An appointment with the analyst

At a data conference in Shanghai in 2018, Zhuo Lingzi, 27, says she met many fellow data analysts and realized many had backgrounds in statistics with a specialization of data analysis but few had concentrated on data visualization.

Zhuo, a product manager at Yidu Cloud, a medical artificial intelligence technology company, says she has pursued a career in data analysis since graduating with no professional experience and eventually became strongly attracted to data visualization.

She obtained a master's degree in comparative economics and policy at University College London in 2016, and a position as a financial analyst became her first job.

"I had done economics as part of my bachelor's and master's degree, but didn't want to go into the finance industry, so when I graduated any other industry was new to me."

"When I began, the data analysis did not require so much solid professional experience, and in doing the job I got a lot of fulfillment by analyzing data and learning many things as I was doing so."

From there she became interested in data visualization, learning a lot about the field on the job as she dealt with clients, and the data visualization reports she was creating became more and more sophisticated.

"At the beginning it is relatively easy to learn this stuff, but producing a complete, readable report requires a lot of hard work and thinking out of the box."

Excel and PowerPoint are not that vivid, she says, and in using data visualization you can highlight figures and trends in a more direct and lively way.

"When you look at sheets of paper and figures it's hard to gain an instant insight, whereas visualized graphs can present data analysis conclusions in a much more intuitive way."

With data visualization tools continuously being upgraded, learning about the field is a learning process that never stops, she says.

"Interest is the best teacher to push you to keep on learning."