I recently unpacked some of this in my article “Pivoting to an Analyst Role: Real World Stories” but after several conversations on the topic recently, I wanted to dig a little deeper.
The current job market is undeniably competitive. Many job postings, especially at the entry and mid-level can rack up thousands of applicants. For those looking to transition from a non-analytics role into analytics, this can feel like an impossible barrier. It is easy to look at your resume and feel like you are starting from scratch.
This perspective, while common, is a mistake. The belief that, “my past experience is irrelevant” is holding you back. Your industry specific knowledge is not something to be discarded. It is the very thing that can set you apart from hundreds (or thousands) of other candidates who only have technical skills or a degree in business analytics. The challenge is not to discard your past, but to reframe it.
How do you do this? I’ll get into it, but let me start with my personal journey, which I’ve stripped out of a lot of mess to get to what I believe are the key details. If you want to know more about those pain points, drop a comment and we can chat.
I had no idea that I wanted to be an analyst for Best Buy’s corporate office when I was driving a Geek Squad van around the Portland, OR metro repairing appliances and TVs. I loved my job. Being the guy to come in and “save the day” when the laundry was piling up or the oven quit right before Thanksgiving was satisfying and I liked solving problems.
However, after a few years, I was looking to grow. Admittedly, while the work was satisfying, the problems got easier and easier to solve and I was getting bored, even with my efficiency turned up to 135%. Plus, I felt like I wasn’t being paid enough for what I actually brought to the table.
So, I asked for some stretch assignments. I came up with a plan to help increase the sales attachment and customer satisfaction (NPS) for the rest of the team since I was leading in those areas. I sent a weekly recap to the team with best practices and guides on how to improve.
Eventually, this led to a big opportunity to jump into leadership of the 3PL (Third Party Logistics) final mile services part of the business. I had some imposter syndrome going for sure, it was a big pay grade jump and a ton more responsibility. Still, I had been building the “problem solving” muscle every day at work for most of my adult life, I just needed some guidance to build the business acumen.
Also, I ended up bringing a fresh perspective that wasn’t traditional for the role. Someone who had done repairs, deliveries, installations first-hand. It was great for the installers and delivery teams to hear from someone who had been in their shoes. Many of my peers in these leadership roles were former retail managers without this experience.
During my time in this role, I was able to create some massive jumps in customer satisfaction (NPS) by creating and executing SMART plans. I used what I learned from running those plans to create guides for teams and help evolve how onboarding and training outside of just my market.
This was when I first considered making the move to a corporate analyst position. I had connected with these business analysts (called Forward Operatives at Best Buy) during our weekly business reviews. I thought it was super cool how they would help me apply what I learned at the local level and scale it across the enterprise. My goal quickly became, “How can I apply my past experience to land one of those roles?”
Even after reframing my experiences with an analytical mindset, it took applying for dozens of different roles internally over the course of a year, lots of conversations with mentors, and rewriting my resume and interview “pitch deck” about a hundred times. And it took a manager, Dan Ralles, who saw that my unique experience in the final mile space and managing external partnerships was a superpower. He knew that as a former Demand Planning Manager, he could teach me the complexities of supply chain and how to think like an analyst. With all of that, I had landed my first analyst role at a major corporation.
There’s no perfect way to take this journey and I hit a lot of speed bumps along the way. However, there is a tactical approach you can take to take this journey yourself. It will require self-reflection and potentially breaking out the way you viewed your experiences previously.
The first thing you need to do is deep dive your previous roles for data related activities. You have almost certainly performed analytical tasks, even if they were not part of your official job title or you didn’t think they were analytics tasks.
Ask yourself: Where did you get data to look at a problem? What did you do with the data?
Did you use reporting the company made available to you, or did you track activities or trends on your own and then compile them into something useful?
Here’s a couple of examples of non-analytics roles doing analytical work with basic data:
These are all business problems solved with data. Make a list of every task where you used data to make a decision or improve a process.
Once you have your list, translate those experiences into the language of analytics and impact. This is critical for your resume and interviews.
This translation demonstrates that you not only understand business operations but can also quantify your impact.
Your resume should tell a story. The story is not, "I was a marketer and now I want to be an analyst."
The story is, "I have a proven track record of using data to solve marketing challenges, and I am now seeking to specialize my career in the analytics discipline that has been central to my success."
This narrative shows a logical career progression. It presents your pivot as a deliberate and informed step, not a random jump, even if the path felt random at times. Each bullet point on your resume should support this story. It will connect your past contributions to the needs of the role you are applying for.
To make your narrative truly convincing, support it with a tangible project. You can use publicly available data from your former industry, or anonymize data from a past project, to build something that visualizes your impact.
If you worked in finance, analyze market trends in a sector that you know well. If you were in healthcare, visualize public health data. If you were in sales, show how you measured customer satisfaction and look at margin erosion that affected your commissions. These all demonstrate your analysis skills within a business context you genuinely understand.
It’s not always easy to find examples in your work that can directly translate to “3-5 years experience” for an entry-level position, but they exist. Analytics is everywhere, and often it takes a bit of digging to find it, unironically like much of the analysis work you have done and will be doing in an analyst role.
Enjoyed this article? Let me know what resonated with you in the comments and share it with your network!
