Power BI is a scalable, unified platform for enterprise and self-service business intelligence tasks. It helps users connect to data sources and create visualizations that can be integrated into everyday applications. An important aspect of receiving professional Power BI 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 will have different requirements and expectations for prospective employees, and you should consider these when you start training. This is true for students who already know the kind of work they want to do and for those not yet sure what path they want to take after learning Power BI skills.

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. 

Common Industries That Use Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a popular tool that helps businesses of all types and sizes leverage their data to its full extent. This modern BI tool helps finance, healthcare, education, and retail professionals make more informed, data-driven decisions. The following sections will take a brief look at how professionals working in these industries use Power BI for everyday work tasks.

Finance

Data plays a crucial role in the financial service sector. More data is being created each day than ever before; however, it’s not of any value to those working in finance until it can be leveraged for advanced analytics. Power BI helps financial professionals like Financial Analysts keep track of business activities and streamline work processes. This user-friendly service also performs accurate and fast data analysis. Financial professionals use it for far more than analytics, though. Power BI also allows them to track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to finance. It can be used to provide insights into cash flow and liquidy during a specific time period; spot duplicate or fraudulent transactions; provide a profit-and-loss analysis; and visualize important metrics over the course of a long period of time to guarantee stability.

One of the most useful features Power BI offers to financial professionals is Power Query, which allows them to aggregate and merge data from different sources, like Excel spreadsheets, cloud apps, and data warehouses. This family of tools and services also is helpful for creating interactive maps, charts, tables, and visual reports. Power BI dashboards include a built-in time feature that can locate subtle patterns in the data, as well as any changes over time to this pattern. This is particularly useful for monitoring sales revenue, profit and loss statements, and general business expenses. Power BI also includes a “what if” parameter that allows users to make important decisions using projections or data forecasts. This can provide insights into how things may have gone in the past if the scenario had been changed.

Financial Analysts earn a competitive salary for their contributions to their organization. These professionals make approximately $95,000 a year. This field is expected to experience a 9% job growth over this decade, which is above the national average. This makes it a good profession for those with Power BI skills to consider.

Education

The education sector has a wide range of uses for data analytics, especially real-time data. A well-designed Power BI dashboard is a powerful tool that can meet various audiences’ needs in the education sector, including provosts, deans, employees, chancellors, students and faculty. Power BI provides educators and administrators with dynamic dashboards that can provide real-time insights into course curriculum, student enrollment, tuition, and academic progress. Educators work with dashboards pertaining to tuition and course offerings. College administrators can use Power BI to upload data from various departments to visualize information pertaining to pre-graduating students who aren’t currently enrolled in classes. A representative from the college can then reach out to the students, so they have a chance to enroll.

Software Developers can create scalable Power BI dashboards that can be used by small private schools and universities with campuses across the country that have tens of thousands of students enrolled at any time. These dashboards provide important insights that can dictate how funds are allocated, as well as how effective various programs are. Even when working with vast volumes of data, Power BI solutions like dashboards drastically reduce the amount of time it would take to gather and analyze data. This results in less cost for the school, less paperwork for administrators, and better student outcomes.

Healthcare

Those who work in healthcare are constantly faced with new challenges during the patient triage process. Power BI can help healthcare professionals improve their clinical decision-making process using KPIs focused on patient health. This allows nurses and physicians to access real-time patient data, which can lead to faster and more accurate decisions. By providing information about emergency situations, patients can receive immediate, life-saving care based on the available data. Another benefit of using Power BI in the health sector is that it provides a way for healthcare professionals to share insights with experts worldwide, which can help them find the best treatment approach for their patients.

Power BI dashboards and reports can be embedded within hospital portals and applications care teams are already using, which provides healthcare professionals with essential real-time data that can help them make life-or-death decisions. Sensitive patient data is kept secure using Power BI’s governance policies and access controls, which helps those working in healthcare adhere to HIPPA requirements.

Another benefit of working with Power BI in the healthcare sector is that it provides insights into clinical and operational information that can predict health trends before they occur, reduce patient risks, and lead to new care models. Power BI’s built-in AI tools analyze supplies, clinical activities, costs, logistics, and outcomes, which allows healthcare professionals to anticipate future needs and plan accordingly. This software solution can easily connect, integrate, and analyze huge volumes of data from many insurers, providers, and organizations, which provides a way for those working in the healthcare sector to pinpoint trends, spot opportunities for cost savings, and discover effective medications and treatments they may not have considered. Even insurers benefit from Power BI; they use this tool to anticipate fraud and losses before they occur by implementing advanced analytics on billing data, claims, and premiums.

Retail

Those who work in the retail sector understand the importance of real-time data. Power BI helps these individuals anticipate the demands their customers will have tomorrow based on their purchasing patterns today. Retailers who use Power BI focus on KPIs pertaining to customers’ purchasing behavior, which products are selling at the highest and lowest levels, and which products are overstocked or understocked. They rely on smart inventory management when collaborating with suppliers to ensure they always have enough of an in-demand product without running the risk of over-ordering. 

Those working in the retail sector also use Power BI’s real-time data insights to more effectively target their marketing efforts. Power BI’s advanced reports can be used to analyze how a product is faring against competitors’ products, perform predictive analysis, modify available discounts and pricing, and customize offers according to audience needs. One example of a retailer leveraging Power BI to spot streamline operations is H&M. With the help of this tool’s dashboards, H&M could spot data loss and implement measures proactively to mitigate the problem. Management collected real-time insight into their product use with the help of Power BI’s premium data connectors.

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 Takeaways

• Power BI is used across professions and industries to help professionals make better decisions based on the data they have.
• Those working in finance use Power BI to streamline various work processes and monitor business activities. Professionals who work in education rely on Power BI’s dashboards to offer real-time insights into tuition, academic progress, course curriculum, and student enrollment.
• Healthcare professionals work with Power BI to inform how they make clinical decisions, treat emergency situations, and share insights with other healthcare professionals. Retailers use this software solution to find better ways to market products to potential buyers, as well as to better anticipate their audiences’ need for products.
• A great way to learn more about Microsoft Power BI is to enroll in one of Noble Desktop’s comprehensive Power BI classes. Instruction is available in the in-person and live online format.