Analysts often assume that the best way to advance their careers or provide more value is to improve their technical chops. While it's true that you need a baseline of technical skills to conduct analysis, most of us need further development of our soft skills rather than further honing of our hard skills.

Any time you look for patterns in previous experiences or make a tradeoff between one option and another, you're working with analytical skills. Improving these skills is one of the best investments you can make; you can tackle your own problems at work and get closer to answers for your own questions.

At Mode, we believe everyone is analytical. Any time you look for patterns in previous experiences, or make a tradeoff between one option and another, you're analyzing. Improving these skills can only be good for your career; the demand for analytical talent in the workforce is at an all-time high.

What makes an analytics team great? To find out, we interviewed the leaders of three. Our discussion ranged from team structure, to mission-driven motivation, to measurement of success. Their responses can help other folks steering analytics ships of their own form high-level philosophies to keep their teams on track.

Between the thousands of data scientists, analysts and others who use Mode every day, and the hundreds of companies that run their analytical operations on Mode, we hear from both sides of the data talent market. From these conversations, we've noticed some common reasons that companies struggle to hire data talent: