Overview
When a financial institution is considering an investment, it is common to create an assessment to evaluate the risk factor for the investment. A Credit Risk Analyst uses information received by a client, analyzes the data, and creates an easy to understand report based on the data. This can be a very time-consuming task that requires many hours of looking through thousands of rows of data and creating a process to create a simple and clean representation of the data.
Work Environment
Mr. Curiel is a Credit Risk Analyst and has been for many years with Wells Fargo, a popular banking firm. To complete his job, he is required to have knowledge of at least three systems, SAS, SQL, and Python. All three of these systems help him sort the data, analyze it, and summarize it. This process is described as follows, he first searches the data manually for what information he needs from the set (names, address, credit score, etc.). He then uses SQL and SAS to pull the data in Teradata to summarize it. This process can take anywhere from a couple of days to weeks to fully complete. In addition to SAS, he also uses Phyton to help process and analyze data which would otherwise be more difficult to compile. Once the data has been summarized, he uses Tableau to visually display the data using charts, graphs, maps, etc. to be presented to clients.
While he was presenting, I did learn a lot about data analysis that I did not realize before, for example, a lot of times, he has to make his own programs using Teradata to process the data, there is not a fully-featured data analysis tool to do the job. Also, Data Analysts make a very good yearly salary (typically between $95,000 and $160,000).
Reflection
As a career choice, this will be a consideration due to the enjoyment of programming and a more than sufficient salary, but I am not sure if this is my top choice. I believe that I am more interested in making software that will be used by many people such as operating systems or other types of software. Nonetheless, I learned a lot about what it will take to make this a future career and what I can do now to support this goal.