By Katrina Kirsch

If you’ve ever tried to solve a Rubix Cube, you’ve put your analytical skills to the test. Making the colors match up requires problem-solving, logical reasoning, and pattern recognition.

While the majority of marketers will never make it to the next speedcubing competition, the skills you learn with puzzles like this are essential to a successful marketing career.

In today’s workforce, nearly one in four workers have a job in which analytical skills are considered the most important factor. Companies want to hire for these skills because it shows a candidate’s ability to think logically and use data to inform decision-making. In fact, Indeed found the most in-demand skills for employers — and several analytical skills top the list.

That’s why it’s important to know how analytical skills apply to your career and what you can do to develop these skills over time.

As a marketer, being able to understand problems and provide solutions is essential to a long, successful career. It means you can take a critical lens to the details of a problem to fully understand it. This helps you notice trends, understand the steps needed to take action, and offer novel solutions. But that doesn’t mean you have to throw creativity out the door. Using analytical skills to problem solve can look like a structured, methodical approach or a more creative one.

We’ll explore the various types of analytical skills later on, but first, let’s look at how analytical skills differ from critical thinking skills.

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Analytical Skills vs. Critical Thinking

A person who uses logic to find patterns, brainstorm, analyze data, and make decisions based on that information has analytical skills. One of the skills required to do that is critical thinking.

In other words, critical thinking is just one of many skills you need to be an analytical thinker.

You probably use critical thinking more often than you imagine, like when you:

• Question whether a piece of information is a fact or an opinion.
• Break problems down to understand the reasoning behind them.
• Draw conclusions from data, rather than a gut feeling.
• Make intentional, rational, and goal-oriented decisions.

Marketers who have strong critical thinking skills make reasonable, logical judgments and think through every decision. They provide facts and logical arguments to back their choices, which leads to smart decisions and improves company success.

While each role has its own analytical skill requirements, there are several that will benefit any marketer throughout their career.

Example of Analytical Skills

If you’re looking for a marketing role that leans towards analytics, such as a market research analyst position, it’s best to develop analytical skills specific to that position and your desired industry. Analytical skills are soft skills, so you’ll also want to develop hard role-specific technical skills.

For an analyst, that means mastering technical skills like Google Analytics and statistical software, while also having analytical skills such as creating data collection methods …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron