer to your stakeholders. Learn how they think, what pressures they face, and how success is measured in their world. Ask better questions, not just for the sake of data accuracy, but to understand the decisions behind the requests.

Because at some point, someone will look at you and ask, “What would be best for the business?” And that’s the moment where your growth truly begins—not in your code editor, but in the confidence to start with data and end with value.