SQL DATA ANALYSIS & JOB MARKET RESEARCH
Data Analyst Career Market Analysis
SQL PROJECT • JOB MARKET & SKILLS ANALYSIS
SQL
Data Analysis
Job Market Analysis
Skills Analysis
I built this SQL project to understand the Data Analyst job market in Canada from several angles. I looked at salaries, the skills attached to higher-paying roles, the skills employers request most often and which skills offer a useful balance between demand and salary.
SQL ANALYSIS
Canada Data Analyst Market
Salary • Skills • Demand
Project Overview
I wanted this project to go beyond simply finding the highest salary or the most requested skill. I used SQL to answer five questions that look at the job market from different angles. The analysis covers pay, skills in higher-paying roles, overall skill demand, average salary by skill and the balance between demand and salary. Looking at these together gave me a more complete view of what employers were asking for.
Tool: SQL
Project Type: Job Market & Skills Analysis
Location: Canada
Questions Analysed: 5
Dataset: Data Nerd
Questions I Wanted to Answer
01
Highest-paying roles
Which Data Analyst jobs had the highest salaries?
02
Skills in top-paying roles
Which skills appeared most often in those higher-paying roles?
03
Most-requested skills
Which skills were most in demand across Data Analyst job postings?
04
Highest average salaries
Which skills had the highest average salaries?
05
Demand and salary balance
Which skills offered the strongest balance between demand and salary?
How I Worked With the Data
01
Clean / Prepare
Filtered the data to Canadian Data Analyst roles. For the top-paying jobs and skills analysis, I focused on remote postings with available annual salary information.
02
Explore
Reviewed the job, company and skill data to understand the fields available for each question.
03
Query / Analyze
Used JOINs and CTEs to connect tables and organize the multi-step queries.
04
Summarize Findings
Used COUNT, AVG, grouping and ranking to compare skill demand, salaries and role patterns.
05
Present Results
Turned the query results into the final SQL visuals and project narrative.
A Look at the SQL
Which Data Analyst Jobs Paid the Most?
The query returned 10 higher-paying remote Data Analyst job postings in Canada. The highest salary in the result was $385,000 for a Financial & Data Analyst - Pricing role at Siemens. Pfizer followed at $198,500, while a Data Analyst role at Tanamera was listed at $180,000. All 10 roles in this result were remote.
One thing that stood out was the gap between the highest-paying role and the rest of the list. It reminded me that one unusually high salary can affect how the overall market looks, so it is useful to look at the full range rather than focusing on one number.
Which Skills Appeared in Top-Paying Roles?
One of the 10 top-paying job postings did not have matching skill information, so this part of the analysis covered 9 jobs. SQL appeared most often, showing up in 6 of the 9 roles. Python appeared in 5, while Excel appeared in 4. Snowflake and Tableau each appeared in 3 roles.
For me, this was an important result because the three skills that appeared most often - SQL, Python and Excel - are widely used core analytics tools rather than highly specialized technologies.
Which Skills Were Employers Requesting Most?
SQL had the highest demand in the Canadian Data Analyst postings, followed by Python and Excel. Tableau and Power BI also appeared frequently, showing that reporting and data visualization tools were an important part of the skill mix.
This gave me a clearer picture of the skills that appear repeatedly across job postings, rather than looking only at the requirements of a small number of higher-paying jobs.
Top Skills by Average Salary
Which Skills Had the Highest Average Salaries?
The salary ranking looked very different from the demand ranking. Phoenix had the highest average salary in this result at $272,500. Several specialized technologies, including MongoDB, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, Kafka, Neo4j, Terraform, Kubernetes and MySQL, appeared with an average salary of $198,795. This part of the analysis showed me why salary should not be looked at by itself. A skill can have a high average salary but appear in far fewer job postings.
Which Skills Balanced Demand and Salary?
Looking at demand and salary together gave me a more balanced view of the market. SQL had the strongest demand in this result, while Python combined strong demand with a slightly higher average salary. Some more specialized skills, such as Snowflake and Databricks, appeared less often but had higher average salaries.
The main lesson for me was that high demand and high salary do not always mean the same thing. A skill may be linked to a higher average salary but appear in fewer job postings, while another skill may offer more opportunities because employers request it more often.
What the Analysis Showed
Key findings and why they matter for the business.
01 — CORE ANALYTICS SKILLS · FINDING
SQL, Python and Excel formed a strong foundation across Data Analyst job postings.
WHY IT MATTERS
These are practical skills that appear across many roles rather than only specialized positions.
02 — REPORTING & VISUALIZATION · FINDING
Tableau and Power BI also showed strong demand alongside the core analytics tools.
Employers are not only looking for analysis skills; they also value the ability to present and communicate results clearly.
03 — SALARY VS DEMAND · FINDING
The highest-paying skills were not always the skills employers requested most often.
Looking only at salary can give an incomplete picture of where the widest job opportunities are.
04 — BALANCING OPPORTUNITY & PAY · FINDING
Comparing skill demand and salary together gave a more balanced view of the market.
This helps identify skills that may offer both stronger job opportunities and good earning potential.
Tools & Skills Demonstrated
Tools
SQL
Analysis
Data Filtering · JOINs · CTEs · GROUP BY · COUNT · AVG · ORDER BY · Job Market Analysis
Reporting
Data Visualization · Business Interpretation · Communicating Findings
What This Project Helped Me Practice
This project helped me practice looking at one business question from more than one angle. If I had focused only on salary, I would have missed the skills that appear most often in job postings. If I had focused only on demand, I would have missed the salary differences between skills. Working through the five questions helped me see how SQL can be used not just to retrieve data, but to compare different measures and build a clearer picture from the results. It also gave me more practice deciding which findings were worth highlighting and how to explain them without making the analysis more complicated than it needed to be.
Explore the Project
The GitHub repository contains the SQL queries, project documentation and additional files for this analysis.
View Project on GitHub