Best Jobs for Analytical Thinkers

As an analytical thinker, your ability to deal with complex issues is invaluable in the workplace.

However, with so many options to choose from, it can be challenging to decide which would be the right career for you.

Here are some of the best jobs for analytical thinkers:

Data analytics

Data analytics is a very hot field that has myriad applications, especially in the DC metro economy. For example, in business, a company might want to know, “What are the demographics of the people most likely to purchase our products or services?” and “Which products sell best and have the best profit margin?”

Public health and medical research

Analytical thinkers are also in high demand in public health and medical research, where they can apply their critical thinking skills to understanding precisely what data do and do not indicate.

They can use their data analytics tools to detect meaningful trends in data that can be explored for breakthroughs in understanding disease etiology (causes) and the most promising public health approaches.

Investment advisor

Analytical thinkers can also make great investment advisors or fill other roles in the financial sector. Analytical thinkers can also play a key role in the information technology sector as business analysts, the people who understand both business and software development.

They break down a business’ need for technology in a way that will be doable within a reasonable budget for software development.

In politics, a campaign would want to know, “What groups are most likely to come out to vote for us? What groups are most likely to donate? What groups are most likely to volunteer?”

Large nonprofits also benefit from data analysis on both the problems they address and the support they can find, and those jobs can be found either directly within nonprofits or in consulting firms that serve nonprofits.

International development organizations (encompassing nonprofits, government agencies, intergovernmental agencies like the United Nations and World Bank, and private sector companies) need analytical thinkers for monitoring and evaluation, which means designing studies to show the changes their programs bring about in target indicators.

Think tanks need analytical thinkers to parse data and write papers on which proposed solutions to social and political problems are the best fit for the known facts of who is affected and how they behave.

Inside the federal government, intelligence, military, census, health, and many other agencies need analytical thinkers to break down—without prejudice—the meaning of large sets of data.

Most analytical thinkers are introverts, which make up 25 to 40% of our population. A person who is or has this personality type draws their energy from the inside out.

They are the type of people that ask for report days in advance before the due date. You usually get it back redlined with all sorts of corrections and suggestions. This is because they needed the time to think about the process and revise your information.

You’ll find these people detail-oriented, bottom-line thinkers, many times blunt and judgmental, yet may come across as shy in the workplace. There is a wide scope of jobs that apply to analytic thinkers who are introverts including:

• Database administrator
• Electrical engineer or a technician
• Plumber
• Carpenter
• Car mechanic
• Aerospace engineer
• Industrial engineer
• Civil engineer
• Web designer
• Fashion designer
• Accountant
• Statistician
• Pilot
• Proofreader
• Physician
• Anthropologist
• Zoologist

What all of these have in common is quiet. All these career positions work alone. It is an ideal opportunity to look at a situation and analyze it from the inside out. They may be on a team at work, but they do not need a team to get their part of the work done.

They don’t have to be the strong and silent type. They’ll never jump on the stage and become a motivational speaker, but they may not necessarily look at their shoes while they are talking to you either!

Related: 12 Best Jobs for Introverts (& People Who Like to Work Alone)

If you’re looking for a job that involves some serious intellectual thought and you’re a natural at descriptive statistics along with the law of small numbers, the data analyst position should match your personality type like a plugin a socket.

Data analysts throw under the microspore mountains of data and probe it to make forecasts, spot trends as well as extract information to help businesses make better-informed, data-backed business decisions.

What’s particularly appealing about the data analyst career path is that you’ll be able to find job opportunities throughout a diverse mix of companies and industries. That’s because any business that uses data needs data analysts to analyze it and make sense of it.

When it comes to money, data analyst salaries vary based on your education level, years of experience, industry, location, and skills, but the average annual salary for a data analyst position in the United States is around $70,000 per year.

Growth marketing

Analytical thinkers should consider jobs in growth marketing. Growth marketing is the data-driven, performance portion of marketing that drives significant business impact for companies.

Growth marketers are typically responsible for a company’s marketing channels – this includes email, organic search, paid search, social media, TV ads, referral programs. They also commonly own the customer lifecycle and own goals for customer acquisition and retention.

Growth marketing is an ideal job for analytical thinkers because it requires the use of data and experimentation to find ways to grow a business and measure results. Growth marketers analyze large data sets to understand customer behavior.

They must combine this knowledge with an understanding of the business to hypothesize new marketing tactics. New tactics are commonly launched using an AB test to calculate impact. There is further analysis of the experiment to determine how it impacted different customer segments.

Finally, as owners of marketing channels, growth marketers must analyze and report on performance.

Data analyst roles are great for analytical thinkers

Every business generates data – and most generate a lot of it. Data analysts bring meaning to all these numbers. They analyze what has happened in the past, often to predict what will happen in the future. This helps businesses to adapt to changing demands in more efficient ways.

As an analyst myself, I find that analytical thinking, critical thinking, and creating thinking all combine to create the best analysts. Most people that are analytical thinkers tend to also be good at math because it’s a very logical process. This makes them naturally suited for jobs in analytics.

Market analysis

Making multi-million dollar decisions about the direction of a software product cannot be all by intuition. Qualitative and quantitative analysis, including rigorous opportunity sizing strategic analysis, is essential for successful product development.

Competitive analysis

It is a must to continually be on top of competitive and alternative offerings. Analyzing competitive strengths and weaknesses is essential to identifying the unique value proposition of my products.

Product analytics

All software Product Managers need to get in touch with their inner Data Manager to understand the customer journey and build analytics assets to bring these insights to life. Understanding the customer journey is key to moving them along that journey towards buying and championing my product.

Furthermore, understanding the basics of data analytics, data modeling, data engineering, and visualization can help surface the customer journey insights needed to inform the product roadmap.

Search engine optimization

As an analytical thinker, some of the best jobs in the field of marketing are SEO, Conversion Rate Optimization, and working in analytics. Many marketing companies need analytical thinkers who enjoy sorting data, making predictions, testing them, and then analyzing the data to draw supported conclusions.

SEO, for example, requires that you analyze top pages on the site, what’s converting on those pages, what changes lead to traffic increases, etc. And with conversion rate optimization (CRO), you test small details and measure the results.

It’s very analytical. And of course, if you’re certified in Google Analytics and able to use it to its full capability, you’ll always have a place with larger companies.

A data analyst is someone who extracts meaningful insights from large data and uses it to address business problems.

The predispositions that a data mining analyst should have are highly developed analytical skills, the ability to draw conclusions from extracted data, but also creativity, the ability to challenge the obvious results, ask questions as well as combine data and facts from various sources.

Marketing

Marketing is one of the best uses of an analytical mind. We constantly see people trying their hand at marketing, and they just aren’t analytical enough. They trust their gut when they need to distrust absolutely everything they see.

You have to test, tweak, test again, verify there were no external influences, look for clues, and spot repeatable patterns. You need to be able to think of human behavior in terms of response patterns and verify the theory. For the right people, it is very exciting.

Marketing is a dream job for the right type of thinker, but arguably a terrible one for someone that is easily led by their emotions.

Project management

Analytical thinkers excel at using logic and analysis of data, facts, and information to make decisions. Jobs in project management are great for these types of people because they can use critical thinking and analysis to prioritize work and solve problems as they come.

Project managers are faced with many different kinds of tasks and problems to solve, and they must be able to take them on quickly to ensure that a project moves forward and gets finished on time. Analytical thinkers are typically great at solving problems quickly and efficiently, which is absolutely essential in a project management position.

I think there are so many roles and positions across industries that rely on data analytics that are certainly good opportunities for analytical thinkers.

They require problem-solving skills, paying close attention to detail, critical thinking, and the ability to make sense of various numbers and figures.

As a marketing leader, I certainly rely on those skillsets from members of my team and feel I offer the capabilities myself.

There are also a plethora of roles in finance, accounting, technology, user experience, product design, and more that require solid analytical skills. The opportunities are endless!

Product management

Product management is one of the best fields for analytical thinkers because it’s a product person’s job to collect feedback from stakeholders (owners, users, guest users) and deduce courses of action for the development team. This feedback usually comes in waves and there is typically a large amount of data to decipher.

Once you have your courses of action set, you’re able to gauge and analyze what worked best for your company and what didn’t, based on the data.

The best product people will follow where the data takes them and deduce insights from that, and not from any specific bias’ they ‘ve viewed or sampled. Besides pure analytics jobs (financial, data, etc..), I don’t think there is a more data-driven job!

Project management.

Analytical thinkers excel in project management roles, as this career requires someone to see how multiple elements of a process fit together and how small changes will impact the project as a whole.

As these individuals need to be able to apply their skills swiftly and with precision to keep the work flowing, analytical thinkers can be of great use in this complex role.

Accounting

Facts, figures, and solving problems – it’s no doubt this is a fitting career choice for those who enjoy the attention to detail paired with financial data.

This is also an excellent role for those who prefer to work independently while spending time breaking down complex problems, interpreting, and analyzing data for clients.