Everyone’s an Analyst!

I grew up in much simpler times. A food critic was a food critic. A chef was a chef. A banker was a banker. A travel agent was a travel agent. And if there ever was such a thing, an analyst was an analyst.

That is definitely not the case now.

Back then, if Judith Chalmers told you on a Monday night that somewhere looked like a great holiday destination, you might wander down to the travel agent on the high street and book it. If you were feeling particularly adventurous, you might even use Teletext.

Today, everyone is a travel agent. We compare flights, read reviews, scour hotel websites, and build our own itineraries without speaking to another human being. The travel agent has not disappeared entirely, but most of us have taken on the role ourselves.

The same thing has happened with food.

Once upon a time, you had read restaurant reviews in the Sunday broadsheets, written by professional food critics who were paid to travel around the country sampling menus and offering their considered opinions. Now everyone has a platform. People blog. People post. People review. Some influencers even ask restaurants to pay them for promotion.

What is remarkable is how quickly we have all become critics. Go out for dinner with a group of friends and it will not be long before someone is discussing the texture of the steak, the balance of flavours in the sauce, or whether the vegetables were overcooked. Suddenly, the table sounds like an editorial meeting at a national newspaper.

Which brings me neatly to analysts.

Someone learns how to use Excel, creates a pivot table, builds a graph, and before you know it, they are presenting themselves as a data analyst. They are about as much of an analyst as I am a food critic, chef, or travel agent.

Yet we are surrounded by them.

There was a time when being interested in data was considered a bit geeky. The person who spent their day poring over spreadsheets was not exactly the life and soul of the party. Today, however, data carries a certain status. People see it as evidence of intelligence and insight. If you can produce a colourful dashboard with a few trend lines and percentages, people assume you possess some deep analytical wisdom.

Perhaps that is because we now live in a world saturated with information.

In the past, most of our news, knowledge and data came from newspapers, television, and radio. Information was filtered and curated before it reached us. Today, data is everywhere. Every app, website, loyalty card, and social media platform feeds us metrics, charts, and statistics. We are immersed in numbers from the moment we wake up until we go to bed.

When information becomes universally available, it creates the illusion that expertise is too.

We all book holidays, so we are travel agents. We all eat out, so we are food critics. We all look at spreadsheets, so we are analysts.

The democratisation of information is undoubtedly a good thing. But access to information is not the same as expertise. Owning a frying pan does not make me a chef, and building a pivot table does not automatically make someone an analyst.

Sometimes, despite what modern life might suggest, a profession is still a profession.