Data visualization is the act of representing data and information with visual components like charts, maps, or graphs. Visually depicting data allows Data Analysts to find trends, patterns, or outliers the data contain and to share these findings with others within an organization. An important aspect of receiving professional data visualization training to set yourself up for a career change is learning what kinds of fields and industries that training will help you find work in. Each industry has different requirements and expectations for prospective employees, and you should consider these expectations when you start your training. This is true for students who have an idea of what kind of work they want to do and for students who aren’t yet sure what path they want to take after learning data visualization skills.

What is Data Visualization?

Data visualization uses graphics like plots, charts, or animations to represent data findings. These visual depictions communicate complicated data relationships in an accessible and engaging format to an organization’s internal and external stakeholders, even for those who don’t come from a technical background.

Data visualization has applications across industries and professions, from data analytics to business intelligence. The data visualization process is typically broken into four goals: to generate ideas, to illustrate concepts, to provide avenues into visual discovery, and to convey data in the form of visualizations.

Read more about what data visualization is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Data Visualization Skills?

Data visualization provides a concise and interactive way to depict data trends. Visualizations incorporate design techniques like color and contrast so audience members can access information that may otherwise be difficult to comprehend. Data visualization can provide a better understanding of a business’s operations and how activities connect. It offers insights into important business metrics that can lead to smoother daily operations and successful project execution. Data visualization conveys specific insights into customers’ preferences, demographics, and shopping patterns. The information is presented in an easy-to-understand format, and the audience is taken on a journey that leads to a data-driven conclusion. 

Common Industries That Use Data Visualization

Data visualization is used in a variety of professional settings and industries. Those who work in healthcare, finance, retail, and hospitality are just some of the professionals who work with visualizations to convey important data findings. They use tools such as Tableau and Excel to analyze, visualize, and share their data findings with others. The following sections will briefly examine how data professionals working in each of these industries use data visualization.

Healthcare

Healthcare analytics is a broad term for any activities that result from analyzing and visualizing data pertaining to costs and claims, clinical information, patient behavior, and pharmaceutical information. The average salary in the U.S. for a Healthcare Analyst is $65,000. Various members of the healthcare community use data visualization for different purposes. When COVID-19 began to spread, the healthcare community had to work quickly to address the health crisis and work to ensure the health risks didn’t become greater. Data visualization helped them perform tasks like charting the spread of the virus, analyzing patient demographics, monitoring various healthcare facilities, identifying risk areas and help centers, and evaluating how accessible pharmacies were.

Healthcare analytics also has a range of applications beyond COVID-19-related tasks. It can help healthcare professionals identify patients at high risk for chronic illness, which benefits not only the patient but the practitioner and healthcare provider. It can be used to help with clinical research, which improves clinical guidelines and trials. With the help of predictive modeling, healthcare professionals can stay abreast of potential risks and treatment outcomes for patients. Predictive analytics also has large-scale applications, such as predicting the occurrence of outbreaks and providing information about possible ways to prevent future occurrences.

Machine learning algorithms help healthcare professionals spot anomalies in scans, such as differences between MRI images. These algorithms allow them to do so over a thousand times faster than could be done manually. Healthcare analytics also is an effective method for evaluating healthcare professionals. After patients write reviews about a doctor they’ve seen, the information is gathered and analyzed to improve the patient experience. Even concerns such as staffing issues can be helped with data visualization. If a hospital is understaffed, patient care suffers, whereas if it’s overstaffed, the hospital may find itself wasting money. Healthcare analytics involves reviewing the past months’ or years’ admission records to offer predictions on what the upcoming weeks may look like regarding admission rates. This helps hospitals anticipate patient volumes so they can schedule staff accordingly.

Retail

Another industry that benefits from the data visualization process is retail. Both local and regional companies use data visualization to gain insight into customer behavior to better anticipate their customers’ wants and needs and provide products accordingly. These tools can also provide insights into the anticipated fluctuations in customer demand in the coming months and years.

Retail Store Managers earn approximately $70,000 a year. Data visualization allows these professionals, as well as others who work in the retail sector, to study customer demographics and income so they can locate wealthy and inhabited areas in which they can grow their businesses. Finding new locations for enterprises can help a company improve its supply chain, better its current performance, and pinpoint any aspects of its business where profit and costs don’t line up. Because of how competitive the retail industry is, it’s imperative for stakeholders to stay on top of retail flow from manufacturing to distribution.

As more retailers see the benefit of working with customer data, they can continue to reap additional benefits from the insights provided by the numbers. In retail, business teams are commonly treated like disparate entities. This can make it difficult for entire organizations because it means that some teams may not have access to wholesale data, whereas others do. With the help of data analytics and visualization, retail professionals can bring teams together so that each team has full access to necessary end-to-end data and can make better decisions based on this knowledge. Data visualization provides visual evidence of any slow-downs or weaknesses in the chain that must be addressed.

Finance

Those who work with financial analytics rely on data analytics and visualization for a range of tasks. Finance teams collect huge volumes of data so their organization can use it to notice industry trends, establish feasible goals, perform more efficiently, and offer better services and products. However, simply collecting and processing information isn’t enough for a Financial Analyst; these professionals have to also provide actionable insights to their audience so they can understand the information being presented. Financial data visualization allows them to present statistics and data insights to stakeholders in a way they can access. 

Financial Analysts work with data visualization so their teams can translate complicated data into smaller, easier-to-understand chunks. It also allows them to replace static figures with narratives and stories that provide a context for the numbers being depicted. Data visualization allows these professionals to convey financial performance to other members of their organization, as well as to share insights with different teams, so that various members of an organization are kept up-to-speed on any indicators that may be dropping, such as the profit-margin threshold. By using graphics like maps and charts, thousands of rows of data from multiple sources can be expressed on one screen, making it much easier for a finance team to understand them. Financial dashboards can then be created to visually compare and analyze key performance indicators. This provides real-time insights into financial data.

Financial Analysts are compensated well for their contributions to their organizations. These professionals make an average yearly salary of $95,000. Their job outlook is strong over the next decade, with a projected 9% growth rate, which is above the national average. 

Hospitality

Those in the hospitality industry must quickly find and analyze data to remain competitive. Data visualization allows them to condense huge volumes of data into visual components like charts and graphs. This allows Hoteliers to identify industry trends, as well as to offer predictions about what may transpire in the near future so that they can base their decision on this information. 

Hotel data originates from many internal and external sources, such as website traffic, social media, and airline data. These various information sources must be consolidated by Hoteliers through data visualization to be of use. Visually depicting data allows these professionals to easily spot any trends or relationships between data points. Visualization also helps them spot any strengths and weaknesses. Insights such as the knowledge that people are booking rooms because of a hotel’s location help Hoteliers identify how they can better market to potential customers and ultimately improve their bottom line. 

Hotels that keep track of occupancy rates can make accurate forecasts about room demand, giving them an edge over the competition. This information also allows them to price rooms appropriately. In addition, the data insights conveyed through visualizations can illustrate the differences between what hotels pay in labor costs and what it brings in profit-wise. Customer experience also benefits from data visualization. Customers who have a good experience at a hotel often share their feedback through surveys or on social media. Visualizing guest data pertaining to their length of stay or how much they spent on amenities, Hoteliers can use these insights to categorize customers and provide them with specialized offers. 

Hoteliers earn a yearly salary of $60,000. Their field is expected to grow 18% over the next decade, which is well above the national average. 

Learn Data Visualization Skills with Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop has in-person and live online data visualization training. Tableau for Data Visualization Bootcamp instructs students on how to use Tableau Public’s visualization tools. Noble’s Data Analytics Certificate teaches core business intelligence, statistics, data analysis, and data visualization concepts. 

Aspiring Data Scientists can enroll in Noble’s Data Science Certificate to study machine learning, automation, SQL, and Python. The Python for Data Science Bootcamp provides instruction on how to use statistics to make machine learning models. Noble’s Excel Bootcamp teaches fundamental spreadsheet functions, including macros, formulas, and PivotTables. Those interested in working with SQL can enroll in Noble’s SQL Bootcamp.

Key Takeaways

• The act of visualizing data involves using visual components like maps, charts, graphs, or animations to convey data or other information in an accessible manner. These visuals help audience members easily spot trends, patterns, or outliers in the data.
• Tools like Tableau and Excel are commonly used to help data professionals visualize data findings.
• Visualizing data is a skill with a range of uses across industries and professions. It has applications in finance, retail, healthcare, and hospitality.
• Noble Desktop’s in-person and live online courses offer comprehensive training in data visualization.