Power BI is a popular suite of BI services and products that allows users to analyze and visualize data and share the insights they find with others in their organization. An important factor in deciding to learn a new skill is researching complementary and related skills. Doing so will help you make more informed decisions about what you want to learn, and it will help you decide whether acquiring a specific skill is the right decision for you. You will also discover what kind of skills you may want to study to complement your training later on. Read on to learn more about related Power BI training options like business intelligence, data analytics, data modeling, and data science. 

What is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a group of business intelligence (BI) services and products that converts data from various sources into reports, visualizations, and interactive dashboards. This allows users to share data insights with others who work at their organization or to embed them onto a website or application. One of the main benefits of working with Power BI is that it integrates with other Microsoft services and products and third-party platforms. Users can connect Power BI to Excel, Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange, among others.

Read more about what Power BI is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with Power BI Skills?

Power BI is a tool for illustrating what’s happening within an organization in the present and anticipating what may transpire in the future. Because it relies on machine learning capabilities, Power BI can locate patterns in data, then draw from them to predict “what-if” scenarios. Based on these predictions, Power BI users can create forecasts and prepare for different demand patterns that may emerge. They can then communicate this information through data visualizations. Power BI is a go-to for data professionals since it can input huge stores of data that would be a struggle for other platforms to process. 

Skills Related to Power BI

If you’re interested in learning Microsoft Power BI, you may be curious about what other skills or tools you can study alongside this suite to enhance your studies. The following sections will briefly explore skills like data analytics, data science, business intelligence, data modeling, and data warehousing, each of which can be acquired as you study Power BI or afterward.

Business Intelligence

Because Power BI is a tool used for business intelligence tasks, those with a working knowledge of business intelligence will acquire this tool faster and easier. Business intelligence (BI) is a combination of skills and tools like data mining and visualization, business analytics, and data infrastructure that help individuals and organizations make decisions that are informed by data. Business intelligence provides an overview of an organization’s data so that inefficiencies can be spotted, fluctuations in the market or supply chain can be accounted for, and changes can be implemented to benefit the entire organization. BI solutions offer a range of useful features, such as governed data stored on trusted platforms, fast insights, and flexible self-service analysis. 

BI allows organizations of all types and sizes to pose questions in plain language and receive understandable answers. These answers help the organization make decisions that aren’t based on guesswork but on the insights found in the data. Questioning why sales are dropping in a specific region, what customers are posting on social media, or why there’s excess inventory left are just a few of the inquiries BI can help answer. Not only does BI provide insights about how an organization is currently operating, but it also sheds light on past performance and trends. Those with training in business intelligence can allocate the necessary resources to reach organizational goals, gain valuable insights into customer behavior, make ongoing improvements to business operations, and monitor supply chain activity. 

If you’re interested in learning to work with business intelligence and analytics, Noble Desktop’s Business Analysts Certificate provides hands-on training in analyzing and visualizing data, as well as working with relational databases and spreadsheets.

Data Analytics

Another skill set that helps learners work with Power BI is a background in data analytics. Most organizations generate huge volumes of data, such as web servers, social media websites, customer-related data, log files, and transactional data. Organizations strive to optimize as much of this data as possible. This is where data analytics comes in. Data analytics is the process of analyzing raw datasets to answer questions, spot trends, and identify any pertinent patterns or outliers. As the field of data analytics evolves, some of the processes and techniques have been automated into algorithms and mechanical processes to prepare raw data for professionals to work with.

Knowing how to analyze data is a skill that has many benefits. It takes the guesswork out of working with data, which can help Data Analysts select appropriate web content, develop better products and services, and improve customer service and satisfaction. At an organizational level, data analytics has applications for streamlining processes, improving production, and reducing expenses. The insights data analytics provides about what a specific audience values or wants help data professionals to focus their efforts on tailoring their products or marketing to their needs and interests.

Noble Desktop’s Data Analytics Certificate prepares learners to work with various skills and tools for analyzing data, such as Python, SQL, Excel, and Tableau. 

Data Modeling

Data modeling is another skill individuals often learn alongside Power BI. It involves visually representing an entire information system or some of its parts to convey various connections between structures and data points. Data modeling is used to communicate the kinds of data that are stored and used by a system, how data types relate to one another, and how data can be organized or grouped. Each data model is created around an organization’s needs. This means that any requirements or rules are specified at the start of the modeling process. It may also entail incorporating stakeholder feedback throughout the modeling process as a new system is designed.

The data modeling process commences by gathering information from end users and stakeholders about these requirements. Business rules are then transformed into data structures to create a concrete structure for design. Data modeling uses various formal techniques and standardized schemas. It offers a consistent and predictable way to specify and manage an organization’s resources. Most data models continue to evolve as the organization’s needs change. They can also be shared with various stakeholders, such as partners, vendors, and others who work in the industry.

A great way to learn more about data modeling is to enroll in Noble Desktop’s Data Analytics Foundations. This course teaches participants how to use data to predict trends, make business decisions, and perform statistical modeling.

Data Warehousing

BI platforms typically gather baseline information from data warehouses. This is why knowledge of data warehousing can help you work with Power BI. A data warehouse gathers data from various sources and compiles it into a central system. This supports the business analytics process, as well as reporting. BI software can then query the data warehouse so that the results can be presented to the user via charts, reports, or maps. 

Data warehouses usually store huge amounts of historical data that originate from various sources, like transaction applications and log files. Organizations use data warehouses to find useful business insights that can be used to inform their decision-making process. As time passes, data warehouses create a robust historical record that’s useful for Business Analysts and Data Scientists. This is why data warehouses are considered the “single source of truth” for an organization. Most data warehouses include a relational database, client analysis tools, analytical applications that apply AI and data science algorithms, an extraction, loading, and transformation tool, data mining capabilities, and statistical analysis and reporting features.

Data Science

Data science is a popular field that uses a range of skills and tools, such as programming, AI, machine learning, statistics, math, and advanced analytics, to help data professionals discover actionable insights that are contained within an organization’s data. Data Scientists articulate relevant questions, then seek answers through data. Because of the ever-increasing number of data sources and data, the field of data science is one of the most in-demand careers available. This is why Harvard Business Review called it the “sexiest job” of the twenty-first century. 

Data Scientists must have a range of skills to properly handle vast datasets. They must be highly technical, able to create complicated quantitative algorithms and effectively communicate data findings with other stakeholders. Data science requires attention to detail, industry-specific knowledge, and a background in linear algebra, statistics, and programming languages like Python and R. It also draws from tools like Power BI, Tableau, cloud computing, and GitHub.The five stages of the data science lifecycle involve capturing data through data extraction; maintaining them through cleaning, staging, processing, and warehousing; processing them using data mining and modeling; analyzing them with various forms of data analysis, regression, and text mining; and communicating data findings in the form of visualizations and reporting.

If you’d like to learn more about data science, Noble Desktop provides hands-on training in its Data Science Certificate program. Instruction is provided on topics like machine learning, Python and SQL programming, automation, and data visualization.

Learn Power BI Skills with Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Power BI Bootcamp is a project-based course that prepares students to use Power Query. Students work with different case studies to learn how to work with various Power BI capabilities and this tool’s DAX language for creating visualizations based on their data. Another excellent learning option for those interested in working with Power BI is Noble’s Data Analytics Certificate. Those enrolled in this intensive course complete real-world projects using Microsoft Excel, Python, SQL, and Tableau and have the option of taking the Power BI Bootcamp for free. All students receive instruction from an expert instructor and one-on-one mentoring.

Key Takeaway

• Power BI is a family of BI products and services that was developed by Microsoft. It’s used for tasks like analyzing and visualizing data, as well as communicating data insights with other stakeholders within an organization.
• If you’re interested in learning Power BI, you may also wish to study related fields like data analytics and data science to prepare you to perform analytics, data modeling, and visualization tasks.
• Data Warehousing and data modeling are other complementary skills to Power BI. Studying these skills can teach you how to compile data into one source and find out how the data relate to each other.
• Noble Desktop currently offers in-person and live online courses that can help you learn Microsoft Power BI and related skills like data science, data analytics, and business intelligence.