Is it just my company or most of the data analysts are really good at doing the technical & dashboard building, but when it comes to actual analysis, most of them lack the analytical depth to derive good actionable insights?

Yes. That’s to be expected. To perform that level of analysis requires an in-depth understanding of business unit. That skill comes with a lot of interaction with stakeholders to understand how they make decisions.

Maybe your business stakeholders are not great at explaining what they want to know?

Yes, we see this too. I think it’s because they’re not completely linked skillsets and a lot of companies are perfectly happy with analysts who simply do reporting and never extract or apply insights but are still given the job title ‘analyst’. This is just my opinion, but as someone who has to do both of these things, building a dashboard is a piece of cake but insights and an in depth analysis take more out of the box thinking. I far prefer performing an analysis personally, I enjoy the mental challenge, but they’re not equally difficult types of work.

I think some people expect data analysts to be data scientists. They're not the same thing.

They call us unicorns 🦄

I go back and forth on this. I used to work somewhere where our analyses were really deep, well thought out and using tons of academic frameworks, references to back it up. Had some great client work but most of them never came back. Just switched to another company, and was shocked that their reports were pretty cut-and-dry and answering client questions - no deep analyses, no insights, nothing. Was even more shocked when I realized their client roster had a lot of people I had worked with in my previous role. Really made me think about the value that stakeholders put on research and data, and what's the effective way of reporting it

I don't see how you could expect that unless they're more of a senior level