Joe: My Data Analyst Career Journey

Hi Joe, thank you so much for taking the time. Please introduce yourself to our site’s readers.

I’m Joe Squire, Director of Analytics & Data Science for UPMC’s Heart and Vascular Institute. I have a wife and 3 kids all under the age of 9 and love DIY projects, exercising and a good movie.

If I understood correctly, you originally started your career in nursing, but decided to shift to a clinical data analyst role. Can you share with us what prompted you for the change, and how did you manage to navigate into your first role?

My last job as a clinical nurse was with an operating room team where I was sharing 24/7 call with one other individual taking about 2000 hours of call time a year. My wife and I had our first kid while I was in this job and I was looking for some work life balance. This led me into a job that was pretty much a glorified data entry role that required the specific clinical knowledge I had.

I quickly became bored with this work, but was curious enough to ask “We’re collecting all this data, but what are we doing with it?”. From there I began learning more about the world of analytics, teaching myself various tools, and then using those skills to operationalize the data and make it more useful to individuals so that more patients could go home alive.

A lot of what I did in navigating my first role was problem focused. In other words, I found where my stakeholder was having problems that could be solved by using analytics. Whether that was giving them data in a timelier fashion, in a clearer format, or simply making sure I was communicating with them in a regular and effective manner. Being proactive and seeking out key business problems then solving them will take you pretty far, pretty quickly.

Since then, you’ve steered your career quite brilliantly, now being a Director of Analytics and Data Science. Tell us more about the progression.

Honestly, my career progression was a combination of three things:

1) Networking/building a brand
2) Seizing opportunity when it came up
3) Luck

It really isn’t about the technical skill at the end of the day, just being able to solve problems with the tools you have and build a solid reputation around the people you work with.

1) On networking/building a brand
The work I did in my early days in analytics dealt with many stakeholders who were very influential in recommending me for various roles down the line. Building those relationships and making yourself generally useful to those around you goes a long way in career progression. Today I am building that network and brand in a more global way through my LinkedIn presence and connecting with people I find interesting and in roles/companies that are ones I want to learn more about.

2) On Siezing opportunity when it comes up
It’s good to have a 5-year plan, but you should never let that get in the way of seizing an opportunity, because opportunities never come when you feel read to take them on. The move that ultimately ended up leading me to a Director role required me to leave a role I had only been in for 9 months, was super cushy, close to home, and had a great team to take something that was going to be hard work for not too much more pay, but had the potential to lead to big things. It was a hard decision, but ultimately, I knew if I stayed where I was, there wouldn’t be much progression past where I was currently.

3) On luck
Luck is pivotal to everyone’s success. We can’t necessarily control our luck, but we can control our luck “surface area”. This is what networking and seizing opportunities does, it expands the surface area where your luck can hit. If I hadn’t made those types of moves, I never would have had the luck of becoming a Director.

What would you say the biggest difference on day to day responsibilities are at different levels?

As you move from an individual contributor (IC) role (analyst, senior analyst, etc) to a managerial role (lead, manager, etc.) your focus necessarily shifts from being technical and in the weeds to looking up and out and being more strategic. You need to do this so you can guide your team effectively. With this change comes technical decay. While you may lose your SQL, visualization, or Python skills, you gain skills in project management, budgeting, people management, etc. that become ultra important in helping your team be successful and rise to any occasion.

The biggest differences in the day to day between IC and managerial is you take on more meetings. IC’s should have a pretty open schedule in my opinion so that they can do deep work and not be interrupted. Managers take on meetings to navigate organizational needs, 1:1’s with their team, connecting the dots between various stakeholder groups, etc. These are all necessary, build relationships, and helps your team win.

How does the role and skills required change as one progresses?

Technical skills progression isn’t the only key to progress your career.

It’s in the soft skills of being able to work with stakeholders, the soft skills of being networking, in the soft skills of problem solving, the soft skills of communicating and the soft skill of executing on what you say in a reliable manner.

These are what will progress your career the fastest, not necessarily technical skills.

Being a leader requires a very different skillset to what's required from individual contributors, and early in one's career. What are some of these steps/mindset shifts one can make, to see if the leadership role is the fit?

Everyone can be a leader, it doesn’t matter what your formal title is. I started studying leadership in an individual contributor (IC) role, 3 years before I got a formal managerial role.

I did this through reading, listening to podcasts, and then applying those concepts and ideas to my daily life in both work and home.

So, it’s important to realize that leadership is something everyone can do in any role. Making that mindset shift makes being able to jump from a technical IC to a managerial role much easier because it is much more important to lead than to manage. Managing, in my view, are the actions associated with formal procedure in an organization, typically related to human resources. These are standard and mostly check boxes and are easily navigated if one has developed an ability to lead.

I will say, leadership is a constant teacher. You must be willing to be humble and learn from when you make mistakes to get better at it.

What is it that you're personally finding most exciting about working in data analytics roles?

What I find most exciting about working in an analytics role is being able to deliver something to an end user that makes their faces light up because you made their lives 100x easier with what you just did.

Overall, you’ve spent over 13 years in the healthcare industry - what did you learn about using data insights to make an impact in the industry?

The biggest learning, and this applies to any industry, it doesn’t matter how groundbreaking you insight is, you still have to be able to sell it to the right people who are willing to act on it. So often we think the data speaks for itself, but we have to learn how to communicate with individuals in a way that gets them to understand the information we are showing them and then for them to take action.

How does what you do drive insights and business decisions?

The insights are easy, it’s getting them to drive business decisions that is difficult. What you truly need to get people to act on insights is trust. Trust takes a while to develop but some ways to establish early trust are the following:

-       Get quick wins in a new position. Do this by finding the low hanging fruit and knocking those projects off the to do list
-       Overdeliver. In other words, be as fast as you can with turning projects around.
-       Communicate. Initially, don’t worry about overcommunicating (yes, you can overcommunicate), but when you are new to a role, be sure to keep people updated and ask as many questions as you need.

How are you using data in your role, and what is the impact you’re able to achieve?

A large part of my and my teams work is around clinical outcomes (i.e. patient deaths, etc) and clinical research (i.e. will taking this medication have more favorable outcomes than this other medication).

With working in these areas, we get to not only the impact at a health system level like being able to decrease cardiac surgery mortality rates by 2% and saving 44 lives/year but also seeing some of our research papers generate changes in practice be recognizing things like atrial fibrillation (afib) tends to have higher death rates in younger patients who do not see a physician for their condition.

Circling back toward career growth - what would you say analysts who want to grow into leadership roles, must know and do to stand out and rise through the ranks?

It all goes back to the soft skills and the following:

- I would say solve problems.
- Build trust and reputation through effective networking.
- And seize opportunity when it arises.

On the other hand, what recommendations would you give to someone who is looking to join the data industry and get their first full-time data analyst position?

A big thing with transitioning into the data world is being able to articulate how the skills you currently have translate to analytical work. A lot of what we have done in our lives, whether its odd jobs or hobbies we did while in school or a previous career bring those soft skills and business understanding that are needed to truly succeed in an analytics role. So, think hard about what you have done in the past and how that translates into a role you are seeking out. In an interview, being able to talk through this and convince someone that you have what it takes is a game changer and truly sets you apart.

What are you most excited about in the healthcare space right now?

I’m really excited about the potential of AI in healthcare. There is a lot of administrative burden throughout healthcare in the US and AI has the potential to alleviate or make those burdens much more efficient. While there is still a lot of hype around AI, I’m excited to see the impact that those who outlive the hype cycle have on healthcare and patient care delivery.

An extra one:

Speaking of AI, how do you see the increased availability of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard etc., impacting the role of someone in data analytics? Are you using AI tools to augment your thinking, analysis and overall work?

Where to start…

I see AI augmentation of analytics work becoming ubiquitous in the next few years. It won’t replace jobs, but it will replace tasks.

That being said, we are working with the dumbest AI we will ever work with, so it’s important to work with it, understand its strengths and weaknesses, augment our weaknesses with its strengths, and develop a continuous, curious, and experimental attitude to AI as we work alongside it in this new era.

I currently use a few different AI tools, ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, & Ideogram being the primary ones. Where I am largely using them is in a few different areas:

-       Being able to stay technical as a director. I use AI to draft initial code shells for projects that I then tweak to get right. This creates a much faster standup and iteration process, typically shortening some work by multiple days.
-       Market research. Perplexity has been a great tool when diving into companies and wanting to learn more about them and markets they are working in. This has been something that has been extremely helpful in understanding competitors or preparing for interviews with companies.
-       Ideation. I use AI heavily for ideation for business scenarios, content writing, or really anything where I want to get my creativity juices flowing.

This has been great, thank you again, Joe. Where could people see more of your work, and connect with you?

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-squire/